Is it possible to turn negative thinking into positive? Barbara Fredrickson, psychologist at the University of North Carolina, USA. Has shown how an optimistic attitude to life can help the brain cope with negative emotions. exercises, the body can be trained to promote and multiply positive responses, thus creating a natural barrier against stress and depression.
The first thing we need to clarify is that the thoughts we declare war on will attack us. If we resist, oppose or reject a negative thought every time it comes to mind, it will persist and remain in our minds, each thought will trigger more thoughts of the same nature, until it generates an entire cognitive torrent that does not help us.
- The thoughts we have can affect our daily lives and even our emotions and behaviors.
- It is important to understand the relationship between combating negative thinking and reducing its negative consequences.
- For this the first thing we must do is identify our automatic patterns of negative thinking.
- Which are habits of being part of our fundamental beliefs.
Our core beliefs are full of cognitive inclinations or distortions, it’s time to identify and combat these distortions to generate positive thoughts about each new situation, these inclinations or distortions cause our minds to remove information that doesn’t suit us to maintain our beliefs and expand. or increase the information that corresponds to our way of life.
The brain does not seek truth, but to survive, in a prehistoric world this form of mental behavior was very appropriate, but today much has changed, now it is less necessary to react quickly to survive, as an appropriate response to We must remember that our brain can sometimes be wrong: it can show us the situation as it thinks it is, not as it really is.
The mind seeks to save energy, giving us a quick response to a particular event, trying to take control and bring us security and tranquility. It is in these mental shortcuts that the greatest distortions occur. Our primitive brain tends to act quickly, in the same way that our ancestors had to act to survive, hence excess generalizations, negative revelations and mental rigidity when we process information quickly.
Today, in our society, there are very few situations of real danger in which we find ourselves daily; almost all threatening situations are imagined or the consequences are exaggerated. The processing of information quickly causes us to fall into prejudices that try to make an image distorted by the speed with which we try to deal with it.
One of the biggest involuntary distortions is accepting as an absolute truth the probability that something can happen, this leads us to act anxiously or depressedly without the fact having occurred, only about 20% of our thoughts actually happen. thoughts should not be the judges of our lives, but the spectators.
Most of us tend to devote only a portion of our attention to the activities we are doing right now, while mind and thoughts work on another problem. This way of acting is the same as living on “autopilot”, which makes us very unaware of the details of the time in which we live.
Being fully aware of what happens here and now is the ideal state to combat negative thoughts, accepting that this type of thinking is necessary in certain circumstances, and a vicious cycle of negative premonitions that feed on us, gives us the key to replace them. with thoughts more appropriate to reality.
There may be elements of certain situations that we cannot change, such as pain, illness, or a difficult situation, but at least we realize how we can respond or respond to everything that happens to us. In doing so, will we be able to develop strategies to change our relationship with our circumstances and filters?not always friends?that we use to treat them.