Blog Short #200: How to Keep Negative Thoughts From Taking Over Your Mood
Photo by Lala Azizli on Unsplash
Imagine this scenario: You give a speech to the whole staff at work, and it goes really well except for one moment when you fumble over your words, but you recover nicely.
What’s your takeaway?
I’m betting you’ll replay that word fumble over and over in your mind even though you did well and got great feedback from the staff.
Why is that?
There’s an excellent reason, and fortunately, there’s something you can do about it.
Let’s start with why it happens.
Why do negative thoughts have so much power?
It’s simple. You have a natural negativity bias built into your brain that keeps you primed to scan the environment for possible harm or danger.
If you think about the news for a moment, you’ll note that most news stories are negative and aim to instigate fear, worry, or anger.
These stories are energizing because they trigger your emotional brain to react and narrow your focus.
Newswriters and advertisers make use of your negativity bias to get and keep your attention.
The same happened to you in our example: Instead of focusing on the overall success of your talk, you ruminated more about what went wrong and exaggerated its significance.
This is how your negativity bias works.
As you go about your day, your mind will naturally lean toward the negative, especially when you aren’t intentionally focusing on something.
With that as our backdrop, let’s move on to strategies to manage your negativity bias.
Things You Can Do to Stop the Deluge
Watch and Allow
The first strategy is to “mindfully” watch the flow of thoughts that arise over the day without suppressing or reacting to them.
Mindfulness means observing from a distance without reacting or judging. A thought comes up, you observe it without reacting to it, and let it fade out.
It is challenging initially, but you get better at it with more practice. Mindfulness helps you separate yourself from your thoughts and feelings so you can observe them and decide how to use and react to them.
The key is to allow everything to come up so you can review it before deciding whether to take action, change your perspective, or let it go. Sometimes, you simply watch the flow and do nothing.
Correct
Negative thoughts and emotions tend to be more distorted than positive ones, although it can happen in both cases.
Watching your thoughts as they arise helps you notice:
- Repetitive negative thought patterns.
- The degree to which you ruminate about things without taking action to resolve them.
- How often your perceptions are distorted and narrow.
Watching gives you a wider picture of what’s going on in your mind. It allows you to see where your thinking is distorted, causing more distress than necessary.
Repetitive thinking is powerful, and the more distorted your thoughts are, the more adversely they affect your mood and state of mind.
Spend time pulling out your distorted thought patterns and correct them to reflect what’s accurate.
I’ve found it helps to make a habit of questioning my thoughts regularly, especially when they carry a lot of weight.
Balance
This strategy is a lesson in how to build positive capital.
Because of your negativity bias, you’ll naturally lean toward building a larger store of negative thoughts and experiences than positive ones.
The goal is to expand your positive space and build it out to create a better balance between the two.
That doesn’t mean replacing negative thoughts with positive ones. It means increasing your notice, remembrance, and attention to positive experiences.
Rick Hanson, who wrote the book Resilient, calls these experiences “jewels,” which is an apt description. He likens the recognition of jewels to observing life as a mosaic.
He says,
This is not positive thinking. It’s realistic thinking: seeing the whole mosaic of the world around you and the complexity of your experience, despite the brain’s tendencies to fixate on a handful of bad tiles in that mosaic while overlooking the jewel-like good ones.
His strategy is to notice or create beneficial experiences and then absorb them to build positive capital. He uses the acronym HEAL, which stands for Activate, Enrich, Absorb, and Link.
I won’t go through them in great length, but I’ll give you a quick sketch. The full explanation is in Chapter 3 of Resilient.
1. Activate:
You begin by noticing or creating a positive experience.
It can be as simple as taking a five-minute break from work and sitting with a cup of coffee or going out to dinner with a friend.
For me, it would be a quick walk outside or daydreaming for ten minutes about something pleasant.
You can also notice what Hanson calls “good facts.” These are things like values, character strengths, talents, and time you’ve given to others.
These are internal positives that you sometimes take for granted. Notice them.
The goal of this step is to become skilled at noticing any event or characteristic, small or large, that gives you a sense of pleasure or well-being, happiness, joy, and contentment.
2. Enrich:
Once you’ve honed in on an experience or good fact, stay with it long enough to internalize it. Focus and allow your brain to acknowledge it, creating new neuron paths in the process.
Hanson suggests “turning up the volume” by enjoying and being excited about it as you acknowledge it. Embody it and let it bleed out into other positive remembrances and feelings. What is its value to you?
This process doesn’t need to be lengthy—a few minutes will suffice.
Often, as you get in the mindset of appreciating the experience you started with, your mind associates it with similar ones that mirror or heighten it.
Just as negativity is contagious, positivity is too.
3. Absorb:
Absorbing is a conscious acceptance of the experience and allowing it to take up some space in your positive warehouse.
You intentionally receive it and let it sink in so that it’s not just a fleeting experience but part of your positive inventory, which you can draw on to balance the positive and negative. Your brain encodes it into long-term memory.
4. Linking:
Linking is an optional step in the process and more complicated, so I won’t address it here.
It involves linking your positive experiences with painful experiences or psychological material to help alleviate them.
I encourage you to read Resilient to learn more about this step.
For our purposes, the overall point is to acclimate and automate your mind so that you notice what’s positive both within and around you as much as or more than what’s negative.
It’s a matter of intentionally shifting your attention to the broader Kaleidoscope of experience so that you don’t operate with skewed perceptions, especially those that promote fear and negativity.
Act
Replace rumination with action when possible. If you’re absorbed daily with situations or circumstances that create negativity, you have several choices:
- Change the circumstances if you can.
- Accept them, decide what value you can derive from them, and then pursue that. In other words, look for silver linings.
- Practice building positive capital while looking for ways to improve the situation.
Doing nothing (or chronic ruminating) can only make things worse and sink you into a deeper negative hole.
Use negative experiences to create something good. This may be learning something valuable, strengthening your determination, or building your character.
Sometimes, it’s being patient until circumstances change, but seeing what you can do with the time while you’re waiting will uplift you.
That’s all for today.
Have a great week!
All my best,
Barbara