Negative Thoughts

Negative thoughts are very powerful and have a tremendous influence on our actions. The other day I awakened and one of my first thoughts was I didn't like something about the way I was going to have to start my day. Rather than catching it in the moment, I began my day doing what I didn't want to do and feeling resentful about it. That influenced how I interacted with my husband, and so on and so forth. It took me an hour or so to catch where I was and do something about it....and just get over myself.

That little experience gave me something to think about though, and I realized my entire day could have started off very differently if I had addressed my negative thought in the moment. When I first had that little negative "I don't want to do this" thought, and changed it into a neutral thought or even better - a positive thought, my day would have unfolded very differently.

About negative thoughts:

• A negative thought has the incredible ability to grow into something much bigger like a snowball rolling down a hill growing bigger as it rolls and collects more snow. By the time it reaches the bottom of the hill, it won't even resemble the little snowball that began rolling down the hill. Negative thoughts are lot like that - they attract more negative thoughts, and what could have been a simple matter to address, becomes much more problematic.
• Negative thoughts can be addictive. It does seem crazy that we would choose negative thoughts over positive ones, but often we do. We want to stay angry, resentful, and upset about something. We want to have that misery!
• Negative thoughts influence our attitudes. Negative attitudes affect our personal and professional relationships, our health and our performance and success in work or play.

Negative thoughts can be neutralized by thinking positive thoughts. Have one negative thought and rather than allowing it to take off down the hill gathering more negative thoughts along the way, choose something else. Choose to conquer the negative thought with a positive one. A negative thought looses power in the presence of positive thoughts. It usually isn’t easy to loosen the grip of a negative thought though since that is what feeds our need to be right or our need to be angry and resentful.

Needless to say, our world would be very different if we put some effort and energy into transforming our negative thoughts into positive ones.