If you turn on the news right now, you’ll probably see a bunch of headlines about everything that’s going wrong in the world today. This might give you the impression that things are falling apart all around us. But if you look back to almost any point in human history, you’ll see that things always seemed to be falling apart, to people with a negative mindset.
Fear is a universal language. We are biologically wired to respond to what our brains identify as threats to our livelihood. And by stoking people’s fears, media outlets are able to create attention grabbing headlines. A study by Outbrain showed that the click-through rate on headlines with negative superlatives was 63 percent higher than their positive counterparts. And that negative bent isn’t unique to news outlets. You’ve heard it in your social circles, at home, and maybe even at work. It cripples morale and productivity.
Negativity affects all of us. Fear based thinking can send you into a downward spiral. Yes, it’s important to recognize the issues playing out all around us. But we shouldn’t let them cloud our potential for solution based thinking. When you spend too much time thinking negatively, you lose some of your potential.
Who you are is guided by how you think. If you internalize all the negativity around you, you become a vehicle for problematic thinking. Negative thinking impacts every aspect of your life from your work to your professional relationships.
How to combat negative thinking
Start by focusing your energy on the positives around you.
Cultivating a positive mindset isn’t necessarily easy. But then again, nothing worth doing is ever easy. You have the power to be happy and change your life for the better, starting now. And it won’t happen overnight. Changing your mindset requires deep intention and mindfulness. It involves being continuously aware of your thoughts and emotions, and why you think or feel a certain way. Start by focusing your energy on the positives around you. Thinking positively will heighten your creative energy and allow you recognize new potentials.
I have several mental exercises which I use to bring myself into a positive mindset. These may work for you and they may not. Everybody is different. The first thing that I like to do is to create a list of ten things that are going right in my life. I’ll even set alarms on my phone to remind myself to make time to be thankful and run through that list. Secondly, I like to put my problems into perspective in order to realign my thinking. I do this by reading about others hardships and how they were able to triumph in the face of overwhelming adversity. For inspiration I personally turn to Andy Frisella, Ed Mylett, and the bible, among others.
Once you’re able to cultivate a positive mindset and get yourself in the right headspace, the next step is to be a positive influence in the lives of people around you. Negativity is contagious, but so is solution based thinking. You can help foster positivity in your social circles by holding people accountable for negativity by orienting them toward a solution based thinking.
Negative thinking leaves you feeling defeated.
Only by understanding the bad things can we do something to fix them.
And the problem with negativity — We become what our thoughts are.
Open up
Echo chamber of negativity, which bleeds over into other parts of your life.
Negative thinking focuses on a problem. It isn’t solution based.
Anyone can point out what’s going wrong. Far fewer people are able to take the right measures to correct it.