How to stop thinking negatively: 4 common traps and how to get out of them
Pete and repeat were in a boat, and Pete jumped out. Who was left?
As the worry repeats over and over in your mind and you are sucked down into the vortex of your negative thoughts, how does this keep you stuck in your life? Do you want to stop overthinking and negative thinking?
Let’s look at the impact this has on your energy and the different tools you can use to stop the negative thinking traps.
The effect: negative thoughts sap your energy and keep you stuck
Given that you are reading this article, I assume you are aware that you worry a lot and get stuck in replaying events over and over thinking about what you could have done differently in the situation. You aren’t alone! I am silently pleading guilty as I write this.
Understanding exactly what negative thought patterns do to us can help us find the motivation to stop participating in the thinking traps that block us from achieving our dreams or unlocking our potential.
Think of a current or situation when you noticed yourself worrying and try to estimate the amount of focus you placed on it.
Now double the percentage you assigned to it because that only accounts for the time you were focusing on it.
It doesn’t account for the time you were focused on avoiding thinking about it. Or overthinking about it. It doesn’t account for the energy you are spending – the hunched shoulders, the clenched teeth, the back pain – to avoid the pain and stress the situation is creating in you.
Not only does chronic worrying sap our energy, it keeps you stuck.
Your brain is designed to travel familiar paths, so when you worry, you follow predictable patterns or ways of thinking, which become overly rigid as you employ them again and again.
This drives the way you interpret what’s going on, which makes it harder for you to see the situation accurately or to think of creative ways to solve the problem.
So, you get stuck – stuck in unproductive emotions and narrow looping perspectives.
Because these narrow looping perspectives are created from your interpretation of the event or situation, you have a high chance that your interpretation is based on an misinterpretation or an error in the way you perceived what happened.
Essentially, you are likely worrying about a reality that probably doesn’t exist, or at least certainly not in the exact manner in which you are remembering it.
A real life example
Using myself as an example, I had a dust-up with a good friend recently because we both interpreted something entirely different out of a situation in which we were both present!
If it’s possible that two bright women were present during the same conversation and event and took away two interpretations that were in no way similar, it shows that there is no one reality, one truth, upon which everyone agrees.
And where we were both living in our separate interpretations, we weren’t living in the same reality.
Luckily, we both have an innate trust that the other has our best interests at heart, so we were able to repair our relationship.
It amazes me how vulnerable we are to our interpretations. It could have cost us a valuable friendship.
The cost
Even though it didn’t, our interpretations certainly cost us time, energy, and emotional angst.
Afterwards, both of us admitted to having conversations in our heads with the other – convincing each other of our position.
And that was time we were obviously focusing on the situation.
From my side, I also experienced back pain and had a very low level of patience because I was putting the energy I normally used for my own wellness toward pushing back the negative feelings from my fight with my friend.
The point of this example is simply to show that making a single interpretation and not being able to see multiple perspectives keeps you stuck not only in the situation, which drains your energy, but also blocks you from being able to see multiple perspectives, which is key to moving forward.
Before we take a look at how we can develop the mental agility required to not only see, but also enter into, multiple perspectives, let’s look at some of the most common ways we get stuck in our negative thought loops.
The thinking traps
I’ll walk through four thinking traps that I see a lot with clients. There are a lot more – these are just some of the most common I see.
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Me
You see the negative situation as your fault in this thinking trap: you aren’t enough; you aren’t capable; you should have done something better or been more. In the vortex of negative thoughts, you beat yourself up, ultimately deciding that you will never be good enough for anything. You take the one event and expand the faults that caused this situation across all of your skills and experiences.
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Them
In this thinking trap, you see the situation as someone or everyone else’s fault: you could do or be better if only they would have or wouldn’t have acted that way. Like the Me trap, this often becomes global, crossing events or periods in your life.
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Mind-reading
You think you know what the other person is thinking and feeling. You base your thoughts, emotions, and actions around an assumption that you understand what’s going on inside the other person. Conversely, you expect that they should have a good understanding of what’s going on inside you, which only makes any negatively interpreted situation even worse because they know how much their words or actions affect you.
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Catastrophizing
You take a single negative event and apply it to your entire life, past and future. You can’t see your way out of this ultimate failure. Everywhere you turn, there are no solutions, and the situation only gets worse. This single negative event means you are going to fail life.
Do any of those negative thought loops resonate with you?
My favorite trap that I still struggle not to fall into is the Me thinking trap, which is a lot about how much I like control! But I won’t go off on that side-track in this article!
We’ve covered some of the most common types of negative thinking patterns, noting how they often start with a misinterpretation, or an interpretation that blocks us rather than serves us.
We also examined how these negative thought loops impact us, draining us mentally and emotionally. Now let’s transition to looking at what we can do.
Amazingly, if you are creating the negative framework – it’s based on your interpretation of a challenge, the story you write about it, followed by a negative pattern you unroll and spend a lot of time engaging in – you have the power to choose to do it differently. How cool is that!
How to Change Your Thinking Style
The first thing you can do is develop your mental agility. To do this, step into an observer self to find some emotional distance and see that there may be many interpretations of a situation.
This will help you be able to decide which perspective serves you best. Once you can see multiple perspectives, no matter how implausible, you can decide which one will give you the greatest sense of peace.
Step 1 – Pause and detach.
To start take a deep breath. After you slowly release the breath, notice yourself in whatever posture you are in.
If you are sitting, notice how the backs of your thighs connect with the chair. If you are standing, notice how the soles of your feet press into your shoes or the floor. Take the time to really observe this.
Now notice that while you are noticing your thighs or feet, there is another part of your mind which is active.
It might be thinking about how this article applies to an area of your life. It might be making your grocery list. It might be focused on a noise you hear on the street.
You have the ability to break your mind into different parts, which is key to being able to see multiple perspectives at the same time.
Just like you, the other person(s) in the situation are able to think and feel simultaneously on multiple levels. They have whole worlds going on inside of them, of which you are likely not aware.
Step 2 – Identify as many possible causes for the situation or context as you can.
In any one situation there are always multiple options for what is actually going on. Try to identify as many of them as you can, no matter how implausible they may seem.
This step helps you increase the emotional distance you feel from the negative emotions in the situation.
It builds context, which makes it more likely that you will be able to understand the other person’s reality.
The goal here is not to understand the other person in order to whitewash something that bothers you.
The point is to make it easier for you to bear the negative emotions.
If you can start with the assumption that the other person is doing their best given the beliefs they hold and the challenges they are experiencing and empathize (which is not the same as justifying behavior!), this step will help you find a space that is more emotionally peaceful.
Step 3: Identify, challenge, and reframe the thinking pattern.
After you practice being an observer, notice the thinking pattern you are employing and challenge and reframe it.
In any of the thinking traps above, taking the time to ask yourself what evidence you have that you are a loser or what proof you have that this situation means your whole life is going down the drain, can help you realize that much of your feeling is based on interpretation.
At this point, you can bring out the multiple perspectives you pinpointed in step one and ask yourself how much that interpretation is serving you?
Is there an interpretation that would serve you better? How might you use one of those interpretations to reframe how you see the situation?
If you reframed it as not your fault, not their fault, and not indicative of your value or life path, how might that empower you to feel better about the situation?
If you felt better about the situation, how might that change your actions in the moment or in the weeks after?
How much more energy might you have if you reframed the story in your head to let you release the negative thoughts and emotions?
In sum
Try it yourself! Think of one situation that’s draining your mental and emotional energy.
- Try to step back and see multiple perspectives.
- Identify the negative thought pattern and ask yourself if that interpretation is serving you.
- Choose a different storyline to focus on and see if that impacts your pattern!
Come back to the comments and share your learning. Or share where you are getting stuck!
Together can look at how to shift your outcome.
If you’d like to explore how to work on developing an observer self or shifting your interpretation, schedule a free discovery call with me.
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Image credit to Cloud 10 – WordPress.org.
