How to Overcome Negative Thinking: the Three Skills — Mindfulness.com

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Do you ever struggle with negative (unwanted or unpleasant) thoughts? If you have a harsh inner critic or get caught in feelings of worry, stress, anxiety or depression, then you know some of the symptoms first-hand. Negative (unhelpful) thinking can range from being a little uncomfortable to having devastating impact on our relationships, our self-esteem, our health, our work—and our lives.

Anyone who has been caught in the grip of negative thinking (and most of us have been there at some point) knows just how painful, debilitating and dark it can feel. Even though these mental struggles can feel overwhelming and hard to handle at times, the good news is that we can train our minds to untangle from unhelpful thoughts and cultivate calm, compassion and inner strength.

If you’re experiencing mental struggles right now, it’s important to know that you’re not alone and it’s not your fault. We all struggle sometimes. It’s tricky having a human mind. It helps to understand how and why the mind gets caught in negative thinking—so here we share a little background on why the mind works in this way, followed by some practical mindfulness-based skills that can help you overcome negative thinking, unlock your potential and live a more fulfilling and meaningful life.

The human mind has been evolving for around 200,000 years—since the times of our hunter-gatherer ancestors. They lived in a much more difficult and dangerous world than we do today. To survive, they had to be constantly on the lookout for problems and dangers. 

Those who survived to pass on their genes were the ones who constantly stayed vigilant, and kept a constant focus on problems and things that could go wrong, so ‘negative’ thoughts—the ones that focus on our problems, what is wrong in our lives, what’s not good enough, or what ‘could’ happen—are simply a part of our evolutionary inheritance.

In other words, negative thinking is not a sign of deficiency, it’s a sign of having a normal human mind. But because negative thinking can cause us suffering, it’s important to learn to free ourselves from its grip. We can train our minds be stronger, happier and healthier, which is where the following mindfulness-based skills come in.

Modern life is nowhere near as difficult or dangerous as it was for our caveman ancestors, but our minds still operate in much the same way as they did back then. We have an unconscious negativity bias. That is, our minds tend to highlight in awareness, anything that could be a problem or cause us harm. This helped our ancestors to stay vigilant and stay alive but these days it’s not so helpful for us to always focus on the negative. 

Psychologist Rick Hanson uses a great analogy to describe the negativity bias. He says that negative experiences tend to be like velcro for the mind, whereas positive ones are like teflon—so the negative ones tend to be sticky, while the positive ones often slip away unnoticed.

What was once a helpful evolutionary advantage has now become a mental burden for many of us. But we can balance this bias and train our minds to take in more positivity and joy. We can, in the words of Rick Hanson, ‘hardwire happiness’ into our minds and therefore let it flow into our lives.

Dr Hanson offers a simple but powerful technique that you can call on to help you take in the good and buffer against the negativity bias. 

This technique has three basic stages:

First he advises us to deliberately seek out good experiences each day. They can be simple, like appreciating the beauty in your garden. So you deliberately want to cultivate these moments of taking in good in your life. This helps you to activate your brain and start the process of taking in the good.

Secondly you want to then enrich the experience. To do this, stay with the experience for at least five seconds. This is not about positive thinking. This is about your direct experience. Open up to the body sensations, feelings and all that is happening in the moment. Drink in the the good experience fully letting it fill your mind and build in intensity. 

Then absorb the experience. Allow the experience to really sink in. Set the intention to make it feel part of you and take it with you in memory. 

Many of our most gripping negative thoughts arise from another evolutionary tendency—the desire to fit in and get approval from others. In the hunter-gatherer days, fitting in with the group was essential to survival—our ancestors survived in groups but they didn’t last long alone. 

If you ended up getting kicked out of the group, it wouldn’t be long before a predator, warring tribe or injury would get you. Your survival would have depended on having the approval of the rest of the tribe.

Because of this, our minds are constantly assessing - am I fitting in, am I doing anything that could get me rejected, am I contributing enough, am I special, am I enough?

The modern human mind still constantly compares us to other people and looks for approval. 

The problem is that we are now comparing ourselves to a huge number of people—especially through technology and social media—instead of just those in a small tribe. When we are constantly scrolling through images of all these people who seem to be smarter than us, better looking, sexier, richer and more successful than us, we may quickly conclude that we are not measuring up. 

Most of us therefore have an inner critic that constantly tries to whip us into shape. It criticises us, judges us, belittles us, bullies us and pushes us to be ‘better’—all so that we can get approval. While our ancestors were trying to stay alive by thinking like this, it only serves to deepen our suffering in today’s world.

The inner critic can crush self-confidence or trigger anxiety or depression. For others, it can be the catalyst for endless striving—pushing our bodies and minds to their limits while trying to meet the new impossible standards of what it means to be enough. Instead of being our true selves, we try to be liked. Instead of doing what makes us happy, we spend our time trying to impress others.

‘Self-compassion’ is the opposite of self-criticism. It is a more wise and empowering way to relate to yourself. Instead of judging ourselves when we suffer, fail or feel inadequate, self-compassion allows us to acknowledge that we are all imperfect humans who may make mistakes, and that this imperfection is normal and okay. When we accept difficult experiences with kindness and compassion, we train our minds to be kinder, stronger and more resilient.

In fact an avalanche of research into self-compassion over the last decade has conclusively shown that people who are more self-compassionate tend to have more motivation, better health and better relationships. They have less anxiety and depression and greater happiness and overall life satisfaction. The self-compassionate cope better with life's stressful events such as break-ups, job loss and even combat trauma. This is due to the fact they have shown to have greater mental resilience.

A simple way to be more self compassionate is to speak more kindly to yourself both mentally and out loud. Also try treating your mind and body with a little more care and kindness too. How can you take care of yourself instead of always pushing yourself? 

Self compassion is something we can train and build like a muscle. As you get more ‘mentally fit’ you gradually let go of negative thinking and develop genuine confidence, authenticity and openheartedness. Over time, you will notice that being kind to yourself becomes like second nature and life feels lighter, less serious and more joyful—like storm clouds clearing and warm sunshine enveloping your body and mind.

The great majority of negative thoughts occur when our minds wanders off into thoughts about the past and future. Maybe you ruminate over past mistakes, regrets and things that haven’t gone the way you wanted them to. Alternatively, you might worry about what could happen in the future, maybe tossing and turning at night or becoming anxious playing out ‘what if’ scenarios.

It becomes easy for us to get drawn into negative thinking when our minds wander and research from Harvard University shows that the average person’s mind is wandering around 47% of the time. In fact they summed up their findings with the headline ‘a wandering mind is an unhappy mind’.

Through mindfulness we train our minds to wander less and stay present more. We learn to also recognize when we are getting caught up in unhelpful thoughts and ‘unhook’ from them so that they no longer pull us around or drag us into negativity, stress and struggle.

This powerful practice cultivates our capacity to abide in a calm, relaxed awareness of the present moment. From this more clear, grounded and focussed state of awareness we are less reactive, can think more clearly and more equipped to make wise choices—the ones that lead to us living a more happy and healthy life.

Numerous studies show that mindfulness is an effective practice for easing anxiety, depression and stress, as well as improving our overall feelings of happiness. The less our minds wander, the happier we are—which is an excellent reason to practice mindfulness on a regular basis.

Your mind is the basis of everything you experience in life and everything you do—the way you treat others, what you contribute to the world and how you feel on a daily basis. Given this fact, it makes sense to train it. You already know what it’s like to have an untrained mind. We all do. It’s getting caught up in anxieties, regrets, self-criticism and that feeling of unworthiness. It’s getting lost in mind wandering, reactivity, negativity and low moods.

Even when everything is going ok in our lives, an untrained mind can still keep us consumed by struggle and stress. 

Training your mind to be more positive, compassionate and mindful does take some time and practice but you will find the effort you put in will literally change your world from the inside out.

Over time, you can develop an unshakable sense of inner peace and mental strength that you can carry wherever you go.