Want to Change Your Life? Try Changing Your Mind.
How to reframe negative thoughts.
Negative thoughts and feelings. They’re part of life. Part of the human experience. Just one of those things that happen to everyone and there’s nothing anyone can do about it. Right?
Let’s take another look at that assumption.
Every negative thought you have is based on an assumption you’ve made based on your personal experience or that you’ve accepted from other people. Many people live their whole lives without ever examining or even being aware of these underlying assumptions that they’ve accumulated throughout life.
These assumptions can feel like the water we fish are swimming in. And while yes, we are all swimming in the water, some bodies water gets more polluted by negative thoughts than others.
Reframing
Reframing is the process of unpacking the assumptions underlying your negative thoughts and challenging them to identify the errors in thinking that are making you feel stuck. For example, let’s say you notice that you spend a lot of time thinking, “I never do anything right. I always mess everything up.”
(BTW- absolutes like “never” and “always” are usually signs of a negative emotional life script, a big clue that you’ve found a thought pattern that is probably having a strong negative effect on. your life.)
Get out your journal and try this exercise.
Step 1: Challenge the thought. If the thought you are challenging is “I never do anything right. I always mess everything up.” find a counterexample. Think of times when that was far from the truth. We all have times when we do things right, when we succeed, when we don’t mess things up. But we tend not to notice when things go to plan nearly as much as we do when something goes wrong. Catch yourself doing things right. You do things right all the time. It’s what’s happening whenever things aren’t going wrong.
Step 2: Ask yourself “What do I have to assume for this thought to be true?” Words like “never” and “always” assume that you have enough information to know for sure what will happen in every possible situation that could ever occur for the rest of eternity.
Spoiler alert: You don’t!
“Never” and “always” also assume that the way things are now is permanent and unchangeable. They aren’t. Those words also assume that you have no power to change things. You do! And that the Universe has no power to change. It most definitely does. As you read this sentence right now, something is changing somewhere.
“I never do anything right. I always mess everything up,” also assumes that you have perfect hindsight and perfect recall. Those are things that no one has. This also assumes that you have enough information to know definitively if an action you’ve taken in the past was a mistake, or if it was exactly what needed to happen at the time for some reason. None of us can ever truly know that for sure.
The negative thoughts that you assume limit your human understanding of the Universe. The more of your thoughts you examine through this process, the more you will realize that many of your negative beliefs are based on false assumptions about yourself.
Step 3: Ask yourself, “How does it make me feel to believe this?” When you tell yourself that you always mess up, how do you feel? Does telling yourself that makes you feel inspired and energized? Or tired and stressed out? Is it uplifting you or dragging you down?
Any thought that brings you down lowers your vibration and keeps you out of alignment. These are exactly the thoughts that you do not want to keep. Choosing to believe something bad about yourself is choosing to make it true. Isn’t it time to make something good about yourself true instead?
Step Four: Ask yourself, “How would it feel to stop believing this?” How would it change the way you feel about yourself to let go of that belief? How would it change the way you feel about your future and your life? What would you start doing differently if you stopped believing this negative thing? Who would you let yourself be?
Visualize how your life would be better without this belief. Be as specific and vivid as you possibly can. Let yourself really get excited about the possibilities you see opening up before you.
Step Five: Choose the better thought. When you’re making the transition from holding a negative belief to letting it go, it helps to focus on a better thought every time you slip and accidentally think the old one again. These things take time and practice. You may not be able to immediately go cold turkey and never think the negative thought again. Thought patterns get ingrained in our subconscious and it takes focused work to dislodge and remove them.
The simplest way to work on this step is to reframe the old thought in a way that gently challenges or corrects it. For example, maybe you do this journaling exercise on a Sunday. On Monday morning you walk into work and quickly learn from your boss that you made a mistake on something you did last month and it was just discovered.
It’s natural that you’d revert to “I never do anything right. I always mess everything up.” You’ve been thinking that for years. It’s a knee-jerk reaction, a habit that you’re only just now starting to break.
But this time, you’re prepared. You have a positive thought at-the-ready to counteract your habitual negative pattern. Maybe the thought is something like, “I sometimes make mistakes, but I appreciate the opportunity to learn from my mistakes and improve.”
That not only reframes the negative thought into a positive one, it also employs gratitude, which can get you back into a positive headspace and a state of alignment faster than anything else.
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