March 10th, 2008
Negative thinking
Each of us has hundreds, if not thousands of thoughts a day and most of them are automatic. Thoughts create feelings and feelings lead to actions. But unfortunately, for many of us a large number of our automatic thoughts are negative. They hum away in the background or flit unbidden into our consciousness and leak negativity into our lives. Yet for the most part we don’t realize they are bombarding our mind with pessimistic and gloomy information. Negative thinking is one of the major reasons we sabotage our own efforts, ambitions and happiness.
Very often one negative thought, such as “I look fat in this’, can open the floodgates to a string of negatives—“I’m such a pig/I’m so ugly/I have no will power/ how can anyone find me attractive/I am worthless” which in turn can even lead to a chronic inferiority complex.
We can also acquire other habits of distorted thinking that give us a warped picture of reality. Some negative distortions are:
Black and white or all or nothing thinking: We are unable to see any middle ground. If people don’t love us then they must hate us, if they are not good then they must be bad, we must be brilliant and successful or we are failures. This way of thinking produces unrealistic expectations, makes us intolerant and leads to dissatisfaction and disappointment.
Dismissing the positive: Whether from low self-esteem, perfectionism, negative core beliefs or unrealistic expectations, some people ignore, play down or dismiss their successes, strengths and positive experiences and assets. They don’t value who they are or what they have so can never be satisfied. If we always focus on the negative we lose sight of the positive.
Overgeneralization: If your boyfriend, girlfriend or spouse cheats on you for example, you might conclude that all men/women are cheaters and mistrust or even avoid all future relationships. You take one fact and assign it the power to predict future events and thereby rob yourself of potentially pleasurable opportunities and experiences.
Jumping to conclusions and tunnel vision: We focus on one thing and ignore the bigger picture. For example, you invite a group of friends to your home for a meal but one fails to turn up. There could be any number of reasons why they don’t arrive but you assume they have forgotten or are snubbing you. You get upset and angry and refuse to take their calls or hear their explanation.
Making mountains out of molehills: Magnifying the smallest problem into a major disaster. You plan an outing and it rains but you take it personally as though God himself is punishing you. Your disappointment is out of all proportion. Or you get stuck in traffic and are late for work so you let it ruin your whole day. We can also tend to magnify other people’s achievements, possessions or personal attributes so that we feel as though we don’t measure up.
Catastrophic thinking: We are always expecting disasters, catastrophes, calamity, misfortune and trouble. Your boss seems preoccupied so you are sure you will be fired, then you won’t be able to pay your mortgage, the bank will foreclose and you will be out on the street. So we live in fear. We dare not ask for a raise, we dare not borrow too much, we stay in an unsatisfying relationship because if we leave we will never find another partner and die alone. This unhealthy thinking leads to negative emotions and self-sabotaging behaviour.
Labels: We negatively label other people, situations, or most destructively, ourselves. The most damaging self-labels are things like “I am a failure/loser/coward etc”. The more often we use labels the more powerful they become and the more like the label we become.
Reading minds: You assume you can tell other people’s negative impressions or judgements of you. Co-workers laugh as we walk by so we assume they are laughing at us, someone whispers so they must be gossiping about us, on a train, a stranger stares at us, so they must think we are hideous. We believe we have a natural ability to pick up negative vibes. These negative assumptions affect our self-esteem and confidence.
Fortune telling: We believe we can predict what will happen and of course it will be something negative so we give up and don’t bother trying.
Shoulds, musts, and oughts: We tell ourselves that we are supposed to do something we are not doing and be something that we aren’t such as “I should be slim/ I should be earning more money/ I should be married by now.” Instead of inspiring us to take action, such shoulds usually just make us feel guilty or inadequate.
Blaming: If we personalize everything so that we feel responsible for things we are actually not responsible for, we handicap ourselves. Abuse victims often blame themselves for example, and the perpetrators take full advantage of the distortion. Or, we might deny responsibility for our own actions by shifting the blame to someone else. So we are never able to learn from our mistakes.
In order to stop being our own worst enemies and stop sabotaging ourselves we need to apply logic to our thinking patterns. Just because we think this way and may have done so for some time, doesn’t mean that it is necessarily a healthy and accurate way to think.
Coming soon: How to change negative thinking into positive thinking.
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