Developing a Positive Mindset: Turning Negative Thoughts To Positive

Could you do with developing a more positive mindset? Thinking negatively can lead to you feeling low, down or anxious. The more those thoughts fill your mind, and the more time, energy and focus you give them, the worse you can end up feeling.

What’s more, the more low or anxious you feel, the more of those thoughts there tend to be, leading to a cycle of not feeling particularly great. You may also find yourself thinking about all the things that could go wrong and then talking yourself out of taking action on the things you want to do.

Your habitual thinking patterns develop over time and from experience. The more negatively you think, the more low, down, stressed and anxious you feel, and the more it colours and feeds into your attitude, expectations and how you typically think, feel, act and react.

That’s not to say that you should switch to always thinking positively and being uplifted into every moment. That could be equally exhausting and limiting. And there are times when it is reasonable and appropriate to feel a bit low or negative about some specific thing you are experiencing.

Yet the more you can undermine and replace habitual, unnecessary, casual negative thoughts, the more positive your mental attitude and mood will be, and you feel better in yourself. You can start to feel  more positive about life, yourself and the future, and to feel self-assured enough to believe in yourself and your abilities, and to take action on your goals.

 

Positive Mental Attitude

When people come to see me for hypnotherapy, one of the most commonly sought outcomes is thinking and feeling more positive. The negative thinking they have been experiencing makes them feel anxious, low, down and stressed. They don’t want to be thinking those thoughts, they know it’s unhelpful and makes them feel bad, yet it feels like they can’t change their thinking.

Thoughts have a way of expanding to fill all of the available space inside your head. More and more negative things can get drawn in and the whole time you feel lower, more anxious and more stressed. You can find that you just start to think, feel and respond to things negatively.

If you think negatively and feel low then you probably also feel like doing less in areas of your life. Maybe your motivation for work or exercise isn’t there. Maybe it’s relationships and friendships that are affected. And you may well avoid anything new, challenging or taking action on things you’d like to do because of how you are thinking and feeling.

Part of the ongoing problem of negative thinking is that it can start to become more automatic and habitual. As you think the worst it can fill you with a sense of lowness, dread and worry. Because your emotions direct your thoughts, you then find yourself thinking even more negative things and that leads to feeling even lower (and so leading to more negative thinking). It can become a spiral that leaves you stuck in a rut you struggle to get out of.

 

Develop Your Positive Mindset

The good news is that you can change your habitual thinking patterns and so develop a  more positive mindset. Your current negative thinking is only a result of repetition and investing belief and focus into those unhelpful thought processes.

You can start to focus more on the positive and, as a result, you will find yourself more automatically thinking things that lift your mood and mean you feel better in yourself. As you feel better you will have more motivation and enthusiasm to do things. You can experience more joy, fun and happiness. And as you feel happier in life and in yourself your mindset and thinking will become even more positive, more automatically.

Using the process I’m sharing here with you today will help you to start developing a habit of switching off from old, unwanted negative thought processes, and instead replacing them with more pleasant, positive thoughts and thinking. You can weaken those old negative mental pathways where you used to feel low, lack positivity or have a dip in mood. In their place you will strengthen much more positive thoughts, feelings and experience.

1. Before beginning, spend a few moments making a list of a dozen or so pleasant or positive life experiences. These could be recent events or from long ago, and could be any times where you’ve had a good experience or a happy occasion or anything where you’ve found yourself feeling good for some reason. If you can’t think of specific times then you can think of the sort of typical times when you enjoy yourself or feel uplifted, or you can imagine what these sorts of times would be like for you and create and imagine these kinds of positive moments, events and experiences inside your imagination.

It can be useful to spend a few minutes each day to review this list, holding each event in your mind for thirty seconds or so, to help you strengthen the habit of switching your focus to more positive thoughts and experience.

2. Ensuring you are sitting somewhere quiet, take a deep breath and close your eyes. If you know self-hypnosis techniques you could incorporate these here. Start to extend your out breath and say the word ‘relax’ to yourself on every breath out. You could tense and relax each part of your body or tell yourself that each part of your body is relaxing. You could imagine a calm colour or sensation spreading through you or fill your mind with a relaxing sound. You could engage your imagination and imagine being in a remembered or created place of calmness, seeing the sights and hearing the sounds. Or you can draw upon and utilise any other ways that allow you to feel comfortable, calm and relaxed. Your aim here is just to feel as safe, calm and comfortable as you can right now.

You can also use either of the processes covered in these articles: The Eye Fixation Induction In Hypnosis, Mindfulness For Anxiety, Stress and Promoting Mental Health

3.  Start to look forward to how you will find yourself being more positive in your mind-set, thinking more positively and feeling more positive, having the ability to interrupt any old unwanted negative thought processes and replacing them with much more positive thoughts and feelings. And then take a moment to think back on any old unnecessary, unwanted negative thoughts and feelings that you may have been experiencing.

Just notice those old thoughts and feelings, what you used to think and when you used to think it and be aware of the kind of times, places and situations where you used to find yourself feeling low, lacking positivity or feeling negative in some way.

Notice, be aware of, and develop a good understanding of the negative things that you have been thinking and the unwanted feelings that you have been experiencing. And notice how what goes on inside your mind, the things you pay attention to and say to yourself inside your head, how those things can lead to uncomfortable, unwanted feelings, behaviours and sensations. And notice how the more time, energy, attention and focus that you give to them, the more you may have experienced that unwanted negativity and lowness.

4.  Now, begin to change your focus, attention and awareness to think of one of your pleasant and positive life experiences. Bring to mind now one of those times when you’ve felt good, where you’ve enjoyed yourself or you’ve felt uplifted in some way. Hold that time in your mind and switch your thinking to these more pleasant and positive things.

Remember the sights and the sounds of this positive experience, the colours and the shades of light, the sounds nearby and any further away, noticing what you saw and heard and how you felt in this positive experience. Let positive thoughts and feelings fill your awareness, be aware of the kind of things you think to yourself when you feel good. Notice how you experience feeling and being more positive, where you feel it in your body, the kinds of images that go through your mind, the kinds of things you think and say to yourself. Really be aware of your pleasant and positive thoughts and feelings as you hold this happy and good experience in your mind.

Adopt this positive mind-set and think empowering, positive thoughts and ideas to yourself. Notice how when you do this, you feel better in yourself.  And when you feel better in yourself, notice how more positive thoughts dominate your mind. Make it so strong inside your mind so that even if you thought back on old negative thoughts you used to experience, you find yourself switching away from them to more positive thoughts and feelings.

5. Repeat this process inside your mind. Remove unwanted thoughts and move them on to more positive thoughts and feelings. Draw upon your positive times and experiences, recall where you were, who you were with, what you were doing, the sights and sounds, the good feelings and hold each in your mind for a while. Imagine for a few moments that you are there again, enjoying those good feelings, thinking those positive thoughts.

Move onto more of your positive and pleasant times, places and experiences. Recall what happened, what you saw, what you heard, how good you felt and imagine for a few moments you are there again, enjoying those feelings. Spread those positive feelings into each and every part of you.

6. If that feeling of positivity has a colour, spread that colour into every part of you and double the brightness to double the feeling. If positivity has a sound let it resonate throughout you. Feel that feeling, magnify and amplify it. Set the intention to think more and more positively from today, to notice the things that make you feel better more readily and capable and to continue to strengthen your positive thought processes and feelings.

7.  Then, when you are ready, count up from 1 up to 5 inside your mind, open your eyes and reorientate yourself to your surroundings.

If you’d like me to guide you through this process then take a look at this Positive Mindset hypnosis download:

 

As mentioned above, it can be useful to spend a few minutes each day to review your list of positive experiences, holding each event in your mind for thirty seconds or so, to help you strengthen the habit of switching your focus to more positive thoughts and experience. The more you do this, and practice the process here, the more you will find yourself automatically and easily thinking more positively and feeling better in yourself.

And if you want a powerful, guided experience of this, and you want to develop your positive mindset and ability to switch from negative thinking to positive thinking, then you can find my hypnosis download where I help you to do just that here: Positive Mindset Hypnosis Download

To your health and happiness,

Dan Regan

Online Skype and Zoom Hypnotherapy  

Face-to-face hypnotherapy in Ely & Newmarket

 

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