People often use descriptions about someone like “He/she is positive,” “He/she is capable,” “He/she is negative,” and many more. In a world where we trust our emotions so much, the emotions often cause us to think in categories about others or behaviors.
Because of the stress produced by modern society, people often move from accepting and optimistic to becoming negative, frustrated, and unproductive. And then the labels start falling from the sky.
Of course, while people are social animals and want to be liked, we often start searching for the causes of the negative outlook we have created to fight it and turn it into a direction where our thinking and appearance will generate and sustain a positive image.
Knowing the main reasons for what can cause negative thinking is always helpful. It saves time, focuses on thinking in categories, and makes us work better toward identifying and dealing with negative thinking.
Negative past
The most obvious reason and the most prominent category when searching for why our thinking has become negative is our past. What has happened to us before has created a list of reactions and behaviors for us to answer to that treating situations. What made us feel fear in the past has formed our outlook for situations and people. With that thought in mind, finding negative roots is not so hard. The past, with its appearance in the presence in the form of emotions and reactive answers, is a large category that can form negative behavior.
Negative experience
People live their lives, forming behaviors and reactions based on experience. If we have met with a particular situation in time, our brain has developed a list of responses and actions toward the case to protect us and our personality. Remember when you have eaten that great-looking piece of chocolate to find it contains chili papers? If you are not a spicy food lover, that has created a negative emotion in you and made you build your list of reactions the next time you see a piece of chocolate. Maybe the first step in your response is to take the package and read the text. Then you start with a small amount of the chocolate you try, and so on. Your negative experience forced you to build a defense mechanism for dealing with similar unpleasant situations in the future. And it goes the same way with all other things happening in your life. Your negative experience forced you to build your system of defense.
Words spoken by authorities
In “The Punisher,” the main villain tells the excellent guy at the end, “I cannot change. My teacher in the primary school told me in the second grade that I was born to fall and will fail in life.” With that in mind, the villain has built a criminal imperium. Authorities are essential in our life. At every stage of life and development, sources form our approach to the world by saying words, doing actions, and creating our outlook with judgments and descriptions of our personality. The stronger the power, the more complex the words spoken hit our internal world and reform it. The teacher may have been the authority in your childhood, but think of others like your family, circle of friends, and groups you have joined. They set norms and put you in categories like – successful/not successful, villain/good person, positive/negative, and many more. Authorities come into our lives to form understandings and norms. If we use their presence to develop negative thinking in us, they often create toxic environments and circumstances around us.
Contamination in environment
Did you watch the news lately? What have you last skimmed while browsing your social media account and feed? According to the Positive Psychological Society research from 2022, more than sixty-nine percent of the news and information that surrounds us has become negative. Television and social media play a crucial role in the process of distribution of this negative information. War, killing, natural disasters, missing people, just name it. The environment has a significant impact on how one’s thinking is forming. Depending on what we see daily, our thinking develops models that create norms and descriptions for the environment.
And now, the hard part. We see all these things from above, live in the situation created by us and others, and suffer the consequences of our or others’ negative thinking. But the question “How to move away from the negative thinking?” remains unanswered.
Here is the path I have built for myself and the people I have worked with in the last ten years.
Refrain from responding
What boosters negativity is that people react when in emotional distress. While this distress causes uncomfortable behavior, we often focus on what has the closest path to our emotional condition in the moment. Most often, this is the negative thinking of powerlessness, inability to deal with the situation, etc. During negative reviews, responses become increasingly frustrating for us and others, creating a high probability of conflict. With the tension to respond immediately, the person boosts negative thinking, so the proper tactic here is to learn how to stop and distance from the situation. After distancing enough and calming down, the one who experiences negative thinking may react more promptly to the problem.
Build self-awareness
Emotional reactions happen because people do not know themselves. According to a McKinsey survey for emotional intelligence across cultures, some forty-three percent of people suffer from the syndrome of self-delusion. This syndrome is caused by not knowing ourselves, not recognizing our reactions set for different situations, and being unable to build the right strategy to respond to stress and negativity. But still, it all starts with how weak people are in knowing themselves. The most used term in my region is “I am a good psychologist.” This defense reaction often comes from people who are weak in acknowledging their self-awareness level and recognizing the signs of negative thinking.
Accept that thoughts are only thoughts.
When thinking negatively, people often tend to generalize. As a next step, this generalization turns from a single thought to a series of hostile action development plans in their heads. This turns the stable understanding of what negativity can cause into the negativity scenario(at least in the person’s head). Thinking of negativity as a pattern creates an opportunity for the individual to fall into the trap of feeling unsuccessful and creating an environment full of negative pictures around them. A good practice to deal with this way of thinking is acknowledging the negative thoughts but moving forward and letting them go. Thinking critically about the negativity and seeing it only as one side of an equation reshapes individuals’ minds and makes them build a responsive behavior toward the negative behavior.
Stop negative environment
What supports or strops negative thinking is the environment we live in. According to an Inc.com article, some sixty-two percent of the content an individual is surrounded with has negative connotations. Televisions make sensations from reporting killings, disasters, pathetic people stories available, etc. Social networks “connect us” with information and, at the same time, have limited censorship when dealing with negative news. People are attracted to negativity and attached to the suffering of others by nature. That makes them at the same time look strong and feel the same way as those struggling. Negative news about someone else or something else boosts personal feelings of success by feeling safe from what has happened to others reported in that news. An excellent technique to stop this is to filter the information an individual is exposed to. This will mean re-evaluating sources of information and removing those, delivering a large amount of negative news, turning TV and media off, and using the time with real people and family to connect on different emotional levels. According to an HBR research from 2021, people who do that feel thirty -seven percent more positive, relaxed, and successful than those who continue to support negativity channels around them.
Think in opposites
And the last thing an individual can do to avoid negative thinking is to search for ways to reverse the information from negative to positive. The connotation of the information exposed may make a big difference in how we feel and act in the environment.
A good example is a failure at work to deliver a project within the agreed deadline. When people fail, they often search for the mistakes and blame others for their negligence. This other may be a living person (colleague, your boss, the other department, etc.), or turn to politics, economic situation, some disasters happening, etc. A technique to overcome that thinking and turn it into a winning strike is to look from a different perspective. A failure to deliver within a specific deadline project is a good learning opportunity. A disaster happening around us is a way to learn how to be more effective and efficient and prevent an impact on something similar in the future. An economic downturn may raise awareness of building a strategy to move through a similar situation next time as a winner instead of feeling like a loser. Reverse thinking makes people curious, prepared, and energized to change themselves and the environment.
IN CONCLUSION:
Negative thinking is part of life. All of us experience it through the cycle of their lives. Holding the position of someone who loses from that thinking makes the loss tangible. Turning it from a negative experience to a positive learning opportunity can make a big difference for the individual and those around them.
The Human place - a path from you to yourself 