How To Dealing With Negative Thoughts?

Advocating education, an old television commercial once warned, "A mind is a terrible thing to waste." It can also be a terrible thing to occupy when a person experiences periods of negative thoughts, since it is here that his reality is established, even for short durations. What he thinks, he believes to be true. And the fact that the body, mind, and soul are inextricably tied means that thoughts will invariably generate feelings, emotions, and even physiological effects.

" When you have to go into your head, don't go alone," according to a member's share in Al-Anon's Hope for Today text (Al-Anon Family Group Headquarters, Inc., 2002, p. 47). "It's not a safe neighborhood... (But if I do), I remind myself that I've been (there) before."

Because negative thoughts can be pessimistic, self-defeating, depressive, forewarn of impending doom, evoke emotional responses, and pose obstacles that need to be surmounted, it is important to understand them, so a person can more effectively deal with them when they occur.

Default Mode Network:

Although negative thoughts are hardly pleasant, they result from the brain's default mode network, which is activated when a person is alone, lonely, bored, is introspective, or engages in self-directed thought. Defying the physics principle of a body remaining at rest unless acted upon by an outside force, it contrarily seeks to activate itself by continuing to function, anticipating problems, considering solutions, and reviewing past behaviors, actions, hurts, and injustices, often resulting in rumination.

The network itself, exhibiting strong, low-frequency oscillations during its inactive times, is generated when a person engages in internal mental state processes. But, like a treadmill, a chain of thoughts, which are not always sequential, linked, or even rational, begins where it last ended and ends right before it resigns.

Thoughts versus Thought Patterns:

While negative thoughts cannot be avoided, there is a difference between them and negative thought patterns.

If, for example, a student thinks that he will most likely fail the following day's exam because he has not studied for it, this could be considered a negative thought, but one that will most likely reflect the circumstance. If, on the other hand, he has the same thought the night before every test, despite the fact that he may know the subject well and may have engaged in significant study, it would constitute a pattern he imitated at an earlier time and which he has not extricated himself from, since it would be neither realistic nor rational at a later time.

Like the needle placed in the grove of a vinyl record, it repeatedly follows it without variation, remaining stuck in its earlier time. In this respect, these thoughts can become automatic.

Types of Negative Thoughts:

There are several types of negative thoughts or thought patterns. The first of them can be labeled the "critical inner voice."

Exposed to alcoholism, para-alcoholism, dysfunction, criticism, blame, abandonment, and shame during their upbringings, so-called "adult children," who physically mature but remain mired at the moment of early-life trauma and parental betrayal, believed whatever was said to and about them, internalizing their caregivers and thus continually playing the recordings of them, even as adults.

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