Simple Steps to Stop Negative Thoughts
While some may need to seek help from professionals, Coyne says there are “simple steps that folks might practice, helping them detach from that critical voice and build more joy and vitality and connection in their lives.”
1. Pause a Moment
If you are feeling stressed, anxious, or stuck in negative thinking patterns, PAUSE. Focus your awareness on the world around you with your five senses.
2. Notice the Difference
NOTICE the difference between being stuck in your thoughts vs. experiencing the present moment through your five senses. Notice also what you have been up to in your mind.
Were you arguing with yourself? Struggling with disproving negative or critical self-evaluations? Trying to push unpleasant thoughts or images out of your head?
Ask yourself whether this mental struggle is serving you well.
3. Label Your Thoughts
If it isn’t, see if you can step back and LABEL your thoughts as they are, rather than literal truths. For example, you might practice slowing down your thoughts and adding to them the stem “I am having the thought that ….”
Continue this practice of labeling, without attempting to soften, change, or avoid whatever thoughts you happen to be having. See if you can notice what it is like to have some distance between you—the thinker—and your thoughts.
4. Choose Your Intention
Once you have PAUSED from your mental struggle, NOTICED what’s happening and how it’s been working, and LABELED your thoughts for what they are—simple, mental weather that will come and go—you are better able to CHOOSE your intention, and the next right step for you.
Are you going to continue to struggle with your thoughts? Or you can choose to take a small step toward something that matters to you in your life.
