If you’re like most people, you have many reasons to feel down: mistakes you’ve made, mistreatment by others, failures, a negative self-image, worries about finances, relationships, health. The list is endless. How good are you at setting aside negative thoughts and focusing on positives? It’s a myth to think that we can be positive all the time, never feeling negative. The best we can do is continually strive to achieve a healthy balance between positive and negative emotions. This can be done with ongoing effort by, first, monitoring how we feel in the moment and, second, trying to switch our focus from negative to positive. Changing how we think, however, is only part of what it takes to make us relatively more positive than negative. Enjoyable activities or being with happy people can also cheer us up. These tactics are two sides of the same coin. Sometimes we can’t enjoy anything if we’re not in the right frame of mind so it’s good to work at being active and positive at the same time, even if we need to push ourselves a little.
You’ve probably heard it said that we need to live more in the present moment in order to stop worrying about what might happen tomorrow or beating ourselves for what happened yesterday. The thinking here is that we only have the present; we can’t go back in time or visit the future. But this is only true of our physical bodies, a fact that has no bearing on where we choose to spend our time in our minds. Mentally, we can live in the past or the future as well as the present. Telling ourselves to focus only on the present as a way of shutting out unhappy memories or future worries can be just a temporary escape. We need a more positive way of thinking about our past, present and future than being told to stop going to painful places.
Changing Focus: Negative to Positive
There are at least 8 areas we can choose to think about or focus our minds on:
- Past negatives: regrets, past hurts, mistakes, losses, anything in our past we feel bad about
- Past positives: all of our happy memories, things we have done that we feel good about
- Future negatives: worries about possible future setbacks in health, finance or other areas
- Future positives: enjoyable things we can plan and look forward to doing
- Present negatives: current worries over relationships, health, work, money or other issues
- Present positives: anything in our present lives that makes us feel good, fortunate or happy
- Meditation: focusing on our breathing while trying to set aside all thinking, negative and positive
- Mindfulness: paying closer attention to an enjoyable activity in the moment and savouring it
We seem to be programmed to think of negatives more readily than positives so it takes work to strike a better balance between the two. Being explicit about 8 different areas where we can invest our mental energy can help us to be more aware of where our minds are at any given moment and remind us that there are positive options that we can think about to counterbalance our normal negativity.
A great starting point is to make a list of all the positives in your life, past, present and potentially in the future. This is not as easy as it sounds. If we’re in a negative frame of mind, it’s easy to downplay or take for granted all the good things we’ve done in the past or that we’re doing in the present. If you’re finding it hard to make a very long list, try it with one or two friends so you can stimulate each other to create as long a list as you can. Then, whenever you’re feeling negative, you can remind yourself of all the reasons you have to feel happy, grateful or fortunate.
Watch out for the temptation to dismiss the good things you’ve done, or are doing, by telling yourself that they’re nothing special. It may help to ask yourself if your friends or family members have done such things. If not, then these things may be more special than you have acknowledged. When people receive a compliment for doing something special at work, they often say, dismissively: “Oh, that’s just my job.” Unfortunately, we have a perverse tendency to downplay or take for granted good things we do in our lives, which is why it takes a real effort to list them for ourselves.
The best way to become more positive is to catch yourself when you feel down and remind yourself of all the nice, happy moments and good things in your life, past, present and future. This is a good starting point to feel relatively happier and more upbeat.
See also Feeling Fortunate