Someone asked me, ’now that you’re so positive, do you ever have negative thoughts?’ I may be very positive and content with my life, but I still have negative thoughts, occasionally. The thing is, I become aware of the negative chatter and turn it off by focusing my attention on something else that’s positive. I’m writing this post as an escape from a negative thought loop that I caught myself in. My theripist told me that I ‘ruminate’. Being the ’observer’ of the negative thought loop, I asked myself if I was tired of the merry-go-round yet? Then I thought about what to do as a distraction, and the thought hit me to share it. Being positive does not stop negative thoughts. But training to observe my thoughts enables me to step back and recognize that I’m in a negative thought loop. Then it’s a matter of deliberately finding something positive to focus on that gets me ’back-on-track’. Writing this paragraph was my distraction.
Now to share a positive benefit of training your thoughts to be positive. Before I trained my thoughts, I would have links in a chain of negative thoughts. One negative thought led to another negative thought, causing me great stress and anxiety. (was this a neural pathway?) After I trained my thoughts to be positive, I still have a chain of thoughts, but they’re positive. I’m about to share one chain because it has the potential to bear positive fruit in the future. I recently started advertising this website on college online newspapers for a cost of $300 to $400 each installment. While pondering the cost of long term advertising, I thought “this could get expensive’. The next thought was “maybe someone will be impressed and want to donate’. Next, ‘but I don’t want a profit with required reporting’. Next, ‘maybe I can suggest ‘pass-it-forward’ where the donor takes on the responsibility to run the advertisement at a school of their choice’. OK. That’s one ‘positive thought’ chain. That’s the positive benefit of training my thoughts to be positive. No stress, just a pleasant thought. (Was that a new neural pathway?)