Another term for positive thinking is positive mental attitude. Positive thinking is very helpful to us in stress management. Overcoming negative self-talk and adding positive self-talk are the two important sides of having a positive mental attitude.
Overcome Negative Self-Talk Tips for Stress Management
1. Journaling With Freedom
Journal every day at least 6 lines of words. Journal with freedom. What this means? It means making an agreement with your mind that any thought can be written on paper. This agreement with your own mind is very important. The main reason is that sometimes very negative thoughts that scare you go through your mind. And if you don’t allow your mind to have them, you increase the state of fear of the mind. Look at your mind like a child. Think how dangerous it is for a child not to have enough confidence in you to tell you what hurts him.
One of the great challenges for parents is to convince their children that it is safe to talk to them and tell them what is hurting them. Either we talk about emotional pain, physical pain, bullying at school, child’s mistakes and many other things that children tend to hide from parents out of fear. If you are a parent you understand this aspect very well. You want your child to tell you everything.
This is how your mind should feel towards you and you should help it reach this state. You want your mind to tell you everything. But not random, not chaotic. Just like with a child. You don’t want him to talk all the time and never stop. You need order and discipline. Use journaling freely to help your mind tell you everything. This will help you with stress management a lot. My father has a saying: The disease whose diagnosis is made correctly, is already half cured.
2. Befriending Your Mind
Become friends with your mind. A kind, gentle friend, a true friend. Not a friend who uses you and manipulates you and talks bad to you. Look at your own mind as a friend. When negative thoughts go through your head, look at things like this: “My friend is suffering. How can I help him with this suffering.” This way you will have the following attitude towards your mind: “Well, let’s talk for a while. Write down what thoughts are hurting you. I understand you.”
It is important to spend quality time with your friend. To like him and you to like him. So do things with your mind that you both like.
Also another trick is to look at your mind as an organ of the body. We often forget that the brain is an organ. An organ that we have to take care of, just like we take care of our stomach for example. We don’t eat everything because we don’t want our stomachs to hurt, to get sick, to break down. Same with our brain. We need to take care of him just as we kindly take care of every other organ in our body. And so, our mind will become a good and reliable friend. This will also help you with stress management because you will solve faster and even earlier, the eventual stress generating situations.
3. Stop the Generalizations Game
Generalization is poison to the brain. The search for the secret of secrets, the solution that can be applied to all problems, everything you think after saying the words “in general” are super harmful to the human mind. These generalizations do not help you to live in the present, to be present and aware and to choose from this present awareness. Generalization forces you to make your choices based on predetermined rules that are not properly verified and validated.
Nowadays when lifestyles have become so complex largely due to strong technology and the growing number of people in the world, generalization is extremely dangerous even for your life.
And negative generalization is even more damaging. For example: An unpleasant thing happens to you at work and instead of focusing only on this aspect, you tire your mind in vain with other thoughts. How do you do that? Reassessing in all those days all aspects of your life. In relationships, often when one of the partners has a problem in his life, the other partner quickly concludes that their relationship is no longer working. Instead of giving you space to solve your problem, the partner worries because the level of happiness decreased. These re-evaluations of other sections of life on the days when we have a problem in one section of life, stress you out a lot. Stop reevaluating other areas of your life when you have a problem in a certain area. And teach those around you to do the same. This will help you with stress management because you will not put additional stress on you when you are already stressed.
Positive Self-Talk Tips To Improve Positive Thinking
4. Positive Journaling
Positive Journaling is not writing realities, but it is a tool that generates positive energy that your mind adores, moreover, needs it. One of the needs is to have positive energy to make clearings through the countless energy channels that run through the human body. Three main energy channels pass through the human body, which are strangled, drowned, in seven large areas called chakras. From these channels start countless other channels throughout the human body and this pattern supports the human body in fact. Positive energy helps to unblock the energy channels of the body through which vital energy flows. Positive journaling is a very good tool for generating positive energy.
Another need of the brain is to connect to higher levels of light and wisdom. And your brain does this through positive thinking and positive words. This will help you with stress management because positive energy acts as a clearing for negative energy and stress. However, cultivating positive energy is not easy for everyone. The licensed therapists at BetterHelp can help you learn how to stay positive and reduce stress.
5. Learning Positive Words
Positive words are learned through education. They are like other words, they do not exist in the human mind from birth. They are learned in the same way as other words that the child learns from an early age. If there is no specific and clear learning of positive words, the child grows up with a lack in this area. Every positive word denotes a positive emotion. With the help of positive words, the child or adult can actually identify the combination / pattern of positive emotions that is happening in and around him. If the child has not learned positive words, he will not know how to put a label, to recognize positive feelings when they happen. Usually he will frame all the positive emotions in two big categories Happiness, Love, Courage … and later in life: Peace. But it will not go on to Serenity, Warmhearterdness, Loving-Kindness, Acceptance, Appreciation, Gratitude, etc. Unless someone teaches him or if he teaches himself.
Positive words and positive emotions do not come automatically, they are learned. Unfortunately this aspect is not clearly and distinctly included in the classical education systems. A big disadvantage of not learning positive words and positive emotions from an early age is that the mind “does not record what it is not told to see.” I mean, if you don’t tell the mind, look, this is a moment of Serendipity, the mind won’t remember that moment later, even if you lived it. This is one of the reasons why many adults consider that they had a very unhappy childhood. They no longer remember the countless moments of joy and other positive emotions they had. Example: Do you remember all the moments when you ate ice cream when you were little? No. The tons of ice cream you ate when you were little, made you happy. But you don’t remember.
Start today to learn positive words and practice identifying positive emotions in your reality to create positive memories.
6. Improve Quality Of Sleep
Without a restful and quality sleep whatever you do does not work. It’s not about sleeping as much as possible, although that does matter. But the quality of your sleep matters a lot. First of all, don’t jump a night without sleeping. Sleepless nights practically disintegrate the cells in your body. You felt it actually. After not sleeping one night, you seem to be unaware of anything. You can’t even sleep because of how tired you are. Sleep every night, don’t jump any night.
Another trick to being able to sleep is to have the ability to stop your mind. One of the benefits of meditation is that it gives you control over this button, if we can call it like this, a button to stop and turn your mind on command. If you do not meditate then there are two tricks that combined will help you fall asleep.
The first trick is to make a deal with you so that at 10 o’clock at night you stop any activity that requires your mind. Such as: emotional discussions of any kind (with your mother, siblings, husband, friends, etc.); to read any text on the internet that excites you negatively, to worry about any problem in your life, to work something else for your job/work.
The second trick is that when you go to bed, after you put your head on the pillow and say your prayers or affirmations, or what else you think after you put your head on the pillow, to invent a new story in your head. By the end of the story, you’re already asleep. Of course you do this without moving your body and by keeping your eyes closed. Like when you were little and your parents put you to sleep and said: Keep your eyes closed and don’t move.
Improving the quality of your sleep will clearly help you in stress management because it will firstly decrease your stress level.
7. Help Someone with Positive Thinking
Helping someone other than yourself with positive thinking is the best advice in this article. To help the other person, you need to know something about how to think positively. Many times we help others to think positively just by telling them: Think positive. But the “How?” is the key and the valuable advice you can give.
In order to be able to tell someone how to think positively personalized about the situation of his life, you must have studied this aspect of life before. So helping someone else forces you to learn more and this is a benefit. A second benefit is that it will return to you multiplied. And suddenly you will wake up and have many positive thoughts and you notice that is very easy for you to think them.
