5 Practices That Will Help Reduce Negative Thinking

How to Eliminate Unhealthy Thoughts So You Stay Positive Consistently

Neel Raman

4 min readMar 20, 2020

Your ability to reduce negative thinking will impact your mental and emotional states and your daily experiences.

If you know how to manage your thoughts well, you will know how to give more attention to what’s important.

What Causes Negative Thinking?

The negative thoughts people have will vary and the common causes include:

Their childhood experiences.
Their environments.
The beliefs they have about themselves, others and the world.
How they interpret events in their lives.
Their level of self-confidence and self-esteem.
Their input or what they are feeding their minds.

The underlying cause of negative thinking is fear. It can include fear of criticism, making mistakes, being judged by others or not being good enough.

The Costs of Negative Thinking

The price you will pay for not dealing with your negative thoughts include:

Mental and emotional health challenges, which can lead to physical symptoms.
Not taking risks to achieve new results.
Having a bad attitude, which can affect your outlook on life, your happiness and your relationships.
Not challenging yourself enough.
Making bad decisions.

Having practices that will help reduce negative thinking will make it easier to stay in a positive frame of mind.

5 Practices That Will Reduce Negative Thinking

Keeping guard of your thoughts is a never-ending process. Here are five practices that will help reduce negative thinking so you can give more attention to what’s important.

Become an observer of your thoughts. You can separate yourself from your thoughts. You have thoughts, but you are not your thoughts. This means you can train yourself to notice the thoughts you are generating. A simple question you can ask is, “What am I thinking?”
Question or challenge the accuracy of your thoughts. Your thoughts aren’t real, which means you have made them up. Questions you can ask to question your thoughts include, “Why am I thinking these thoughts?” or “How are these thoughts getting me closer to what I want?” You will discover most of your thoughts are fear-based, which means you can overcome them.
Forgive and release thoughts not serving you. Instead of resenting or fighting your negative thoughts, a better approach is to first acknowledge and accept you have them. That will take the power or charge those thoughts may have. You can then let those thoughts go by applying releasing techniques.
Shift your focus to what you want. As you have over 50,000 thoughts per day, you cannot monitor every one. A better use of your mental capacity is to redirect your attention to the outcomes you want. That will allow you to generate thoughts that will support you in reaching those outcomes.
Work with a professional when needed. Sometimes, a person’s early programming and childhood experiences are deeply ingrained. A professional such as a counsellor or a life coach, can facilitate processes to work through events or experiences so they don’t trigger negative thoughts.

Final Thoughts

Everyone generates negative and positive thoughts. The more you focus on taking the power out of your negative thoughts, the less control they will have over your behaviours and actions.

A practice implies doing things repeatedly until they become habitual. Reducing negative thoughts will require a strong commitment because negativity is always around.

The ideas suggested above are a good starting point to redirect your thoughts to positive outcomes.

Action Step: Practice being the observer of your thoughts. Do not judge your thoughts, but allow yourself to notice what you think about consistently. This simple practice will help you become more aware of the thoughts you have, which will make it easier to redirect them to the outcomes you want.

Question: What are more practices that will help reduce negative thinking?