Do you often find yourself thinking about the same thing every now and then? Or realize that you have gotten into a loop of fear, anxiety, criticism and self-doubting thoughts?

Well, the kind of thoughts you feed to your mind decides your fate. Hence, it’s extremely important to surround yourself with fruitful, positive thoughts to grow as a person.

Negative thoughts can do no good for anyone. Because if you express them, you inflict pain on someone else and if you repress them, they affect you and many times turn into health ailments.

These repressed feelings also affect the internal organs and systems on the cellular level.

So if both expressing and holding back these feelings can be harmful, what should you do when you encounter these emotions?

Here are a few ways to learn from such situations and resolve them in a positive manner:

Take a moment to analyze

The moment a negative thought comes up, look into it, find it’s source, analyze and accept it. Let’s suppose you get extremely angry because of something.

As soon as the emotion of anger strikes in, take a pause to take a long, deep breath, let yourself feel the anger, and without saying or doing anything just exhale it out.

Give the feeling complete freedom to express itself within you so that you actually feel it.

Breathe into it, and breathe out. Soon it will dissolve by itself.

Be aware of external and internal aspect

To stay away from negative thoughts, be aware of your external as well as internal perspective. For example, you get into a fight with your spouse and start thinking about every bad thing that she or he did that hurt you. This is the external aspect that you’re thinking of.

Now, think about your actions- did you say something that triggered your partner, did you forget about something or was it just because you were having a bad day at work, could be anything. Simply, remember to bring awareness to your inner self when you encounter a negative emotion. 

When awareness goes both ways, outer and inner, understanding is established which keeps your mind bloomed with optimism.

Write it down!

Whatever you’re feeling, just write it down! Writing is the simplest and most effective way to let out emotions and thoughts.

It helps you understand your thoughts &emotions more clearly and gain more control over them.

Give the feeling FREEDOM; let it FLOWER and FADE away.

Practice Gratitude

Create a list of 10 things that you’re extremely grateful for. You can’t be sad and grateful at the time.

The list could be of the smallest things. Anything that makes you happy can go up into this list. 

If you practice this every day, your brain will automatically start to look out for things that make you happy and your perspective to look at things will LEVEL-UP.

Live in the moment

Most of the worrying thoughts by reliving past mistakes or worrying about what will happen in the future. 

Understand that there’s nothing that can be done of something that has happened in the past and future is never certain. So the best way is to live and enjoy the present.

You can easily turn your negative feelings to positive when you live in the present.

So, these were my ways. What do you do when you encounter a negative thought?