The Benefits of Practicing Positive Self-Talk
Thursday, March 15, 2018 (Updated) -
Author: Robbie W.

Did you know that negative thoughts limit your potential, and how you see the world? Allowing negativity to rule your thoughts and life, will give you the feeling of being trapped. You will fail to see that there are ways to get help and get out of every situation. Only you are in charge of your thoughts. It is a choice. Choosing to change the way you think has to be a conscience choice. Through awareness of your thoughts, you need to learn to listen to the ones that inspire you, not the ones that leave you dejected.
Fear of the Unknown
Fear of the future, worrying that something will go wrong begins with negative thinking. Negative thinking could spoil something that has not happened. You need to differentiate between your negative thoughts and reality. Besides making you feel awful, negative thoughts can be discouraging, and cause you to lose your focus. When continually listening to negative thoughts, it ends up affecting your life, marriage, job, and personal and business relationships. They influence everything around you and the people you love.
How negative thought habits affect your life
Some of us grow up continuing to believe many of the things we heard as children from family members. We maintain these beliefs throughout our childhood and into our adult lives. If we hear from people that everyone in our family gets cancer, we end up believing that we will be predisposed to contract it. The more you dwell on how a disease can hurt us the more it is that you may experience the physical symptoms. Negative beliefs, anxiety, and fear become a form of acquired helplessness. As the physical symptoms increase, the more plausible our negative thoughts become. Learning to control our thoughts, we can learn to minimize our physical symptoms and pain.
Positive thinking has definite health benefits
Utilizing positive thinking in many different situations is common in the twenty-first century. Learning to block negative thoughts and increase awareness of how positive thoughts raise motivation is gaining momentum. You will find training to develop positive thinking in business and sales, children's educational programs, in health, psychology, motivation and inspiration, marketing, psychology, self-imaging and sports.
Researchers continue to explore the effects of positive thinking and optimism has encouraging effects on your health. Their study is to examine the benefits and the correlation between mental health and physical health. Health benefits that positive thinking offers include:
- Lower incidence of depression
- Increased life expectancy
- Increase common cold resistance
- Lower levels of anxiety
- Reduced risk of cardiovascular disease
- Enhanced coping skills during hard, stressful times
- Stronger physical and psychological well-being
It is uncertain why people who practice positive thinking experience enhanced health benefits. The first theory is that maintaining a positive outlook empowers you to manage stressful situations, which decreases destructive health effects of stress on your body. When people keep a positive attitude, they also live healthier lifestyles. They are usually more physical active and follow healthier diets. This also includes not smoking or not drinking alcohol to excess.
Recognizing the different modes of Negative Thinking
During our childhood, we incorporate many comments that were directed at us by parents, teachers, and siblings. Unconsciously we internalize some of these comments and eventually use them as our truth. If there had been a little encouragement during those formative years, these negative thoughts would not have become part of your habitual thoughts. They ended up becoming a pattern we follow when stressed or facing new situations. Instead of seeing the positive in any situation we look for the negative, which adds to the anxiety in our daily life. Here are various methods of negative inner talk we use on ourselves.
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Filter
Filtering out the positive aspects of a situation, we prefer to enlarge the significance the negative aspects. After receiving a great critique from your boss for the well-designed project, you spend the evening dwelling on one suggestion he would like to see incorporated into the project. You ignore all the wonderful compliments worrying why your boss did not think it was not a perfect project.
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Personalize
Do you blame yourself when things do not turn out the way you had anticipated? Friends cancel a shopping trip due to a cold. You automatically assume they cancelled because they do not like you or the mall you picked out.
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Dramatize
When one thing goes wrong, do you expect the remainder of the day to go badly? If your favorite coffee runs out at the coffee shop, you assume that everything else you touch will continue to go wrong that day.
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Polarize
Are you in the habit of seeing things either as bad or good? Do you have trouble finding a middle ground in a situation? You would rather pull a bush out of the garden because of damage from a storm, rather than giving it a chance to grow back and flourish in your garden. Many times damaged plants, but they still thrive if given the opportunity to recover.
Incorporating positive thinking patterns in your daily life
Learning to rethink your thoughts for a more positive outlook can help you handle any situation you find yourself confronted with in life. You do not need to worry about what anyone else thinks. What is important is how you think and how you perceive yourself. Positive thinking is what will make all the difference in your world.
Does your initial thinking sound negative?
Change this thinking to Positive Self-Talk
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This assignment is too difficult for me to handle
Change to: I will approach it systematically to complete the project -
I have not tried this before
Change to: It is time to take a chance and try something new -
I am too unorganized to accomplish anything
Change to: I will examine my priorities to fit this task into my schedule -
I cannot do it without the right resources
Change to: I will find what I need to get the job done -
I cannot change; it is too hard
Change to: Trying innovative things is for ME! -
I will never learn how doing this
Change to: I will get it right if I just try it again -
No one ever talks to me
Change to: I will attempt to open up to people more -
I cannot get anything correctly done
Change to: I believe I can accomplish anything I set my mind to -
I will never get a promotion
Change to: I am a good worker and succeed at all the things I attempt
Utilizing and maintaining positive thought patterns to achieve
Replacing your negative thought patterns to positive ones will not happen overnight. It takes practice, and you will need patience with yourself. You will find over time your thoughts will contain self-acceptance organically and a lesser amount of self-criticism. You will see the world around you with a less critical eye.
With the help of positive affirmations, you will have the strength to quiet the negative thinking and move on to a more positive frame-of-mind. With a positive state of mind, you have a better outlook to manage, everyday hassles in a constructive manner, which will help reduce stress in your life. Positive thinking is more efficient with continual repetition. Repeating beliefs that contain positive convictions and emotions will be picked up by your subconscious, and it will begin to act as if these are true.
It only takes a little time and patience
Start with just one positive thought each day. Say it to yourself in the mirror as you are getting dressed in the morning. Say your affirmation several more times during the day. Take a deep breath, and as you breath out repeat your positive thought. Before you realize it, take another look at the person in the mirror, and you will see a more relaxed person standing there.