The more negative we are, the more we become, insists our psychologist.
Pessimistic, demeaning and/or fatalistic, negative thoughts have deleterious impacts on areas of our lives and can even harm our health. They interfere with our work, damage our social and family relationships, cause stress and anxiety, hinder concentration, impair sleep and can ultimately isolate us and reduce our self-esteem to nothing.
Being negative often comes from childhood, a period during which the thoughts of others or any trauma may have given us a bad image of ourselves and affected the world we perceive as adults. “There may also be a genetic aspect: a person who grew up with a depressed parent may “inherit” this gene and have a tendency toward pessimism.explains Maïté Tranzer, clinical psychologist. It can also come from the environment around us (at work for example) and the negative people we encounter on a daily basis. Without realizing it, we will absorb their negative energy and in turn succumb to darker thoughts.“
Problem: the more negative we are, the more we become, our brain naturally gets used to seeing things negatively. “Being negative becomes a defense mechanism: we will want to anticipate things out of a desire to control them. There is also a form of complacency through the negative, sometimes with a search for victimization and attention behind“, continues our interlocutor. But fortunately we can stop being negative. “We must first become aware of this. You need to identify negative ideas and understand what is behind them. We will try to have an objective look at ourselves, without being in a self-judgment“, insists Maïté Tranzer. For example if we say to ourselves “My interview tomorrow is going to go badly, I’m going to lose my means”, we will take an emotional step back, put rationality and objectivity to transform this automatic thought into neutral thought “I have prepared for my interview, I know my subject, there is no reason for it to go badly” then positive “I will be serious and professional, I will do everything to impress them”.
This introspective work also involves a form of gratitude and self-evaluation to recondition your brain to turn things towards the positive, break automatic patterns and get out of your prism. For example, we can do a very simple exercise in the evening before going to sleep which consists of identifying three positive things that happened during the day (“I did this thing, it made me feel valued or it brought something positive to such a person…”), to write them down in a notebook or to verbalize them to truly become aware of them and anchor them in our brain.
We also need to know how to surround ourselves with the right people, those who will be rewarding, caring, sunny and who will have a positive impact on us. But also limit sources of negativity such as the media, anxiety-provoking television channels or smartphone alerts of toxic information. We can also get help with mindful meditation sessions, sophrology or consult a psychologist to externalize what is causing us problems and stop negative ruminations and limiting thoughts. Having a positive state of mind doesn’t happen overnight, it requires putting in place a lot of little reflexes. “It’s OK to perceive negative things or feel negative emotions. On the other hand, it becomes problematic if we don’t make the effort to go beyond or worse, if we decide to feed them“, concludes our expert.