Let’s talk about Negativity…

In this weeks blogpost I want to talk about negativity, how it effects us and why we should stop those thought patterns in order to live happier, healthier and more meaningful lives. What do I even mean by negativity ? Whenever we complain about some minor thing, whenever we criticize a friend of us or whenever we gossip about someones weird behaviour we let negativity controll our mind and pull us down.

The best way to free your mind from those negative thought patterns is probably to avoid them all at once. This can be hard, because we are sorrounded by negativity. Our friends, our colleagues, or family members and other people we spend our time with are gossiping, complaining and critisizing all the time and by surrounding us with those kind of people, we adopt this negativity and even spread it to other people in our life. It is hard to avoid falling into the trap of agreeing with your peers, whenever someone starts gossiping or complaining about something, but when we start acknowledging that, we can try to shift the attention of the conversation to a more positive aspect. But we should keep in mind, that we shouldn't judge someone by their negativity. They probably received this negativity from someone else and are just the victim of the habit of spreading it to other people. We could try to change those negative people, but the easier and less effortfull way is to sorround ourselves with positive people. For every time you spend with someone who pulls you down, spend 3 times the amount of time with someone who brings you up.

We can choose how to react to the negativities arround us. A good practise that I learned and I try to implement into my life is the spot, stop and swap strategy. Spot and acknowledge the negative thought, stop the critisizing, complaining and judging and swap the negative thought with a positive one. We probably can't avoid critisising, complaining and gossiping all the time, but we can try. This will probably lead us to having much less to say and think about, but we have to keep in mind that we are never improving our own situation by critizing, complaining or gossiping about other people. By stopping the waste of our mental capacity on those negativities, we have much more time to think about how we can improve ourselves. Now we can fill our lifes with more positive thoughts by for example celebrating the successes of our friends instead of envying them.

Another feeling that pulls us down is anger and expexially anger toward other people. Whenever someone hurts our feelings, we ask ourselves the question, if we could ever forgive this person. This forgiveness doesn't happen external, it happens internal. We should always aim for forgiving someone. Giving and receiving forgiveness has many health benefits and leads to happier relationships. A good way to forgive someone internally is to think through the situation from the other persons perspective to understand why this person caused you that sort of pain. Maybe they received pain from someone else and spread this pain over to you. The worst thing you can think about in this situtation is revenge. Whenever we plan a revenge act, we aim for a certain reaction in the other person and if we don't achieve this sort of reaction, we build up more anger. While forgiving others, we shouldn't leave out forgiving ourselves for things we did in the past. A good practise is to make a list of things you want to forgive yourself. While doing that you should keep in mind that you can't change the past and that it is actually a good thing to have stuff to forgive yourself for, because it shows that your values changed over time and that you grew your personality to the point you are at right now.

I hope I encouraged you to give negativity less room in your life and to free up your mind from judging, gossiping and complaining to have more space to improve and grow your own personality.

Cheers Emil