Listen to “How Thoughts and Emotions Affect your Life”.
Negative beliefs, thoughts and self-talk have a physical and mental effect on our bodies. Thoughts are mental cognitions which are made from our ideas, opinions, and beliefs about ourselves and the world around us. They include the perspectives we bring to situations and experiences that colour our point of view.
The way you think about yourself turns into your reality.
Our attitudes are examples of long-lived thoughts which have been developed and reinforced through repetition. While thoughts are shaped by life experiences, genetics, and education, they are generally under our conscious control. In other words, if you are aware of your thoughts and attitudes, you can choose to change them.
However, if you draw inaccurate conclusions about who you are and what you’re capable of doing, you can limit your potential.
People around the world have different ideas, beliefs, and opinions—different thoughts—but they have very similar, if not identical, feelings. While emotions are universal, each person may experience them and respond to them in different ways.
Thoughts and emotions have a profound effect on one another. Thoughts can trigger emotions and also serve as an appraisal of those emotions. In addition, how we attend to and appraise our lives affects how we feel.
How to get your thoughts under control
Throughout the day, pay close attention to your thoughts. Take a mental note of just how much negative chatter is going on. While understanding that negative emotions are a normal part of life is important, there is a downside to giving them too much power.
If you spend too much time dwelling on negative emotions and the situations that might have caused them, you could go into a spiral of rumination.
Rumination is the tendency to keep thinking, replaying, or obsessing over negative emotional situations and experiences. In this spiral of negative thinking, you can end up feeling worse and worse about your situation and yourself. The result of this could bring about a number of detrimental effects on your mental and physical wellbeing.
What you think influences directly how you feel and how you behave. If you think you are a failure, you’ll feel like a failure. The good news is; you can press pause on this negativity so that it doesn’t take over your life. You can train your brain to think differently and take control of what’s going on in your head.
One of the best ways to deal with negative emotions is through acceptance. Once you’ve begun to accept that they are a natural part of who you are, you can start to focus on reframing negative situations and your reactions to them. Just because a negative emotion has arisen, doesn’t mean you have to react in ways that are detrimental to you and those around you.
Accepting negative emotions isn’t about accepting or excusing poor behaviours. It’s about creating awareness for the self and others to create positive reactions.
How we choose to live our lives has tremendous power over the way we feel every day.
