How Negative Thinking Can Make You Feel Better

When you're angry or in a bad mood or upset, it doesn't work very well to try to be positive. Your whole mind-set is against it.

But you can get out of your bad mood with a special kind of negative thinking. It is the key technique of Cognitive Therapy (the most effective therapy available, according to over 600 studies).

Here it is: Criticize your own thinking. Be negative about your own mistaken, exaggerated, distorted thoughts. The fact is, when you're upset, your thinking becomes irrational, and your negative (and false) conclusions keep you upset (or make it worse).

Read more: How to Genuinely Feel Less Angry

The Three Treasures

Praying, or wishing others well is a natural manifestation of compassion for others. As you begin to feel calmer, your desire to make prayers for others will increase. When you want to pray for someone, what do you pray for? What would you wish for another? What is worth having in life? Here is what I suggest and why:

Tranquillity. Calm is universally useful and makes things better for everyone, no matter what is happening.

Connection. Deeper connection with others is universally valued and good for you. Pray the person finds a way to open their heart to people, to find people in their lives they can safely open up with, and who will reciprocate. Love and connection is healthy and one of the main things making life worth living.

Meaningfulness. Pray that they will find meaning in their struggle, and perhaps more important, that they will find a meaningful purpose to put their heart into.

This is what to wish for others, this is what to help them achieve, and these three treasures are what to aim for in your own life.

Read more: Send a Blessing and Becoming Holy.

live in warm affection

Here is an easy practice you can incorporate into your daily life that will help you feel more connected to people:

When you see a person, any person, any time, think to yourself, "She wants to be happy." And then make a wish that she finds happiness in her life.

Each of us wants to be happy. We may lose sight of our desire to be happy. The world is a pretty distracting, embroiling, entangling place. But deep inside, every person you see wants to be happy. It is a fundamental desire you both share, and in that way, you have a connection. To wish the other person finds the happiness they want makes you feel good. And it makes you feel closer to people.

Read more: Generate Friendliness.

how to be healthier without lifting a finger

It's simple: become more optimistic, not in the airy-fairy, everything-happens-for-a-reason, rose-colored-glasses kind of way, but become more optimistic in the scientific sense of the word.

Optimism has a strong impact on your general health and immune system, and this is no longer the fanciful opinion of fringe healers, but a thoroughly validated conclusion of large, long-term studies.

Read more: Optimism Is Healthy

why optimism can be a self-fulfilling prophesy

Optimism includes the assumption I can do something to change this situation for the better. Defeatism or pessimism includes the assumption probably nothing I do will make any difference.

Of course, when you're optimistic, you are more willing to take action to change things for the better, which increases the likelihood that things will change for the better. That's how optimism becomes self-fulfilling.

Pessimism can also become a self-fulfilling prophesy. If there is some area of your life that you have decided you cannot improve, you will no longer even try, which makes it more likely it will stay the way it is (or get worse).

Optimism is not the same as thinking positively, and it is actually easier than thinking positively. But it has far more evidence from scientific experiments proving its effectiveness than positive thinking does.

Read more: Optimism and Optimism is Healthy

why pessimism shuts down your immune system

Pessimism leads to depression, whether it is mild or deep. And when a person is depressed, certain brain hormones become depleted, creating a chain of biochemical events that end up slowing down the activity of the immune system. For example, two key players in our immune systems are T cells and NK cells.

T CELLS recognize invaders (like viruses) and make more copies of themselves to kill off the invaders. Pessimists’ T cells don’t multiply as quickly as optimists’, allowing invaders to get the upper hand.

NK CELLS circulate in the blood and kill whatever they come across that they identify as foreign (like cancer cells). Pessimists’ NK cells can identify foreign entities, but they don’t destroy them as well as the optimists’ NK cells. 

Read more: Optimism Is Healthy and Optimism Interview

invigorate your life using a technique developed in a concentration camp

You will feel strong and happy to the degree you feel your actions have some meaning. Life includes a good deal of suffering in one form or another. If the suffering has some meaning, you can tolerate it well and even find happiness while suffering. Viktor Frankl discovered this while he was in one of Hitler's concentration camps.

Choose something you're unhappy about. Now ask yourself: Is there some greater purpose or meaning that is being paid for by my suffering? It doesn't matter what anyone else thinks or what they might think about it. What matters is that your life and your struggles have meaning to you. Does it serve some greater end? Is your suffering the price you must pay for some important purpose?

Don't come up with an answer right away. Ponder it, like a Zen koan, for days or even weeks.

Read more: Meanings And Feelings
and Master The Art Of Making Meaning

why failing to lose weight is a good thing

In a series of studies at Columbia University, it was found that people who successfully lost weight and kept it off had tried and failed a number of times before they finally succeeded.

When you change the way you eat or exercise, old habits tend to kick in and ruin your progress. To be successful, you first need to learn how to keep the changes and maintain them over time. Each attempt, even though it "failed," teaches you what you need to do to be successful in the future. In fact, the studies also showed that the more times you try to lose weight, the more likely your weight loss will be permanent.

So don't give up on yourself if you've tried and failed. Your very next attempt may be the one that succeeds.

The following chapters in Self-Help Stuff That Works will show you how to pick yourself up after a setback and continue. You don't need willpower, you need the ability to destroy the thoughts that suck away your soul; thoughts that take away your desire and motivation.

Optimism
Master The Art Of Making Meaning
How to Deal With Setbacks and Failures

is there an easy way to stop feeling annoyed or angry?

Yes there is. Anger and annoyance come from the conclusions you've drawn about the meaning of an event. You conclude that you were insulted or disrespected, and then you feel anger in response to the disrespect.

For example, when someone does X, it means they think you're stupid. But what if that's not what it means? Then your anger would just be needless suffering, right?

Try this: Next time you feel angry or annoyed because someone did something, ask yourself what you think the action meant. Then ask yourself What else could it mean? Your first conclusion might not be the best one, so ask it a few times. Your anger will diminish as your certainty about the meaning of the event diminishes.

Read more: Master The Art Of Making Meaning

how to persist without willpower

The secret of success is persistence. But what happens when you hit a setback and feel defeated? When you conclude your goal is impossible, it takes a tremendous amount of willpower to persist.

But when you feel defeated, you have almost surely concluded something that is false: Nobody will ever want my product, I'm just a loser, Everything I touch turns to crap, etc. When a setback occurs, it brings you down. When people are down, their thoughts become overly negative, distorted, and exaggerated.

Learn to seek out the mistakes in your thinking and correct them.

Don't try to persist by forcing yourself to continue even when you feel defeated. Learn to poke holes in your defeated conclusions and you will persist naturally. Without willpower.

Read more: Pillar Of Strength
and Positive Thinking: The Next Generation

the ancient hindus used the same technique as modern cognitive science to end human misery

There isn't much to it: Just give up desires. Of course, you can't possibly do that permanently, but you can do it right now. Ask yourself What do I want right now? You almost always want something. And the state of wanting is a state of discontent. Whatever you want right now, just give it up. Say to yourself I don't want that. Decide you don't want it.

Don't worry, it'll come back. But for right now, you'll gain yourself a peace-of-mind break. This is not difficult, and you can do it.

Notice what you want right now, and let it go. Give it up. Then notice what else you want and let that one go too. You'll notice a relaxing feeling of contentment come over you.

If you don't notice that contentment, and you want to feel it, give up that desire too.

Read more: The How Of Tao