How to Manage Negative Thoughts

Before we dive into how to manage negative thoughts, I want to tell you a quick story about the circus.

BONUS DOWNLOAD: Click here to get my free guide: 5 Strategies for Overcoming Negative Thoughts.

I still remember the first time I went to the circus.  It was the Ringling Brothers and Barnum and Bailey Circus at the Nassau Coliseum.

I remember how exciting it was to watch the acrobats and the tight-rope walkers showing off their skills.  It puzzled my sisters and I watching 25 clowns get out of a miniature Volkswagen Beetle.

But what I remember the most was the lion tamer. This average looking guy, albeit with a strange mustache, controlling four ferocious animals with just a chair and a whip.

To an impressionable 8-year-old, this was amazing.  Even today, I find it fascinating that someone can train lions to do some amazing things with very simple tools.

Clyde Beatty and the Chair

While I wasn’t able to pinpoint when the whip and chair were first introduced to lion taming, one pioneer who helped to popularize the style was Clyde Beatty.

Beatty, unlike many of his colleagues, was not born into a circus family.  He grew up on a farm in rural Ohio.  In 1921, after graduating high school, Beatty got a job with the Howes Great London and Van Amburgh’s Wild Animal Circus as a cage cleaner.

Over the next few years, Beatty would learn from animal trainers and develop his skills until he became part of the show.  Beatty would perform for over 40 years in the ring.  He is most famous for his “fighting act,” where he’d be alone in a cage with over 25 different animals including lions, tigers, and hyenas.

You may think the whip was the most important tool used in training the circus animals, but the key to Beatty’s ability to train the animals was the use of a chair.

When the chair was held in front of a lion, it would confuse the lion and keep it from attacking. Instead, the lion would try to split his attention between the four legs of the chair, distracting and confusing the animal.  With the lion’s focus split, he would back up as a way of trying to figure out what’s going on.  With the lion’s attention on the four legs of the chair and not on the man holding the chair, the lion tamer can then train the lion to do all kinds of tricks safely.

Attacking the Problem from Multiple Angles

You and I may not have to fend off lions in our daily life, but we have to manage negative thoughts, which can be just as dangerous to our well-being.

Consider how many times you didn’t go through with something because you thought it would turn out bad.  Think about all the times you didn’t speak up, the connections you didn’t make, or the experiences you missed out on because your mind convinced you that the outcome would be negative.

What Beatty teaches us is that instead of succumbing to our personal lions or negative thoughts, we can subdue our opponents with some simple tools.

Just like the 4 legs of a chair divided the focus of the lions, we too can attack our concerns from multiple angles to overcome our negative thinking.  The key is to find something that works.  If you try something that doesn’t work, try something else.  Just don’t give up.

Here are four ways we can manage negative thoughts and push our minds into doing what we really want it to do.

Challenging Negative Thoughts

The key problem with social anxiety is dealing with negative thoughts.  Those of us with social anxiety often have skewed negative perceptions.  All the bad things that could happen go through our heads well before anything positive, if positive thoughts cross our minds at all.

Many of these thoughts embedded in our minds. Some of them are so deep that it’s hard to believe that we can ever change them.  But change is possible if you’re willing to do the work.

All of our negative thoughts are bad habits that we’ve cultivated over time.  Habits we can change and replace with practice and determination.

To combat these negative thoughts, we have to challenge them.  By challenging our thoughts, we prove to ourselves that things aren’t as bad as they seem.

Here are the three basic steps to challenge negative thoughts:

1. You must first be aware of your thoughts.

The best way to take notice of your thoughts is to review them objectively. One of the most popular techniques is through mindfulness.  We’ll discuss this more in the next section.

2. Find evidence for and against your negative thought.

For example, when you think, “Everything always goes wrong for me,” is it actually true or are you saying or thinking out of emotion?  I’d bet it’s the latter.

Emotions drive out thoughts and that is OK.  However, it’s imperative that we keep an appropriate perspective of what the facts are versus how we’re feeling.

Challenging negative thoughts requires you to be brutally honest with yourself, even if that means accepting that your feelings, while valid, may not be true.

3. Create an alternative and more realistic thought.

The goal here isn’t to just think the positive opposite of your negative thought, as that thought may not be true either.  For instance, “Everything always goes right for me,” isn’t an accurate statement for anybody.  The goal here is to be realistic, honest, and optimistic.

For example, stating “Everything always goes wrong for me,” is a negative thought with no truth to it.  A more realistic thought may be, “This event didn’t go the way I wanted it to go, but I’ve had success in the past and I will again in the future.“

Mindfulness

Awareness of your thoughts is the first step to challenging your negative beliefs.  Truth be told, it’s also one of the first steps to overcoming social anxiety.  See the problems before you work on the problems.

One of our problems is automatic negative thinking.  Having negative thoughts before considering any other factors.  The best way to notice our negative thoughts is through mindfulness.

There are plenty of definitions for mindfulness floating around the internet.  It’s become a very popular and buzz-worthy word.  But, for the sake of simplicity and our conversation today, mindfulness means becoming conscious of the things you think.

Thankfully, it isn’t difficult to learn how to become more aware of your thoughts.  It just takes some practice and the discipline to be objective.

One of the most popular ways to practice mindfulness is by writing out your thoughts.

By writing them out, you detach yourself from them and can objectively observe them instead of trying to balance experiencing your thoughts and objectively reviewing them in real-time.

Studies have shown that writing our thoughts has helped people overcome traumatic events faster than not writing them out, even if no other form of support was offered.

Besides writing, my favorite tool for mindfulness is Headspace.  It’s a free app that helps you practice mindfulness meditation.  It just takes 10 minutes a day and will teach you how to be more mindful of your thoughts and surroundings.   I do it in the morning before I write in my Journal. If you need help to create a meditation space at home, here are some excellent tips.

Test Your Assumptions

I’m an avid listener of the Tim Ferriss Show.  It’s the number one business podcast hosted by Tim Ferriss, the author of The Four Hour Work Week and several other best-selling books.  I enjoy the podcast because Tim interviews people from all walks of life and does his best to determine the little things that helped his interviewees become successful.

One of the most common themes across all of his interviews is the testing of assumptions. Nearly every guest on Tim’s show talks about having beliefs about their future, whether they were positive or negative, and working to find out the truth.

This simple strategy can help you manage negative thoughts and determine the truth about ourselves. It takes challenging our thinking to an actionable level.

For example, if you have the thought you’re a terrible public speaker, yet you’ve never given a speech or have seldom spoken in front of a crowd, perhaps you should test that assumption.

Join Toastmasters or study public speaking.  Practice giving small talks at work or with friends.  Invest some time to determine whether your assumption is true.

The benefits of testing your assumptions are two-fold.

First, you will develop your skills in this area if you invest time and energy in being the best you can be.  Second, you’ll gather actual evidence whether your assumptions are true, allowing you to make an informed decision instead of an emotional one.

Self-Compassion

Finally, it’s important to have some self-compassion.  This means giving yourself a break.

So many of us struggle with perfectionism.  We want to say the right thing, wear the right clothes, have the right job, live in the right neighborhood.  But all this does is create unnecessary stress on your body and a long list of unnecessary and unmet goals.

Instead, be kind to yourself.  It doesn’t matter if you say the right thing all the time or have the right job or house or clothes.  None of that really matters.  What matters is that you’re happy with whom you are now and who you’re working to become.

Failure is a necessary part of life.  Many of us learn much more when we fail than when we succeed.

For example, last weekend my nephew spent the weekend with my wife and I.  On Saturday night, we played video games.

Now I haven’t played video games in about 10 years, so I was more so watching him play.  But, as I watched, I noticed him experience both success and failure.  When he was successful, he’d smile and boast about how good he was at the game.

But what I found amazing was that when he would lose, he would take a moment and think about why he lost. Then he’d develop a new strategy and try it again.  If that didn’t work, he’d try something else, until he was successful.

At one point in the game, I mentioned that he may have missed some kind of bonus by moving too quickly.  His response was a great lesson in self-compassion.

He said, “My goal is to beat the game, not to be perfect.  I’m OK with missing things as long as I win in the end.”

Our goal as Anxiety-Fighters shouldn’t be perfection, it should be winning in the end.  So don’t be so hard on yourself, manage negative thoughts, and keep moving forward.

This post was proofread by Grammarly and ProWritingAid.

Next Action Steps

Over the next 10 days, practice one strategy mentioned in today’s post to manage negative thoughts.  In the comments below, share which strategy you’ll work on.

For more resources and tips for managing your social anxiety, visit my Social Anxiety Resources Page.

For example: For the next 10 days I’ll work on self-compassion.  I am hard on myself.  I don’t claim to be a perfectionist by any means, but I could lessen the pressure I put on myself daily to perform.