If you feel yourself being more negative than you’d like to be, you’ve read the article about why people are negative and you’d really like to learn to be more positive, this article has been written especially for you. Here are a few suggestions to help you on your way to overcome negativity once and for all.

Step 1 to overcome negativity: Awareness

The first step to overcoming negativity is awareness.

Most of us listen to and act on our thoughts and feelings without really being consciously aware that we’re doing it. It’s like a little voice in our head which influences us, yet most of the time we don’t even realize that we are handing over so much power to this little voice, letting it influence us. What’s more, we don’t realize that this little voice in our head is not entirely us. Afterall, if we can observe the voice, then there is another part of us; the observer part that is able to notice the little voice in our head. The key to overcoming negativity is spending more time developing the observer part of us and learning to give less weight to the judgemental little voice inside us.

To develop the observer part, practice observing your thoughts and your words in a very conscious and deliberate way. If you make an effort to take note of your thoughts and your words, you’ll begin to catch yourself mid negative thought. Bear in mind that as you’re catching yourself out during negativity, it may feel as if you’re suddenly a lot more negative than before, and this may be a little distressing, but this is just an illusion caused by your new awareness to any negativity that had been there all along. Catching yourself being negative is already a huge step forward towards overcoming negativity. The more you exercise this skill of conscious thinking and conscious speaking, the less inclined you’ll be to be negative.

If you sought out this article specifically to find ways to overcome negativity you’ve probably already started this step of noticing the voice of negativity in your head.

The next stage is to accept responsibility for your thoughts and feelings.

No-one can force you to think something or feel something. Ultimately, the only person responsible for allowing a thought or a feeling to pop into existence is you. You’re the one who labels any situation as negative, and then allows the negativity to stick around and bug you.

No situation is ever negative until you decide to mentally label it as negative. Shakespeare put it well when he said: “Nothing is bad or good, but thinking makes it so”.

Once you accept responsibility for all the negative labels you’ve stuck on things, you’ll see that this realization puts you in a position of power. It means that you can choose to see things in a more positive light just as easily as you chose to see things in a negative light. It’s just a matter of choice and habit.

Step 3 in how to be more positive: Make “overcoming negativity” a goal

When you make “overcoming negativity” one of your life improvement goals, it encourages you to take the task more seriously and helps you to stick to your intention. Keep your goal of overcoming negativity in mind and keep that intention active. Maybe you can write it down on a list of goals which you look at every day to remind yourself of your commitment to be more positive. Alternatively, you can write your goal on a post-it and put it in a place where you’ll see it often. It is known that people who set goals for themselves are more successful in achieving them. Having a positive focus point to concentrate on helps you manifest whatever you’re after.

Don’t resist the negative thoughts. This may sound a bit strange at first: Shouldn’t you resist negative thoughts if you want to replace them with positive ones? The reason why the answer to this is “no” is because resistance of any kind always leads to pain and discomfort. When you resist negativity, it can create feelings like:

• self-criticism (“I can’t believe my mind insists on labelling things as negative all the time! How could my mind be that destructive!”)
• and guilt (“This must stop! Look at all the misery I’m causing myself and others!”)

Despite the false illusion that resisting negativity helps you fight it, resistance uses tools like self-criticism and guilt that only serve to create more negativity.

The best solution is to observe the negative thoughts when they come. Observe their presence. Don’t judge them. Just notice them and accept that they are there. Then let them drift away without allowing them to make any negative impact on you. Letting the negative thoughts float away is the most peaceful solution.

How do you actively help negative thoughts drift away?

You can do this by simply being very connected to the observer part in your mind, watching the little voice in your head without engaging with it, until you feel the little voice quietens and calms.

Others prefer using visualization techniques. You can visualize yourself breathing out the thoughts or feelings into a balloon and then watching the balloon gently float away. Feel free to find your own imagery to help you with your visualizations. For example, if you prefer, you can imagine it being sucked up and away from you by a vacuum cleaner. Another visualization you can use is seeing the negative thoughts as a cloud that leaves your body and disappears forever into a black hole.

Since every event is neither negative nor positive unless you think and decide it is so, you can use the power of your thought to create more positive feelings by choosing to think about the event as neutral or positive. Consider alternative factors regarding the event to help guide your thoughts in a more positive direction. “Problems” can instead be labelled as “opportunities for growth”.

Examples of how situations which are often labelled as “negative” can be viewed in a new light:

• Losing your job: Positive thought: This may give me the push I need to explore this other line of work that I’ve been wanting to try. Without my old job, I now have the opportunity to find the courage inside me to give myself a chance and explore something new.
• Getting a divorce: Positive thought: This is an opportunity to let my heart guide me in life and for me to listen to my own internal compass.

Sometimes it may be difficult to reach for a more positive thought regarding a situation. In these cases, directing thoughts to a direction which provides some emotional relief moves you in a positive direction. Several people including David R Hawkins and Abraham Hicks have devised a scale that orders emotional states on a scale of increasing positivity. The diagram below shows an example of such a scale:

Whatever level you’re on, reaching for any higher level is an act of reaching for a more positive thought than the one you had before, and this can give feelings of relief.

Always focus on what you already have rather than on what you don’t have. Focus on what you WANT rather than on what you don’t want. Regardless of the reality of the situation, imagine vividly with all your being, where you want to be. Live it, breathe it, smell it, taste it and feel it! The Law of Attraction states that we attract to us that which we hold in our mind and in our feelings.

The more you focus on what you want, and the more you successfully manage to really feel what it is like to be in a better place, the sooner you’ll get to that better place. No matter what happens, keep focusing on the positive. Keeping a focus on what you want can only lead to positive places that will produce buds of change that will grow into shoots of bigger and better things.

It’s so important to keep focused on what you want. Any thoughts that deviate from this positive direction will disrupt the positive flow. It’s human to have moments where we lose focus, but if this happens, simply notice it, accept it, let it go and get back to your positive state of mind.

At the most advanced level of positive thinking, you will reach a stage of having no doubt that positive things are on your path. You feel it with your whole being, that what you want is actually happening.

The Law of Attraction states that once you reach this state of complete and pure positive feeling that something will happen, with zero doubt, it does happen.

Supporting evidence that the Law of Attraction works in gaining positive things:

Here is one form of supporting evidence for the theory that strongly focusing, imagining and feeling the positive situation, works in creating the positive situation: Some of the highest paid professionals in the world are Hollywood actors. What do many of these highly successful actors have in common? A phenomenal skill for getting into certain roles and feelings. I believe it is no coincidence that these very people happen to attract such financial abundance into their lives.

How do you gain complete faith that your positive intention will come true?

• Practice visualizing what it FEELS like to get to where you want to go. This will help you vibrate on the same frequency as your end goal which will help you attract it.
  If you have trouble getting your body to really feeling that positive state you want to reach, one technique you can use to help you get there is the Abraham-Hicks Focus Wheel technique. This method is explained very well in this video:
  
  As you watch  this video, focus on your feelings as the video progresses and you should notice a positive subtle shift in your attitude towards the statement at the center of the focus wheel by the end of the video.

• If you feel resistance to a positive thought, visualize this resistance as a seed of doubt within you. Steve Pavlina, personal development writer and an experienced user of the Law of Attraction, suggests a helpful visualization exercise for this. He suggests you:
  1.) Visualize yourself taking this seed of doubt and throw it away into the trash, or black hole or where-ever you want to imagine, disposing of it.
  2.) Then visualize yourself planting a new seed of positivity in its place.
  3.) Visualize yourself caring for the seed, fertilizing it, watering it and growing it.

That’s it! If you follow these 6 steps you should see some fantastic results in gaining a more positive outlook. Be patient and kind to yourself. It is after all a process of letting go of old habits and adopting new ones and these happen at each individual’s own pace. So give yourself a chance! Soon that little voice in your head will be a whole lot more positive!

Related articles:
- Why are people negative?
- Feeling Down: Why do I feel bad?
- Why do I get jealous?
- Shunning and Social Rejection: Why do people socially reject others?
- Why do I get angry? And how do I deal with anger?

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About the authors:

This article was written by Li-Or with contributions from Spiritual Counsellor, Janice.

Pessimism: It’s an unwanted epidemic of our times. It comes to us in a multitude of guises as people around us complain and spew forth negativity about their lives. They share how bad their life is, how difficult their relationships are, how little willpower they have to keep to their New Year’s resolution to work out more. They complain about their lack of money, their difficulty to find a job or if they do have a job, they complain about how much they hate it. They’re overweight, keep getting sick, feel tired and unhappy. It seems that they have much of what they don’t want and little of what they really do want.

Negativity is even rife in the ever-influential media, feeding our minds with bad news, tragedies, traumas, dramas and disasters. A BBC television program called “Grumpy Old Men” encourages viewers to enjoy watching grumpy middle aged men speak about everything that bothers them in the world.

Why are people so negative, and even more mysteriously, why do some people appear to revel in their negativity?

Why are people negative?

After lots of research, reading and personal reflection, we present ten possible theories for the causes of negativity:

1. We learn to be negative from the environment around us

From the moment we are born we are consistently and unthinkingly bombarded with negativity from our families, friends, peers, teachers and mass media. These people spread negativity and pessimism unconsciously rather than deliberately. They too were negatively imprinted by their environment and as long as they don’t question this imprint, they pass on the time-old repetitive pattern of unconscious negative thinking and behavior.

At a young age we are particularly open and susceptible to picking up other people’s tendencies because we don’t think much about what we’re doing. We just do things without consciously considering them, often learning by osmosis by copying and mimicking.

But all is not doom and gloom because there is a way out of this negative cycle! If you remain unaware of those moments when you’re being negative, and if you continue to allow negative thoughts and behaviors to persist, it may be true that you too will unwittingly pass the tendency to be negative onto the next unsuspecting generation. However, once you become aware of your thinking, conscious of the words that you use, conscious of your actions, and above all start catching yourself as the first inklings a negative feeling start bubbling within you, you can overcome not only your own negativity and stop it in its tracks, but you can also stop it from spreading to others around you and to future generations.

2. We have an evolutionary bias towards remembering negative things

Our biology may have something to do with the widespread negativity epidemic. As living animals, we are naturally concerned with our survival. As the saying goes, “safety first”. One way to ensure that we live is to be extremely vigilant of anything that might threaten our survival. For example, when looking at a beautiful landscape in Africa, it is beneficial for us to notice and pay close attention to the salivating lion that’s making its way towards us. It is quite clear where ignoring danger can lead! Similarly, it would have been beneficial to have a long-term memory of where a threat was located so that it could be avoided in the future.

Vigilance is always warranted when a life-threatening situation is possible, and unlike the joke t-shirt in the photo says, safey does come first. However in our generation many of the worries that we focus on are no longer life-threatening. Instead of only expressing negativity for things that threaten our existence, we worry and express negativity about things that threaten our reputation (e.g. insults) or things that threaten our personal comfort levels (e.g. the discomfort of sitting in a car for a long time in a traffic jam, or being exposed to music we don’t like). Not only do we express negativity about such situations, but often our long-term memory is activated so that we can remember a negative situation, like someone insulting us, long after it occurred.

All this is not entirely our fault. It is in our biology. As psychology expert Hara Estroff Marano aptly puts it: “nastiness just makes a bigger impact on our brains”. Negativity literally does hit us harder than good things. When measured in terms of the brain’s electrical activity, Dr Cacioppo of Ohio State University found that the brain created greater surges of electrical activity in response to negative stimuli than to positive ones. How much stronger are negative things? Marano’s research suggests that you need five good things to happen in order to balance out every one bad thing.

Having said all this, we do have the power of conscious awareness and controlled thinking to enable us to distinguish between helpful concerns (i.e. those that are life-saving) and hindering concerns (i.e. those that hinder happiness and have no beneficial purpose). Once the distinction is consciously made, we can begin working on letting go of hindering concerns.

3. We are negative because of lack of awareness and because it’s a habit

Once you’ve been exposed to the barrage of negativity from your environment, the reason you keep acting negatively is simply down to you not being aware that the situation can be different, and because it has become a habitual way of thinking and behaving. Negativity becomes an unthinking reflexive response to situations. Cultivating awareness and consciously making an effort to break the habit is the solution.

4. Our experiences condition us to be negative

When bad things happen, it can lead to negative expectation in the future. For example, if you fail an exam once, a part of you may have a fear or even an expectation that you’ll fail your next exam too. Similarly, when we “get up on the wrong side of bed” and our day is off to a bad start for whatever reason, a part of us thinks, “It’s going to be one of those days…” and indeed often the whole day ends up being disasterous.

In spiritual terms, it is said that when we focus on the negative, like worrying about how things may go wrong, we vibrate on lower levels of energy. Although scientifically-minded people dismiss energy-talk as pseudoscience, you can feel it in a person’s vibe. When someone is depressed or worried, their vibe feels heavier anad duller than someone who is upbeat and happy.

There is one famous spiritual law called the “Law of Attraction” which states that you draw to yourself experiences that are in line with your energy level, thoughts, feelings and expectations. According to this theory, where-ever your focus lies, be it on the positive or on the negative, Law of Attraction gives you what you think and focus on. Like attracts like. The more “I’m-just-being-realistic” negativity you expect from the world, the more negativity you’ll draw towards yourself. It’s like tuning in to a certain radio station where it’s inevitable that if you set your radio’s dial to 97.3FM you’ll hear 97.3FM transmitted back to you. So according to this theory, if you learn to “tune” your thoughts positively on what you want and not on what you don’t want or don’t have, you will be tuning yourself in to positive, good, happy experiences that you expect.

5. We are negative to vent our frustrations

Part of why we may enjoy expressing our negativity is because it feels like we’re offloading and casting it away. When we become worked-up over something, it can feel like a relief to complain about it, or release the negative energy by having our say in no uncertain terms, shouting at someone or saying something nasty.

Although feeling relief is a good thing, and our venting can release a build-up of negative emotion, this method of dealing with negativity does not direct you towards attracting positivity in your life. Once again, focusing on something negative will only perpetuate it rather than dissolve it. The trick is to be conscious when “bad” things happen. With enough consciousness, you will no longer attach the “bad” label to events. Instead you will see them for what they are: neutral occurrences that inherently have no negativity attached to them. By seeing things as neutral, there will be no tension build-up which needs to be vented. And by focusing on what you have, and what you do want rather than on what you lack, you will direct yourself in a positive direction.

6. We are negative about others to boost our own self-esteem

Another reason why negativity can be “pleasurable” is because if you do it by being negative about others, it can give you the illusion of boosting your self-esteem, which temporarily makes you feel good.

Whether they admit it or not, most people in the world have self-esteem issues to varying degrees. One way people sometimes feel a little better about themselves is by bringing down the value of others around them so that by default, they get the false impression that they are better than those they put down.

Put-downs such as these can have several forms including enjoying talking about other people’s misfortunes, vying for control and insisting that other people’s methods are not as good as your own, blaming others, making fun of others, nitpicking and making a big fuss over little faults and treating people as if they are inferior to you.

7. We are negative because sharing negativity is a bonding experience

• Joint agreement about something that bothers us in everyday life. A lot of comedians use this kind of material to make us laugh as they say how much they hate things we all hate. This is also part of the power that makes the program “Grumpy Old Men” so successful.
• Joining forces to demonstrate against an issue e.g. anti-war campaigns and other movements of activism.
• Joining together to bully someone.

All these can create feelings of acceptance, belonging and togetherness within the group.

One of the greatest fears humans have is of being alone, so anything which supports togetherness is preferred, even if the very thing that brings people together is negativity!

Bonding and experiencing togetherness would be even more enjoyable if there was nothing negative about it, so finding alternative, positive ways of being together would be far more gratifying. Having a good laugh together, or gathering together for something positive (e.g. a pro-peace campaign rather than an anti-war one) feels a lot better than having a good moan together about something painful and unpleasant.

8. We focus on negativity because we think this is necessary in order to solve problems

When something is good, near perfection, there is little to improve and work with, so it occupies your thoughts less. When something is negative however, there is more to engage with. This makes negative things inherently more preoccupying. The irony is that according to the Law of Attraction, the more you focus on the problem, the more the problem will persist. The solution according to the Law of Attraction is to focus on what we do want, and where we want to go from here rather than focusing on the problem itself.

9. We are negative because we think it will make people want to care for us

When something bad happens to us, kind people give us attention and sympathy. For some, attention and sympathy can be confused with acceptance and love, and receiving sympathy feels so good that they rejoice in expelling stories of woe where-ever they go. Once they wake up to the fact that sympathy is not true love, they will have no reason to seek it out any more, because the positive feelings gained by receiving sympathy pale in comparison to experiencing true love.

10. We are negative because it helps us get what we want

Whilst some people want to gain sympathy in order to feel cared for, others use manipulation to get what they want. For example:

• At work, a man may underhandedly say negative things about a colleague to ensure he gets the promotion rather than his colleague.
• At home, a child may play one parent against the other or throw a tantrum to get what he wants
• In close relationships, your partner may complain about their day and about how tired they are as a manipulation to get you to volunteer to do the chores or give them a foot massage.

What drives people to manipulate others is a topic for another article, but the bottom line is that this “impure” desire to manipulate can be behind negative behavior.

It is important to remember that every thing which can be gained by manipulation can also be achieved without using the forces of the dark side! Why should you stop using manipulation if it’s been working for you? Because dark energy breeds more dark energy and by using it, you instil emotions like resentment, anger and negativity in those you manipulate. By contrast positivity breeds positivity. Using positivity to gain what you want is not only better for you, it is also better for everyone.

Whether you use negativity or positivity to get what you want, sometimes despite our best efforts, we still don’t immediately get what we desire. Control over external things and always getting what your desires demand is something that is not always within our reach. Letting such uncertain things determine your happiness is therefore a risky thing to do. Even when you do get what you wanted, the positive feeling felt after gaining external things only lasts a little while before it fades and you set your eyes on a new shiny desire to fill the emptiness. People like Eckhart Tolle who have glimpsed the joy of the completeness and power that comes from enlightenment tell us that this fleeting happiness from gaining “things” pales in comparison to the power and happiness felt when you feel in complete control of yourself. The only thing you can always control is how you feel; your internal self. What gives enlightened folk so much joy is feeling in complete control of their thoughts and feelings, and feeling completely in touch with their true Self. Once they achieve this, they feel complete without needing external things; they are no longer slaves to their desires and nothing around them bothers them.

You can read more about how to overcome negativity in our article about how to be more positive

About the authors:

This article was written by Li-Or with contributions from Spiritual Counsellor, Janice.

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References
1. Marano H. 2003. Our Brain’s Negative Bias. Psychology Today.
2. Hicks & Hicks. 2005. Ask and It Is Given: Learning to Manifest Your Desires. Hay House