Mind Tools - Stress Reduction - Thought Awareness, Rational Thinking and Positive Thinking

Helping you to think your way to an excellent life!

Thought Awareness, Rational Thinking and Positive Thinking

These three related tools are useful in combatting negative thinking. Negative thoughts occur when you put yourself down, criticise yourself for errors, doubt your abilities, expect failure, etc. Negative thinking is the negative side of suggestion - just as making positive statements to yourself helps you to build confidence, improve performance, and improve your mental skills, negative thinking damages these things.

Thought Awareness

Thought awareness is the process by which you observe your thoughts for a time, perhaps during a performance or a training session, and are aware of the thoughts going through your head. It is best not to suppress any thoughts - just let them run their course while you observe them.

Watch for negative thoughts while you observe your 'stream of consciousness'. Normally these will appear and disappear being barely noticed. Normally you may not even notice them. Examples of common negative thoughts are:

worries about performance
a preoccupation with the symptoms of stress
dwelling on consequences of poor performance
self criticism
feelings of inadequacy

Make a note, whether mental or physical, of the thought, and then let the stream of consciousness run on.

Thought awareness is the first step in the process of eliminating negative thoughts - you cannot counter thoughts you do not know you think.

Rational Thinking

Once you are aware of your negative thoughts, write them down and review them rationally. See whether the thoughts have any basis in reality. Often you will find that when you challenge negative thoughts they disappear as you see that they are obviously wrong. Often they persist only because they escape notice.

Positive Thinking and Affirmation

You may find it useful to counter negative thoughts with positive affirmations. You can use affirmations to build confidence, and change negative behaviour patterns into positive ones. You can base affirmations on clear, rational assessments of fact, and use them to undo the damage that negative thinking may have done to your self-confidence.

Examples of affirmations are:

I can do this.
I can achieve my goals.
I am completely myself and people will like me for myself.
I am completely in control of my life.
I learn from my mistakes. They increase the basis of experience on which I can draw.
I am a good valued person in my own right.

Traditionally people have advocated positive thinking almost recklessly, as a solution to everything. It should, however, be used with common sense: no amount of positive thinking will make everyone who applies it an Olympic champion marathon runner (although an Olympic marathon runner is unlikely to have reached this level without being pretty good at positive thinking). Firstly decide rationally what goals you can realistically attain with hard work, and then use positive thinking to reinforce these.

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References

Imagery in Stress Reduction Self-Hypnosis and Auto-Suggestion

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