“I can’t do it.”
“I wont be good enough.”
“There’s no point, I’ll probably mess it up anyway.”
Do any of these phrases sound all too familiar?
The truth is, no matter how well your life may be going, negative thinking can stop you in your tracks. It’s easy to get stuck in a downward spiral, talking yourself out of accomplishing goals, talking to the opposite sex, or even getting out of bed.
At times we can truly be our own worst enemies.
David was like that. ‘It’s like someone up there has got it in for me’ he said.
Even when everything was going right, David would squash any positive feelings with ‘It’s all going too well, you never know what’s around the corner.’
It was like he was trying to protect himself in some way by having negative expectations, deliberately setting the bar low.
As a consequence, David walked around with a personal cloud over his head and was constantly in a fight with depression. Many people gave him a wide berth. He was simply too negative to be around.
Fortunately, the 5 step system that worked for David can work for you, too.
If you’ve been down for a long time, you might think that’s just the way you are. Perhaps negativity or depression ‘runs in the family’. Perhaps you think it’s in your DNA?
However, you’ll be pleased to hear that, despite ten years of research and billions of pounds and dollars of investment they still have found no biomarkers for depressive thinking.
This is good news for anyone who wants to change his or her thinking style. If negativity is not in your genes, then there must be a way of resolving it, no matter how long you’ve had it:
‘The best time to plant a tree is twenty years ago. The second best time is today.’
-Chinese proverb
The way you think is critically linked to the way you feel. It’s not uncommon for people to have ‘thinking errors’ as the originator of Cognitive Behavioural Therapy observed;
‘If aliens landed right now and realised how human beings think, they’d fall off their seats laughing.’
-Aaron Beck
If you get a headache, do you think it’s a brain tumour? If you take a plane to go on holiday, do you imagine it’s going to crash and everyone will be killed?
Do you run scary films in your head?
If you are the kind of person who goes from A-Z missing out all the letters in between, then you have a classical thinking error.
You are a ‘catastrophiser’ and misusing your powerful human imagination. That alone can result in low mood and eventual depression.
If you’ve been fighting negative thinking for too long, it’s time to make some changes. The definition of madness after all is to keep doing what you’ve away done and expect something different to happen!
Overcoming Negativity with the S.T.O.P! System
Throughout life, we learn ways of acting and thinking in response to our environment. We construct ‘internal maps’ to navigate the world we find ourselves in. More often than not, these patterns are crucial to our everyday functioning, however negative and damaging responses can be learned just as easily.
S.T.O.P! is a simple and effective way to break negative or unhelpful patterns of response which have become embedded in your brain’s neural network. Use this tool to break the downward spiral of negativity and start a positive new life today.
