{"id":381,"date":"2020-02-27T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2020-02-27T00:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/stage.jlxstudios.com\/fh\/ll-blog\/my-simple-2-step-process-for-eliminating-negative-thoughts\/"},"modified":"2020-02-27T00:00:00","modified_gmt":"2020-02-27T00:00:00","slug":"my-simple-2-step-process-for-eliminating-negative-thoughts","status":"publish","type":"ll-blog","link":"https:\/\/stage.jlxstudios.com\/fh\/ll-blog\/my-simple-2-step-process-for-eliminating-negative-thoughts\/","title":{"rendered":"My Simple 2 Step Process For Eliminating Negative Thoughts"},"content":{"rendered":"<p class=\"\" style=\"white-space:pre-wrap;\">Hello Doll,<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align:center;white-space:pre-wrap;\" class=\"\"><em>&#8220;Your beliefs become your thoughts,<br \/>Your thoughts become your words,<br \/>Your words become your actions,<br \/>Your actions become your habits,<br \/>Your habits become your values,<br \/>Your values become your destiny.&#8221;<\/em><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align:center;white-space:pre-wrap;\" class=\"\">&#8211; Gandhi<\/p>\n<p class=\"\" style=\"white-space:pre-wrap;\">What do you do when negative thoughts are running on a loop through your head? I&#8217;m not talking about the stray thoughts that don&#8217;t stick, but the ones that make you feel really bad?&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>If you&#8217;re like most people, you probably try to ignore them, or to override them by &#8220;thinking positively.&#8221; Which might seem like the right thing to do, because there&#8217;s truly nothing more unpleasant than when your own mind feels like it&#8217;s attacking you.<\/p>\n<p>But the giant, fatal flaw with either of those strategies is &#8212; they simply do not work. Your subconscious thrives in darkness, so ignoring them doesn&#8217;t make them go away, it only makes them more deeply entrenched.&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;Thinking positively&#8221; doesn&#8217;t work, because by denying the negative emotions you&#8217;re feeling, you don&#8217;t actually change the feeling, you&#8217;re just filing it away deeper, where it&#8217;ll continue to plague you.&nbsp;&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p><strong>If your negative beliefs have friends, denial and avoidance are its very best friends.&nbsp;<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>I don&#8217;t claim to have the only solution to weaken and eventually silence particular hurtful thoughts. But luckily, years ago I stumbled upon a strategy that&#8217;s been quite literally life changing for me.&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>It&#8217;s a really simple two step process, the goal of which is to weaken the emotional force of particular sh*tty thoughts over time. Without the emotional impact, even your most negative thoughts lose steam and fade away.&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p><strong>Step 1: Acknowledge the thought without judging yourself for having it.&nbsp;<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>I do this by saying to myself &#8220;<em>Oh, there&#8217;s that old thought again<\/em>&#8221; or &#8220;<em>Well, this is a new one! That&#8217;s interesting.<\/em>&#8221;&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>You&#8217;ll find by doing this, a little bit of the emotional sting of the thought is instantly diminished, because you&#8217;re creating a small buffer between the thought and your identity. Essentially, it instantly reminds you that&nbsp;<strong>you are not your thoughts.<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>That buffer may be just a teeny one, but that teeny bit matters! That teeny bit is the first step in eliminating that thought over time.&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p><strong>Step 2: Consider the possibility the thought is&nbsp;<\/strong><span style=\"text-decoration:underline\"><strong>wrong<\/strong><\/span><strong>&nbsp;&#8212; even if (and especially if) it feels 100% true.&nbsp;<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>I say to myself some version of &#8220;<em>This feels really true, and it hurts to have this thought because it feels so true. BUT I&#8217;m open to the possibility that it&#8217;s not<\/em>&#8221; or &#8220;<em>Even though I have &#8216;evidence&#8217; that this thought is true, maybe &#8212; just maybe it it&#8217;s not true, or it won&#8217;t always be true<\/em>.&#8221;&nbsp;&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>By doing this you&#8217;re telling yourself &#8212;&nbsp;<strong><em>your feelings are valid, but your feelings aren&#8217;t facts.&nbsp;<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n<p>That&#8217;s it. Don&#8217;t try to override it, or tell yourself a positive mantra that doesn&#8217;t reflect your true feeling or belief. It might sound overly simplistic, but I promise that if you continue to apply these two steps to your peskiest, most painful negative thoughts, they&nbsp;<em>will<\/em>&nbsp;start to weaken.&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>They won&#8217;t go away overnight, but I have personally had the experience where one day, after repeatedly questioning a thought that previously plagued me, one day I find myself surprised to find I now&nbsp;<em>know<\/em>&nbsp;it&#8217;s not true. And once I get to that point, the thought just evaporates. Because it no longer has the emotion to feed it.&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p><strong>My challenge for you is to start paying attention to your negative thoughts &#8212; especially the ones that pertain to your belief about your worthiness or what&#8217;s possible for you. Stick with these two steps, and see how much you can change your life.&nbsp;<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>xo<\/p>\n<p>F<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Hello Doll, &#8220;Your beliefs become your thoughts,Your thoughts become your words,Your words become your actions,Your actions become your habits,Your habits become your values,Your values become your destiny.&#8221; &#8211; Gandhi What do you do when negative thoughts are running on a loop through your head? I&#8217;m not talking about the stray thoughts that don&#8217;t stick, but [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":382,"template":"","class_list":["post-381","ll-blog","type-ll-blog","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stage.jlxstudios.com\/fh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/post-type\/ll-blog\/381","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stage.jlxstudios.com\/fh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/post-type\/ll-blog"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stage.jlxstudios.com\/fh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/ll-blog"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stage.jlxstudios.com\/fh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stage.jlxstudios.com\/fh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/382"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stage.jlxstudios.com\/fh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=381"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}