How to Identify Your Negative Thought Patterns

When you identify your negative thought patterns, you can correct them and step into your full power.

Here’s how you do it:

Set a timer for 10 minutes, and just write.

Don’t think too hard about it. Don’t judge your writing. Literally just write about whatever is on your mind. You’ll more than likely start letting your automatic negative thoughts out. And that’s exactly what you want to do right now.

Eventually, we’ll get into challenging those thoughts.

But don’t worry about that for now. The most important thing you can do right now is to learn how to spot your own negative thinking patterns. And the more you write, the more you’ll see.

Here are a few patterns you should look out for:

All-or-nothing-thinking

All-or-nothing-thinking is basically seeing things as good or bad. Black or white. Yes or no.

An example could be that you’re either good or bad at a certain skill.

Versus realizing you’re probably good in some ways, and bad in others. Thinking in all-or-nothing terms can make you limit your own potential by thinking you’re not qualified for something, when you are.

But because you think you aren’t, you don’t try.

Catastrophizing

Catastrophizing is when you always expect the worst case scenario.

This might mean you always think interactions with certain people will be bad. Or you might think you’ll be destined to work a 9-5 job until you’re 65 years old if you don’t go viral on social media in the next month. This type of thinking limits you in many ways.

It makes you see the bad in everything, and a lot of times it can cause you to block your own blessings.

Overgeneralization

Overgeneralization is when you jump to extreme conclusions too fast.

For example, you might think that if you don’t have a lot of followers on social media, then you can’t get any clients for your business, or sell any products. You’re overgeneralizing by assuming people only buy from people with a lot of followers. And since you think that way, you refuse to create any products or make any offers.

Meanwhile, someone might have bought something from you if you just took the chance.

Note

These are not all of the types of negative thinking patterns you can have.

But they are very common. The most important thing is that you examine your own thoughts to get a feel for the types of negative thinking patterns you have. Knowing the name of the pattern is not as important as recognizing the pattern itself. So, make this exercise a regular habit. The more you it, the more you’ll be able to see how your negative thinking patterns affect various areas of your life.

If you want a more systemized way of identifying negative thought patterns, and correcting them to create the results you want in life, download this journaling template.

If you want a coach to help you work through this process, fill out this form.

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