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Dealing with Negative Thoughts Welcome to this audio lesson You view the world through your mental attitude. If that attitude is predominantly negative, it can impact everything, including health, career, family, and more. Furthermore, negative thinking can have a spiraling effect that attracts more negative thinking. This is four-part series discussion videos about how to deal with negative thoughts. Part one talks about understanding negative thoughts. Part two talks about how to become aware of them. Part three is about how to let them go. Part four discusses how to work with, or “replace,” unhelpful thoughts with positive ones. This series is written from the perspective of a yoga instructor in recovery from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and years of anxious, depressive thoughts. Let us dive in so you can find out for yourself about the issue. 1. Understanding negative thoughts The first step in dealing with negative thoughts starts with understanding the meaning of negative thinking. The negative thinking definition from Rethink Mental Illness stipulates that: "Negative thinking refers to a pattern of thinking negatively about yourself and your surroundings. While everyone experiences negative thoughts now and again, negative thinking that seriously affects the way you think about yourself and the world and even interferes with work/study and everyday functioning could be a symptom of a mental illness, including depression, anxiety disorders, personality disorders and schizophrenia." Not everyone who engages in negative thinking has a mental illness, just like not everyone with a mental illness has constant negative thoughts. However, negative thinking can be detrimental to your mental health and quality of life, particularly when you can’t stop. Luckily, there are ways to end negative thoughts, but you must first look at what causes them. According to the Power of Positivity, there are three leading causes of negative thoughts. 1. Fear of the future: People often fear the unknown and are unsure what the future might bring. 2. Anxiety about the present: Anxiety about the present is understandable 3. Shame about the past: Have you ever lain awake worrying about something you did last week, or even last year? Why do I keep having negative thoughts? Believe it or not, negative thoughts are your brain’s way of trying to protect you. Your mind is like an advanced software program, constantly picking up new information and sorting pieces of intel into “good” and “bad” piles, so that it knows whether to repeat, delete, or shelve for later. The problem is, the more your brain does this, the better it gets at it. Negative thinking becomes an efficient super-highway in the prefrontal cortex, bypassing perspective and rational thought. Next step: In the next video, we’ll discuss how to How to Become Aware of Negative Thoughts