How to Override Your Instinctual Negative First Thought in Any Situation

QUESTION:

My goal and intention is to retrain my brain so that I can immediately turn away from negative thoughts and feel my okayness. I want to be able to rely on my ability to do this so that I can lose the fear of the return of bad feelings.

Last night I turned to your website for some uplifting reading and I clicked on the thought of the week and it was about how you had trouble sleeping and your mind was racing and how you eventually got to sleep. I allowed myself to feel anxious about the fact that you can still suffer anxiety and you are way more practiced then I am. So in the end, I just ended up picking up more worry where I was looking for ease. That is the way my mind currently operates. I am working on it.

ANSWER:

It is human nature that our first instinct is to jump to the negative because our brain is a defense mechanism. Our brain is responsible for our DEFENSE: As a defense mechanism, it is always looking for the negative slant in everything. Just like the Secret Service agents who guard the president. These agents are not trained to look for the positive. They are dedicated to look for the slightest thing which might turn into a negative and endanger their “charge.”

Our brain is the same way but, of course, in this case WE are the “charge,” not the president.  And we should always respect this facet of our psyche because it is designed to alert us to some unusual real danger that might one day occur to us.

However, in general, since most of us do not live a life of everyday danger and intrigue, we have to override this tendency toward the negative by insisting that WE can look for the more productive possibility in what lies before us.

When we earnestly decide to do this, since the brain works by learned association, we will find that we can attach to that first instinctual thought caused from the fact that the brain seeks the negative, the concomitant thought that HOWEVER, WE can look for the possible, or positive idea so that it will immediately pop up and occur to us at the first stab of needless instinctual doubt or fear.

Learned association, remember, is just like thinking salt and then the idea of pepper naturally occurs to us because we MADE that association between the two. Most associations are caused accidentally but we can also make on-purpose learned associations. Like associating the thought “I have just turned off the ignition key” to the thought, “now put the keys in a safe place before you open the door.”

OR. Okay, I can see that negative in this situation, now what is a more useful, productive thought I can think that can override the useless, instinctual negative and get me going in a more positive direction. The more you practice, the quicker you will remember to grab for some more positive application.

A.B. Curtiss