Have you ever tried to quit a “bad habit” only to find yourself falling off the wagon?
Maybe you’ve struggled to quit smoking or drinking. You can’t imagine giving up television or social media. Perhaps a part of you wants to create “better habits” but each time you decide to try, you end up going back.
One of the little-discussed difficulties of habit change is that everything we do is serve us in some capacity. If our actions didn’t have any redeeming utility, we would have abandoned them.
Until you understand how your actions serve you — what benefit you derive from them — no “habit change” regiment will be effective.
The same is true for our “limiting” or “negative” thoughts and beliefs.[1]
Unless you understand how your thoughts serve you, letting go of them to embrace new thoughts is going to be a challenge.
Before we get to how negative thoughts serve us, we need to address two foundational issues.
Foundation 1: Defining “Negative” Thoughts
To start, I dislike the phrase “negative thoughts” because it automatically ascribes judgment to the thoughts or beliefs.
What do we mean by “negative” in this context?
Generally we mean “thoughts that aren’t serving you.”
This forces a conclusion that is at odds with the practical reality. As human beings, everything we do or think serves us on some level, otherwise we wouldn’t do it.
This type of labelling invites binary thinking, setting up polarities:
- good vs bad
- positive vs negative
- helpful vs unhelpful
Reality is much more nuanced. Situations and thoughts can be both helpful and unhelpful at the same time. They can serve us in some ways and not serve us in other ways. We can see good and bad, positive and negative, in the same situation.
For our purposes here, I will define “negative thoughts” in terms of the undesired impact of those thoughts:
Negative thoughts are thoughts or beliefs that cause us to refrain from taking actions that we want to take, or that we believe we should take to help us reach our goal.
Foundation 2: Negative Thoughts Are Part of Human Nature
It’s human nature to hold on to the “negative” parts of our experience: disappointment, hurt feelings, physical pain, seeing the problems, flaws, or risks in a given situation.
We have evolved this way for a reason.
Acknowledging this can help us approach our negative thoughts with compassion, instead of making them the enemy.
That said, what is the utility of our negative thoughts? Why have we evolved to remember the bad more than the good?
3 Ways Your Negative Thoughts Serve You
(1) Survival Mechanism
Pain is an excellent teacher. By remembering what has gone wrong in the past, we give ourselves a chance to avoid those same pains in the future and take steps to ensure our survival.
Let’s say you bake cookies. As you go to take the pan from the oven, you don’t wear a glove and you burn your hand. The cookies are delicious, but the pain is excruciating.
If you remember only the delicious cookies, you might not remember to wear a glove the next time you take the hot pan from the oven. Remembering the pain gives you crucial information you need to protect yourself in the future.
Of course, if the damage caused to your hand was severe and the pain lingered for months or years, you might protect yourself by never making cookies again.
That would be unfortunate, because homemade cookies are an essential ingredient for a happy life.
The challenge is to find the middle ground where we can see and remember the pain enough to inform our future decisions and actions while also remembering the yummy parts so that we don’t hold ourselves back from taking action.
(2) Mitigation Mechanism
Every action we take in life comes with some risk. Seeing what could go wrong in a plan is a great asset.
Focusing on the problems, risks, or painful parts of our past experience can help us create solutions to avoid those pains in the future.
The challenge is to use the experience of the past without allowing the past experience to condition a belief about the present or the future.
(3) Protective Mechanism
Our negative thoughts don’t only protect us from harm that might lead to death; they also protect us from good things.
This might seem counterintuitive, but stick with me here.
Whether through conditioning or life experience, we might develop a belief that good things don’t last.
If you believe that anything good that happens is a matter of luck and can be taken from you at any time, you’re more likely to look through the lens of what is wrong.
When we look at our lives through the lens of what is wrong and where the problems are, we don’t create space to see the good things in our lives or take it in.
This isn’t just theoretical. It also happens on the level of the physical body. You can see this in action in yoga poses like fetal pose or child’s pose, as well as in habitual postures such as people who hunch over or who are very stiff in their movements.
In protective mode, our bodies contract and become rigid. Muscles and joints tighten. Mobility is restricted. The natural spaces in our bodies close up. The good experiences and feelings literally have nowhere to go.
Although might seem counterintuitive to protect against good things, but if you can’t let the good in, then it cannot be taken from you.
Looking at the flaws and problems thus becomes a way to protect yourself.
The problem with this strategy is that it becomes a self-fulfilling dynamic. The more we focus on the problems, the more problems we see. We never give ourselves a chance to build off the good because we don’t allow it to enter our bodies.
The Good News About Negative Thoughts
Here’s the good news: once you see how the negative thought is serving you, you can begin to work with it and shift it from a place of greater compassion and understanding.
- Thoughts and beliefs are somewhat different, but here I’m going to use them interchangeably. ↩
Love it? Hate it? What do you think? Don't hold back...