Human beings in general are very good at getting caught in negative thought processes.
You might try this activity sometime to illustrate the point: Buy a bag of marbles and carry them in your pocket all day. Every time you catch yourself having a negative thought during the day, take a marble out of the bag and put it loose into your pocket. Every time you have a positive thought about yourself or another person during the day, take one of the loose marbles and put it back into the bag.
At the end of the day, if your bag is empty, you’ve ‘lost all your marbles.’ In order to start the next day with all the marbles back in the bag, you must say one positive thing about yourself or someone else for each marble you put back into the bag. Try this sometime and see if you ‘lose your marbles.’
This exercise is designed to make you conscious of your negative and positive thoughts. Do your negative thoughts outweigh your positive thoughts? If so, don’t worry. You’re not alone. Most people have more negative thoughts than positive thoughts. There’s a reason for this: Negative thinking has survival value.
Imagine you’re a primitive man or woman living in a jungle. One day you decide to take a walk through the forest. If you assume that there’s a tiger lurking behind every tree (a negative thought pattern), then you are constantly at alert in case you have to fight or flee. So if you’re always on the alert, you have a better chance of surviving if you have to fight or run away.
The only drawback here is that if you’re constantly stressed out about tigers lurking behind trees, you’re going to be tense and nervous all the time. Tense and nervous people are more likely to be victims of their own emotional aggression. So if the chances of a tiger attack are slim, but you’re stressed out all the time, you’re obviously wasting energy that could be put to better use.
Negative thoughts work in a chain reaction. One negative thought leads to another, and another, until we find ourselves caught in a downward spiral of negativity that can lead to depression, anxiety, poor self-esteem, and emotional aggression. When we find ourselves stewing in our own negative thoughts and feelings, we are said to be ruminating.
This ruminating over negativity is sometimes called snowballing because one negative thought or feeling leads to another, and another, picking up speed and momentum as the ruminating process continues. If you’re standing at the bottom of a hill and a 30-foot snowball is speeding at you at 70 miles per hour, it’s going to be very difficult to stop. It’s much easier to stop such a snowball at the top of the hill when it’s still tiny and moving slowly.
Mindfulness is a way to stop the ruminating, snowballing cycle before it picks up speed and momentum. It’s a way to recognize the beginning of a ruminating cycle so that it may be stopped before it gets too large to handle.
Mindfulness helps you to set aside negative thought patterns by paying attention only to the moment. It’s not about avoiding, resisting or ‘fixing’ unpleasant thoughts, moods and emotions. Instead, it is a way of stepping outside of the thought stream for a moment to realize that the person you are is not defined by your thoughts. It is a way of accepting that you don’t have to ‘buy into’ these negative thought streams about yourself and others. Mindfulness reminds us that thoughts and feelings are not facts.
In a 2011 study Lazar and Holzel demonstrated that practicing mindful relaxation techniques can actually change your brain’s wiring. Just as working out with weights can build muscles, ‘working out’ with mindfulness can increase cortical thickness in certain areas of your brain. This increased thickness translates into better judgment, better impulse control, and better tolerance of unpleasant emotions and thoughts.
Ultimately changing your thoughts is just a matter of practice. The more you’re able to practice the idea that thoughts aren’t facts, the more you are able to realize that your negative thoughts are just things the brain does.
When you gain practice with that, you can change your thoughts. When you can change your thoughts, you can change your world.
Hölzel, Britta, Carmody, James, Vangela, Mark, Congletona, Christina, Yerramsettia, Sita M., Garda, Tim, & Lazar, Sara W. (2011). Mindfulness practice leads to increases in regional brain gray matter density. Psychiatry Research: Neuroimaging 191 (2011) 36-43.