Often times, negative thoughts can creep into our day-to-day life and cause a little bump in our lives. Negative thoughts can affect our drive and ability to navigate through life’s tasks as fluidly as we’d like.
A negative mindset can also affect sleep, motivation, productivity, emotional strength, and stability.
Negative energy can pull you down, and the unconscious mind works in such powerful ways, to diminish our happiness and make us feel poorly about certain things in our life.
If you’re feeling down or overrun by negative thoughts, read on for some guidance on overcoming this obstacle.
How to Cleanse Your Mind of Negative Thoughts
The most effective way to cleanse your mind of negative energy is to find the source of your unhappiness;
The root of what is directly causing these negative thoughts to surface. Ask yourself, what is causing me to have these negative thoughts?
Is it another person putting these thoughts into your head? Is it how you view yourself personally?
Start by finding the root of the problem and then you can work from there. This can be an eye-opening experience for a lot of people because we are often too afraid to dig any deeper.
We don’t want to reveal why it is we think so negatively all the time, for fear of making it worse. When in reality once you identify the poisonous source you can then work on removing it from your life.
Your happiness lies in the solution to your answer.
Related: How to Get Rid of Negative Thinking and Live a Better Life
1. Find a quiet place to sit and reflect.
Close your eyes and identify the root of your unhappiness. Allow your thoughts and feelings to reflect on how this thought is affecting you. How does it make you feel?
Any time a negative thought floats into your mind try to pay attention to it. What is it about this thought that’s making you feel bad?
Let’s say you neglect to take care of your own needs and wants. When you ignore your own needs it becomes harder to set boundaries with other people. The end result is people taking advantage of your kindness and you’re left feeling empty and depleted.
Your mind can then turn to negative thoughts like “No one cares about me, all I do is care for other people. What is it about me that is so meaningless?”
That’s a negative thought right there, so now it’s time to dissect it a little more. Reflect on why it is you don’t feel good enough. Why is it hard for you to set boundaries with other people? Is it a fear of wanting to be liked, of not being there for someone when they really need you?
This is just an example for someone struggling to set boundaries, but this is the same process you can work through no matter what thoughts you are having. This way you can identify the negativity and really begin to understand why it is you feel this way.
2. At this point, decide what you would like to replace your negative thoughts with.
Perhaps a word or phrase, an action, or a happy memory.
Feel yourself releasing the tension and negative thoughts from your head to your toes. Visualizing the tension exiting your body and replacing that space with positivity is the key to permanently ridding yourself of these negative thoughts.
Soak it in and let it absorb the empty space of negativity that has left your body.
This takes time, perhaps as short as 3 minutes, or as long as 8-10 minutes. However long it takes, ensuring you have completely detached from the negative thoughts is important. Any stranded thoughts can resurface into the negative energy you are working at resolving.
Replacing a negative thought with a positive one is an easy practice that shouldn’t have much weight attached to it. You are just trying to retrain your brain into thinking better about yourself.
There will be days where your negativity takes over your mind and that’s ok, don’t force positive thoughts if they aren’t coming to you.
Related: How to Love Yourself More and Develop a Positive Mindset
3. Go slow and be patient with yourself
Like I said, telling yourself to just be more positive won’t work. Filling your mind with affirmations that you don’t fully believe won’t work.
There is stuff that does work, and it’s the most realistic thing you can do. Affirmations sound great in theory, but they don’t make much sense in the real world. When you are struggling mentally and just want the bad thoughts to disappear.
What does help, is going easy on yourself and taking it slow Just like with anything else, cleansing your negative thoughts takes time.
It involves being patient and kind with yourself, and not giving up when you have setbacks.
How to Cleanse Your Mind of Negative Thoughts – Conclusion
Truthfully, I still have days where my mind is FULL of negative toxic thoughts. Even when I try everything in the book to feel better, I just can’t.
That’s when I just tell myself “Ok, today is not my day. Things will get better because it all balances out. But, today I am not going to force myself to work on this when clearly my brain just wants to be negative.”
When I tell myself this, I then do something that takes very little brainpower.
Like watching Netflix or silly YouTube videos. Do something where you don’t have to think too much and try to take that pressure off.
Print out this post and leave it on your refrigerator. Anytime you feel negative energy creeping your way, commit to this quick yet effective guideline to cleanse your mind!
