Self love: Overcoming Negative Thoughts.

What do you think of when you think of the phrase “Selflove” ?

I can tell you what naturally comes straight to my mind: Working out, eating healthy, taking care of my skin, drinking water, eating veggies on a daily basis, treating myself to a nice hair conditioner. In all reality, that list can go on and on.

Here is the truth: the most important part of self love is none of the things we do externally for ourselves, but what lies within us. Our mind is a vast place that processes up to 70 thousand thoughts a day. That is a lot of thoughts, and here is another fact: About 80% of those thoughts are negative.

Externally, you may be doing all the right things to show yourself the highest quality of love, but if you aren’t monitoring or doing anything about your mindset then, can you really achieve self love?

Where is your Attention?

By asking yourself this questions your mind begins to work in accordance to what you know. If you haven’t already realized, your life is a direct reflection of your thoughts. If you want to learn more about this then check out my blog titled “ The Law of Attraction” to learn more about how you are creating your own reality.

Did you know that just about all of our daily thoughts are the same thoughts we were thinking yesterday. It’s pretty crazy to think that the same thoughts that haunted me yesterday are going to haunt me tomorrow again. Obviously there is a way to break out of this nightmare and that is by creating healthy habits! Our thoughts are just a paradigm and luckily we have a brain that is constantly changing thanks to neuroplasticity!

Overcoming Negative Thoughts

This is really the hard part because this is the part where you have to take action in order to show yourself love from the inside out. We act like it’s us vs our mind and I totally get it. Been there, done that. As of now your current thought life isn’t where you want it to be and you may be blaming the stubborn nature of the brain to repeat the same bad thoughts over and over again. Well here is a little secret: your brain is always working for you. Since you know this, now you can use your brain to your advantage. Stop allowing the negative thoughts about yourself to make a home in your brain & begin redirecting those thoughts.

How I redirect a negative thought

So this is probably my favorite way to completely break the pattern of a negative thought. First off, I don’t fight the thought. If a negative scenario is playing in my head, immediately my brain creates a little movie that plays in my head. Our natural reaction is to either try to stop it bluntly or we let it play out and then let it affect our emotions causing us to act out negatively. The best thing to do is practice awareness. At the moment you become aware of the negative thought acknowledge it as a thought and since it’s probably not the first time you have had that negative thought you know how it plays out: not a happy ending is it? At this point what I do is replay the same scenario in my head but create a happy ending. This usually makes me feel silly but it works. I do the same thing if I wake up in the middle of the night after a nightmare. I’ve been battling negative thoughts my whole life and I can tell you this little trick has really began to change my perspective on a lot of my negative thinking.

What I tell myself

I tell myself what I want to believe about myself. I don’t let my negative thoughts dictate how I see myself. Some days it will be hard to believe anything good you may tell yourself, but it’s all about training your mind. What I did to transform my own thoughts was write down positive affirmations and tell myself in the mirror the same nice things I wrote about myself. I wrote down anything and everything I could think of that I wanted to believe about myself. I told myself daily: I am beautiful, I am worthy, I am kind, I am genuine. I repeated this action for my self daily and I still do on occasion. At first you will feel silly and you may not see or feel the results as fast as you would like but it will work. You must be patient with yourself and persevere through the oncoming negative thoughts. This are some of the qualities of love.

Practice mindfulness

This is a great practice to start incorporating in your life. For the first year after I decided to take action and do the things that I needed to do to improve my quality of thoughts was meditation. I did it daily. There are so many free guided meditations on You Tube that you can listen to. You can take 5 to 30 minutes of your daily life and press play and let your mind relax. What I love about the guided meditations is that they are all made for beginners. Usually the instructor you are listening to will guide you every step of the way. Why would you wait to start doing the things that will help you overcome negative thinking?

The only impossible journey is the one you never begin.– Tony Robbins

Stay Selfloveish!