Breathing, Meditation, Positive Psychology, Thought Patterns

Negative Imagery

Our mind is a very powerful tool. It can be our best friend or enemy. Throughout the day we may be talking to ourselves about what we need to accomplish in the future. The question that we must ask ourselves is, “am I talking to myself in a negative or proactive way”.

Planning for the future and setting intentions for our well-being is healthy. However, once we start making up unfounded truths or projections about what we think will or should happen without any justification or facts, we start to descend into the rabbit hole. I refer to this thinking as” Negative Imagery”.

What is Negative Imagery?

It is defined as creating mental images that incorporate sensations of performance errors, unwanted outcomes, demotivation or self-degradation.

Therefore, an example of a false negative imagery story would be my son saying, “Dad, I have a lacrosse game against the #1 seed in the state and we’re going to get crushed! As you can see from this example, my son has created a false story before the game even began. How does he know this to be true? Did he stop to consider that maybe a few of their star players might get sick and can’t play? Or, did he consider that he may stop every shot in goal and have the best game of his life? What caused him to create this false story?

Is society and environmental factors to blame for this? So often our news agencies and social media platforms mostly broadcast negative stories? Could it be possible that sub-consciously that we become brainwashed into thinking that we should think the worst-case scenario. Could it be biologically instinctual that our survival mechanism kicks in to protect us from harm?

Personally, I think it’s a combination of both factors.

The question we must ask ourselves is what do we do to rewire our connections in our brains to unassociated those negative thought patterns that are linked to negative emotions?

Maybe we start by asking ourselves, “if I was to create my perfect world, what would I envision it to be”? Once we have created this vision for ourselves, we can start creating new positive patterns of thinking. Instead of saying, “we are going to get crushed” we change that to, “this is going to be an awesome game and I’m so glad and grateful that we made it to the championship game”. Also, we can evaluate our relationships and what we watch on TV or read because in our world there is no place for negativity!

The decision to change a belief is ultimately up to you!