Negative Thoughts Exercise

Having an inner voice can be very distressing. It can ruin your life and your confidence. Especially if that voice is feeding you negative thoughts all the time. Fortunately there are several ways to end self criticism.

Mindfulness Meditation is one way. Rational Emotive Therapy is another. These both work by encouraging you to challenging the unwanted thoughts. But you can also do a lot on yourself.

How to quiet you inner critic

The first step to solving a problem is to identify exactly what the problem is. Negative thinking always involves some sort of distortion or exaggeration. Tiny slights are magnified. Harmless remarks are twisted into hurtful comments. Everything is analysed for personal malice. Your mind has a wonderful capacity to interpret anything as negative. But these are just habits of thinking. You can change the habits, but you need to identify them first.

By doing this exercise you will be able to identify the particular sources that are generating your Negative Thoughts and inner self criticism. Then you can focus on each one individually.

This method works using metaphor and images, rather than words. For many people this is much more effective then focusing on actual speech.

Stop Negative Thoughts Exercise

Here's a way to find out what your own internal critic is doing to you. The basic idea is note what the Negative Thoughts are, and then challenge their accuracy. Since they are always distortions, they are always not true. You need a way of bringing out the distortion. Once you have got into the good habit of recognizing distortions, you will be able to ignore the negative thoughts. When you are able to recognize a negative thought as an object, it is much easier to treat it as something you don't have to react to, and just let it go on its way.

Get a bit of paper and write down four things you want to be, things that you are trying be, and not getting.

Then write out an affirmation that includes all the things you want to achieve.

For example if you want to be making a living at hypnotherapy; and want to be a great hypnotist; and want to help people; and want to be famous at what you do; then write out an affirmation that goes something like this...

I am [your name].. I am a brilliant talented hypnotist, I am the best there is, I am going to become happy by helping other people.

Identify the source of your negative thoughts

Then write it out again, and again, over and over, about ten times.

And as you do, your mind will become bored by the repetitive task, and you will find a voice comes into your mind that starts sneering at you, or putting you down.... a great hypnotist... yeah... like you could ever become anything.... becoming happy..... yeah... this from someone who can't make it to the end of the week... Help others.... who are you to be helping anybody? ... and so on.

By doing this little exercise you can bring out your own inner critic so that you can examine it, what it is saying, what specific things it is focusing on...

And then you can use self hypnosis to meditate on one of the phrases. For example if you got 'like you could ever become anything' then you can focus on that one phrase, challenge it, ask for a memory, allow your mind to dredge up the original incident that is behind that self belief.

And once you have identified it, you can make a start on changing it.