Help! I think negativity is starting to control me! How can I find happiness and fulfillment in my everyday life?

Worries, sadness, fear, rejection, frustration are all part of life. But what do we do if we find ourselves stuck in these emotions at length? Are there ways we can rewire and retrain our brain to see life with more healthy positivity and enjoy more good days? 

The term positivity has received lots of bad rap lately with the main concern that it is promoting a toxic kind of positive thinking. 

But what we mean here is not eliminating negative thoughts and feelings in our daily life, but our challenge is how to manage them in a way that we still get to adapt to the situation and enjoy living life.

How our negative biases impact our world

The way we see our world impacts our words, actions, decisions, and our focus. 

• We may assume the worst in situations and people we don’t really know well. How we interact with them is influenced by our negative impressions. 
• We may focus only on negative events and disregard positive ones, making us appreciate good things less. 
• We may make decisions using only the things we learn from negative information, making our decisions unsound, and even possibly harmful to us and others we care about. 

How to know if we have a tendency to be more negative

• Do memories of harsh words or negative feedback come back to you more often than compliments do? 
• Do you respond emotionally and even physically to unpleasant stimuli? 
• Do you think about unpleasant events more than happy ones? 
• Do you focus much quickly on the cons rather than the pros? 

Our tendency to be negative often cancels the benefits of many good things that happened in a day in favor of 1 or 2 bad things, and we consider our day ruined. Although our brain has a natural tendency to pick up this negative information to help us adapt to stress, it is also worthwhile to develop a positive mindset and experience good feelings too! 

I want to manage my negativity bias! Where do we start? 

• Know what is serving you and what isn’t. 

Emotions are not bad things. They are essential parts of our system, helping to point us to where we would like to be in important areas such as relationships, finances, and career. But some thoughts, especially those that become unhelpful. They may drag us to more stress, trample on our self-confidence, and deflate our dreams. 

Identify these thoughts and find out where they are coming from.

•  What made me think this way? 
• What do I do when I adopt this thinking? 
• Is my behavior helpful to my life? 
• What are the consequences of my behavior?
• Is there a way for these thoughts to be heard, but changed into statements that give me more courage? 

• Celebrate the positive moments too! 

Stop for a while and think of a positive moment in your day or week. Focus on that and savor it. If it is something significant to you, why don’t you celebrate it? Remembering positive moments is like depositing your cash in the bank. The more you remember them and store them in your memory, the more you can “withdraw” and remind you that good things happen to you too.  

Believe it or not, even the ability to enjoy and savor precious moments takes practice. The next time you have one, engage in the pleasure of it! Do you want to record it? Write it in your journal, or take a picture of the moment and print it. Have yourself a glass of your favorite drink! 

• Practice your mindfulness in your decision-making. 

Our over-analyzing of negative information may make it hard for us to make decisions because we are averse to risks. Remember that decisions have both benefits and risks, so use your developing self-awareness to weigh both sides when making decisions. This allows you to break the grip of fear and consider the gains as well. 

One technique that can help you weigh the pros and cons is clearly writing each down on paper. On one side of the page, you jot down the risks, while you enumerate the benefits on the other. Take your time and decide whether the benefits outweigh the disadvantages. 

When you have a balanced way of managing your emotions, you get the chance to enhance your experience of everyday life! You also get to enjoy getting to know others, and interact with them in pleasant ways. 

Find the most rewarding career opportunities in the medical and mental health field today and start the career you have always wanted!