Changing Your Thoughts

Positive affirmations are an incredibly helpful tool for reshaping our thoughts. They are a short, positive statement, often an “I” statement, that flips the script on negative thinking. If you’re feeling stressed, try “I am calm and at peace.” The key to using affirmations is repetition; it’s likely you won’t believe an affirmation the first few times you say it, but by repeating it over and over (and writing it down, speaking it aloud, etc.), you begin to train your brain to believe it.

Another helpful tool is the Journalling. Identify the situations that is bringing up negative feelings, identifying exactly what is coming up for us, and then reframing the situation in a positive light.

By stopping these negative thoughts in their tracks, we begin to teach our brains that these negative thoughts are not for us. It sounds subtle, and it is, but it can have a lasting impact with practice and time. Interrupting negative patterns and replacing them with positive thinking slowly solidifies those positive neural pathways until they become the norm. Just as we learned to speak negatively to ourselves, we can then unlearn that behavior through retraining and changing our thoughts.