Outsmart Negative Thinking

Hi, welcome to the “Outsmart Negative Thinking” course. 

This is a comprehensive online course designed to help you overcome the limiting beliefs and self-critical thoughts that hold you back. Whether you're struggling with self-doubt, battling anxiety, or simply seeking to improve your mental well-being, this course offers practical strategies and powerful insights to help you cultivate a more positive and empowering mindset. 

I will be sharing with you some of the most effective techniques and ideas I use with my therapy clients to help them silence the nagging voice within!

In this course, you'll discover how to overcome negative self-talk, with techniques designed to challenge and reframe your negative thoughts into constructive and supportive ones. This will help you build resilience and confidence and help you live your life with far more satisfaction, free of the old stories.

I have tried to keep the chapters short and free of psycho-babble so that you can refer back to them if you need to. I want to get to the point without making you trawl through pointless waffle.

What You Will Get From This Course

By the end of this course, you will have the tools and confidence to silence your inner critic and replace it with a voice of encouragement and positivity. We are not here to completely silence negative invoices or pretend that everything is perfect. Negative thinking can be very useful, but only in appropriate contexts. If someone is threatening you, it would be appropriate for the mind to prepare for a potentially dangerous situation. It won't be as useful if you are experiencing panic on public transport, or social events.

The point of this course is to help you improve the essential life skill of Flexible Thinking. Most anxious overthinkers only ever see things in black and white, good or bad, but life is far too nuanced and interwoven for that approach ever to work. In fact, you will exhaust and depress yourself the more you try!

When we can meet a negative thought with creative flexibility, it opens up our options and therefore our world. We no longer live in a world of dead ends and insurmountable obstacles - we begin to move through life with a sense that -even if a solution isn't always apparent - there is - generally -  always a way through.

We all experience negative thoughts, but why do we have them and why are they so hard to get rid of?

Where Do Negative Thoughts Come From?

Some thoughts are things we learn from other people, often our caregivers. Some thoughts are based on faulty emotional reasoning, in other words, if I feel bad then something bad must be about to happen.

There is also something called Thought-Action Fusion - this is when we have a thought and believe that it will happen - so if I think about getting run over on the way to work, it must be true! 

Negative thoughts can be very compelling because they often trigger a strong emotional response. This can make it difficult to “out-think” or “logic away”. 

Most of the time we can ignore these thoughts and go about our day, but sometimes we get trapped in a cycle where the negative thoughts don’t seem to want to go away.

This is because our brains a designed to seek out danger and threats in our environment, and so negative thoughts and ideas naturally focus our attention. This is why we can experience a physical reaction to them, such as shallow breathing, tight chest, and sweating - this is the body's reaction to the thoughts and preparing us to escape or to engage in battle!

It is estimated that we have between 60,00 to 80,00 thoughts a day and that 3 out of 4 - three-quarters - of our thoughts are negative. Perhaps a better way to think of them is that they are trying to protect us.

This is sometimes called “Negativity Bias” - the propensity of the mind to notice and consider threats more than we do things that don’t.

Now, the problem starts when we take this form of survival thinking into everyday situations that pose no threat. Negativity and the emotions that accompany it narrow the focus of our mind even further so that we can end up living with a very narrow frame through which to observe the world. When we are so focused on what may go wrong, we eliminate all the evidence around us that we are safe and that life is - generally - safe enough for us to let our guard down and enjoy living.

Once we begin to think within this narrow frame, life feels smaller and more limited. When we feel like this, we try to make sense of it, often curating a negative internal dialogue that in itself is a form of self-hypnosis.

Course Outcomes

What I am hoping for this short course is to teach you easy ways of breaking the look of negative thinking and giving your mind an escape route from the cyclical nature of negative thoughts. Breaking the cycle takes the power away from the thoughts, and allows us to widen our scope. In other words, when we are out of the loop of negative thinking, we begin to see other possibilities and enjoy all the many options that are available to us in most situations we become blinded to, when we have only learned to consider the negative and fatalistic.

You may use all of these processes or just one or two of the ideas in this course. You will find what works for you. There is also a comment section under each video where you can ask me questions, or share your ideas and experiences.

I really hope you get a lot out of this course, and you learn that you are not a prisoner of your thinking!