Day 8: Negatives
Week 2 Diagnosis
It may already be clear to everyone reading this, but we still need to state the obvious: negative self-talk is not good for you.
It’s not good for your internal psyche. It tends to focus your mind on all of the negatives around you. When you say negative things to yourself, it makes you feel bad. You look for other things that have gone wrong. You worry about the future. You hang on to and ruminate on everything that isn’t right. Negative self-talk amplifies negative thoughts and can leave you stuck in a negative mindset that feels impossible to escape.
We all have positive and negative thoughts. The problem arises when there’s an imbalance, especially when the negative thoughts predominate. The trouble is, it’s all too easy to hang onto the negative things. Seldom do we take the time to think about the positive things in life. And when we do, we tend to dismiss them quickly. Something goes right and we move on. Something goes wrong and we replay it for days.
When there’s an imbalance in our positive and negative thoughts, our thinking process and decision-making becomes biased. It changes how we see the world around us. It changes how we react. It changes how we feel in any given situation. And crucially, it changes what we’re willing to attempt.
The Negativity Default
Getting into a negative thought habit is all too easy to do. We naturally dwell on negative thoughts longer than our positive thoughts. And our negative thoughts can tap straight into our inbuilt survival mechanisms that can cause us stress, anxiety, fear, panic, and other strong protective emotions and responses.
Some people have amazing lives. They’re surrounded by people who love them. Yet they fail to see what’s in front of them. They instead spend their time dwelling on the bad things in their lives. Even making up things or worst-case scenarios to worry about. It’s as though the mind, left to its own devices, will always find something to be dissatisfied with. Something to pick apart. Something to dread.
When hit by adversity, some people keep going, hanging on to something or anything positive just to see them through. Whilst others just give up before the fight has really started. The difference between those two groups usually isn’t talent, circumstances, or luck. It’s the story they’re telling themselves about what’s happening and what’s possible.
Negative thoughts can be the single biggest obstruction to any success in your life. They can be a tightening bottleneck that will stop you in your tracks. Negative thoughts don’t often carry you forward. It generally takes a positive mindset to do that. And a positive mindset isn’t something you either have or you don’t. It’s something you build, deliberately, through the choices you make about what you focus on and what you do.
How You Feel Affects What You Do
How you feel affects the decisions you make in life. If your thoughts are all negative, if your self-talk is all negative, it’s going to make you feel negative too. Our behaviour follows our thoughts and our emotions. Get stuck in negativity and you’re less likely to make positive decisions and do anything positive about your situation. You start to see obstacles everywhere. Opportunities shrink. The world begins to look like a place that’s working against you rather than one you can influence.
It takes conscious effort and determination to feel positive. To think in a more positive way. To do something positive. Taking action and doing something constructive brings with it positive emotion and positive feelings. And you’ve really got nothing to lose because the least it will do is take your mind off whatever it is you’re dwelling on.
The question to ask yourself is: what positive things can you do to improve your situation? What is it that’s going to make your life, your week, your day more positive? Not what would fix everything. Just what would make today fractionally better than yesterday. That’s a question your brain can actually work with.
The Numbers Behind Negativity
Research on negativity bias shows that your brain processes negative information faster and more thoroughly than positive information. Negative events reliably carry more psychological weight than equivalent positive ones, across almost every domain researchers have looked at. That’s how skewed your brain is towards the negative. It’s not a character flaw. It’s an evolutionary hangover from a time when negative information, the predator, the poisonous plant, the hostile stranger, was more immediately life-threatening than positive information. Your brain learned to prioritise it. The problem is that same wiring now prioritises a critical comment from a colleague over ten pieces of genuine praise, or one bad day over a week of good ones.
Research on rumination found that people with depression spend significantly more time thinking about negative events than people without depression. That’s not a small difference. That’s a massive cognitive bias that’s actively making things worse. The more you ruminate, the more entrenched the negativity becomes. And the more entrenched it becomes, the harder it is to see a way out.
And here’s the important part: research on neuroplasticity shows that the more you engage in negative thinking, the stronger those neural pathways become. You’re literally training your brain to be better at being negative. Every time you ruminate, every time you focus on what’s wrong, you’re reinforcing those patterns and making them easier to slip into next time. You’re not just experiencing negativity. You’re practising it.
But neuroplasticity works both ways. You can retrain your brain. You can build new neural pathways that focus on the positive. But it takes deliberate effort. It takes practice. And it takes time. There are no shortcuts. But the mechanism is real and it works.
Acting Your Way Out
You can’t just think your way out of negativity. You have to act your way out. Because action creates emotion, not the other way around. You don’t wait to feel motivated before you do something positive. You do something positive, and the motivation follows. This is one of the most important and most counterintuitive things in this entire course. Most people wait to feel better before they act. But the feeling better comes from the acting, not before it.
This is backed by decades of research on behavioural activation, one of the most effective treatments for depression. The principle is simple: you do first, feel later. You take action even when you don’t feel like it. And the feelings change as a result of the action. Not immediately. Not dramatically. But they change. And each small change makes the next action slightly easier.
So when thinking about what positive things you can do, this isn’t motivational fluff. Your brain gives negative events more weight than positive ones, so the positive ones have to be deliberate — they won’t register on their own. Generate them deliberately. Consistently. Every day. Not because you feel like it. But because that’s what it takes to balance the scales.
And this isn’t about grand gestures. It’s about small, concrete actions. Things you can do today. Go for a ten-minute walk. Send a message to a friend. Do one thing on your to-do list. Cook a proper meal. Tidy one room. These aren’t solutions to all your problems. But they’re positive actions that will generate positive feelings, and those positive feelings will make the next action slightly more likely. That’s how you build momentum from a standing start.
The problem is, when you’re stuck in negative thinking, you won’t want to do any of these things. Your brain will tell you they won’t help. They won’t make a difference. They’re not worth the effort. That’s the negativity talking. It’s protecting itself. It’s keeping you in a state that feels familiar even though it’s causing you harm.
Don’t listen to it. Do the positive thing anyway. Not because you feel like it. Not because you think it will solve everything. But because it’s one data point in the other direction. One positive experience to start counterbalancing all those negative ones. And then do another one tomorrow. And another the day after. Build up those positive experiences. Retrain your brain. Create new neural pathways that don’t automatically default to the negative.
It’s not quick. It’s not easy. But it works. Because you’re not trying to think yourself into feeling better. You’re acting yourself into feeling better. And that’s the only way it actually happens.
What Gets in the Way
There’s one more thing worth naming here, because it comes up consistently. People who are stuck in negative thinking often have a strong resistance to anything that looks like positivity. It feels naive. It feels like denial. It feels like you’re being asked to pretend that things are fine when they clearly aren’t.
That’s not what this is asking. Nobody is suggesting you paper over real problems with forced cheerfulness. The point isn’t to pretend the negative things don’t exist. It’s to stop giving them exclusive access to your attention. The negative things are real. So are the positive ones. Your brain just needs some help noticing both equally, because left to its own devices it will always give the negative things more airtime than they deserve.
Recognising that tendency is the first step. Acting against it, even in small ways, is the second. And doing that consistently, day after day, is how you gradually shift the balance. Not to naive optimism. But to something more accurate. A clearer view of what’s actually going on, rather than a distorted one filtered entirely through the lens of what’s wrong.
If negative thinking has tipped into something more persistent — if you’re experiencing clinical depression, serious anxiety, or a mental health crisis — please speak to a doctor. This course can complement professional support but it doesn’t replace it.
References
- Beck, A.T. (1979). Cognitive Therapy of Depression. Guilford Press.
- Burns, D.D. (1980). Feeling Good: The New Mood Therapy. William Morrow.
- Baumeister, R.F., Bratslavsky, E., Finkenauer, C., & Vohs, K.D. (2001). Bad is stronger than good. Review of General Psychology, 5(4), 323-370.
- Kabat-Zinn, J. (1994). Wherever You Go, There You Are. Hyperion.
- LeDoux, J. (1996). The Emotional Brain. Simon & Schuster.
- Neff, K. (2011). Self-Compassion: The Proven Power of Being Kind to Yourself. William Morrow.
- Nolen-Hoeksema, S. (1991). Responses to depression and their effects on the duration of depressive episodes. Journal of Abnormal Psychology, 100(4), 569-582.
- Sapolsky, R.M. (2004). Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers. Henry Holt.
- Seligman, M.E.P. (1991). Learned Optimism: How to Change Your Mind and Your Life. Knopf.