It’s easy to take our thoughts for granted. However, our thoughts can have a huge impact on our moods and mental health. Often, we get hooked into assuming that our negative thoughts are the truth of our experience or the circumstances around us. Getting to know our thoughts and how they impact our mood, body, self image and more can free us from their negative impacts. Over time, our thoughts can cause and contribute to anxiety, depression and other challenges. Difficult emotions often follow negative thinking or vise versa, hard emotions are followed by unhelpful thoughts.

There are some common ways people’s thoughts can take a turn for the negative. If you are someone who has experienced trauma, “black and white/all or nothing” thinking can be common. Another category of negative thinking is focusing on worst case scenario’s or “catastrophizing”. Blame is common too, the “what’s wrong with me or wrong with them” flavor.

Practices that support us to identify our thoughts and separate from them (just a bit) support changes and improved mental health. We don’t want to just replace difficult thoughts with sunshine drenched, fake optimism. Ideally, we are authentic in welcoming the hard thoughts and feelings, accepting them as they are and gently naming them as a behavior, strategy or reaction. This is where mindfulness and self talk come in. If we can be mindful of our thoughts and name them, we are bringing awareness to the worried part of ourselves. If we can lovingly say to ourselves something like “there I go, thinking the worst will happen…this is just what I do… but really I’m okay right now in this moment. I can let this go…” we can tend to our anxious, scared or upset parts. This sets us up to be with ourselves without letting the difficult thinking take over and drive your life.

The below meditation is a practice to let go of thoughts. The focus is to let go of all thoughts and come into the present moment. Last, I leave you with one of my favorite quotes by Rainer Maria Rilke.

When anxious, uneasy and bad thoughts come, I go to the sea, and the sea drowns them out with its great wide sounds, cleanses me with its noise and imposes a rhythm upon everything in me that is bewildered and confused. -Rainer Maria Rilke