Dispute your Negative Thoughts

All of us have a tendency to focus on the negative thoughts and ignore the positive ones. Disputing negative thoughts refers to the technique of deliberately focussing on your negative thoughts and assessing their accuracy.

If a thought is not accurate or rational, you replace it with a positive thought. This technique is widely used as a part of Cognitive behavioural therapy.

Whenever you feel too sad or angry, you can try this technique to evaluate yourself and get out of your bad moods.

1. Don’t just accept your thought process. Start questioning the accuracy of the basic facts behind your thinking. Look to see whether you are jumping to unnecessary conclusion without checking all the facts.

2. Try to reason out other explanations. Find other perspectives to the issue at hand. Re-examine your options.

3. When you are upset, you are most likely to see things in a much more extreme light than it actually is. Putting things in perspective is very essential. Questions like “is it really this bad?”, “will this even matter in five years’ time?” and the likes will help you get a clearer picture.

Try to recognize that your current way of thinking is not helping. It will help you look at things from a different perspective.

So, the next time you tend to veer towards the negative, immediately pull the brakes and take an about turn. Remember that it is always better to see the glass as half-full, rather than half-empty!