Rational Positive Thinking

by MindTools

Have you ever felt really stressed about something, only to see the stress vanish when you talk the situation through with a friend?

Quite often, our experience of stress comes from our perception of a situation. Often that perception is right, but sometimes it isn't. Sometimes we are unreasonably harsh with ourselves, or jump to wrong conclusions about people’s motives, and this can send us into a downward spiral of negative thinking.

Thought Awareness, Rational Thinking and Positive Thinking are simple tools that help you to change this negative way of thinking. This page teaches you how to use them.

Introduction:

The most commonly accepted definition of stress is that it occurs when a person believes that "demands exceed the personal and social resources the individual is able to mobilize". In short, it's when we feel out of control.

When people feel stressed, they have made two main judgments: First, they feel threatened by the situation, and second, they believe that they're not able to meet the threat. How stressed someone feels depends on how much the situation can hurt them, and how closely their resources meet the demands of the situation.

Perception is key to this as (technically!) situations are not stressful in their own right. Rather it is our interpretation of the situation that drives the level of stress that we feel.

Quite obviously, we are sometimes right in what we say to ourselves. Some situations may actually be dangerous, may threaten us physically, socially or in our career. Here, stress and emotion are part of the early warning system that alerts us to a threat.

Very often, however, we are overly harsh and unjust to ourselves in a way that we would never be with friends or co-workers. This, along with other negative thinking, can cause intense stress and unhappiness and can severely undermine our self-confidence.

Using the Tool:
Thought Awareness

You are thinking negatively when you fear the future, put yourself down, criticize yourself for errors, doubt your abilities, or expect failure. Negative thinking damages confidence, harms performance and paralyzes mental skills.

Unfortunately, negative thoughts tend to flit into our consciousness, do their damage and flit back out again, with their significance having barely been noticed. Since we barely realise that they were there, we do not challenge them properly, which means that they can be completely incorrect and wrong.

Thought Awareness is the process by which you observe your thoughts and become aware of what is going through your head.

One approach to it is to observe your "stream of consciousness" as you think about the thing you're trying to achieve which is stressful. Do not suppress any thoughts. Instead, just let them run their course while you watch them, and write them down on our free worksheet as they occur. Then let them go.

Another more general approach to Thought Awareness comes with logging stress in your Stress Diary. When you analyze your diary at the end of the period, you should be able to see the most common and the most damaging thoughts. Tackle these as a priority using the techniques below.

Here are some typical negative thoughts you might experience when preparing to give a major presentation:

• Fear about the quality of your performance or of problems that may interfere with it;
  
  
• Worry about how the audience (especially important people in it like your boss) or the press may react to you;
  
  
• Dwelling on the negative consequences of a poor performance; or
  
  
• Self-criticism over a less-than-perfect rehearsal.

Thought awareness is the first step in the process of managing negative thoughts, as you cannot manage thoughts that you are unaware of.

Rational Thinking

The next step in dealing with negative thinking is to challenge the negative thoughts that you identified using the Thought Awareness technique. Look at every thought you wrote down and challenge it rationally. Ask yourself whether the thought is reasonable. What evidence is there for and against the thought? Would your colleagues and mentors agree or disagree with it?

Looking at the examples, the following challenges could be made to the negative thoughts we identified earlier:

• Feelings of inadequacy: Have you trained yourself as well as you reasonably should have? Do you have the experience and resources you need to make the presentation? Have you planned, prepared and rehearsed enough? If you have done all of these, you've done as much as you can to give a good performance.
  
  
• Worries about performance during rehearsal: If some of your practice was less than perfect, then remind yourself that the purpose of the practice is to identify areas for improvement, so that these can be sorted out before the performance.
  
  
• Problems with issues outside your control: Have you identified the risks of these things happening, and have you taken steps to reduce the likelihood of them happening or their impact if they do? What will you do if they occur? And what do you need others to do for you?
  
  
• Worry about other people's reactions: If you have prepared well, and you do the best you can, then you should be satisfied. If you perform as well as you reasonably can, then fair people are likely to respond well. If people are not fair, the best thing to do is ignore their comments and rise above them.