Change Your Thoughts to Change Your Life

To Change your thoughts is the 'inner work' that lays the foundation for other self-improvement efforts to succeed.

What do I mean? What thoughts? Change them how?

Everything we do. Everything we Feel is the result of our thoughts. What we think about and how we think about them.

Negative thoughts produce negative emotions and negative emotions produce negative or inhibited actions.

Every invention started with a thought. Someone thought of a bread slicing machine then invented it. Edison thought of the light bulb and made over 1000 attempts before he came up with the right one.

That's easy to understand and accept. but thoughts creating emotions? Yes they do.

Most people, and I was one of them, don't connect their emotions to their thoughts. They just know that they feel. I'll show you the connection.

FEAR

Outside of the immediate, instinctive fight or flight emotions which are short lived, emotions ARE created by thoughts.

Consider the child that is afraid of the dark. They are afraid because they THINK there's a monster in the closet or under the bed. At the opposite end is the teenager who THINKS nothing bad will happen to her and feels no fear, no matter how much an adult tells them otherwise.

If we hear of someone having gotten mugged in a certain place. We will feel fear when we approach the area. This is a normal natural and Desirable feeling. It heightens our awareness and makes us take steps to prevent the same happening to us.

The more we THINK about it happening to us, the more fear we feel. If you change your thoughts, you change your fear.

The closer the negative occurrence is to us, either by location or relationship, the more we heed the warning and feel the fear. We Think about it happening to us. A robbery or child abduction in our own neighborhood brings feelings of fear because we think about it happening to us. If we hear about it happening hundreds or thousand miles away we might have many other feelings, like sympathy or anger, but we don't think about it really happening to us, so we don't feel the fear.

A phobia, an exaggerated, irrational fear, is exaggerated, irrational thinking, 'thoughts'.

A fear of heights is good, to a point. You need to be extra careful when you are high off the ground. But when your mind expands the danger all out of proportion, it can paralyze you. You can even recognize that it is out of proportion, irrational. But until you can control and change your thoughts you will be at their mercy. If you think about falling and getting hurt, instead of thinking of how to maintain your balance, you just get more and more frightened until you have a full blown panic attack.

The book, Deep Survival by Laurence Gonzales, is an examination of who survives and who dies when confronted with disasters. One of the key components is feeling the fear but not letting it control you. If your thoughts are stuck on how bad it is and you continue to think about how it will never get better, it will never get better. Those who think beyond the disaster to how to survive it are the ones who do survive.

Change your thoughts, your obsession, about the negative possibilities to thoughts of controlling or overcoming difficulties and you change your outlook on life.

LOVE

Even something as benign as what makes you feel loved is controlled by your thoughts. When you feel loved it's because you think you are loved. That thought is probably triggered by an outside event. Perhaps it is a wink or a smile from a loved one. It might even be something like seeing the bathroom scrubbed or the lawn cut. If you perceive those as indications of love, you will feel loved when you encounter them. If you think of those things as duty, love is not the emotion you feel.

If you think that you show a spouse love by leaving them alone when they are sick, but your spouse thinks that you show love by hovering over them, neither of you will feel loved when you are sick unless you can change your thoughts and come to an agreement about what indicates love. Until then you might feel angry or neglected.

I remember feeling hurt and devalued when I my boyfriend left a birthday card from his ex out on a table where I found it. We had quite a fight about it. He felt I over reacted because the card meant so little to him that he didn't bother to throw it away. (He threw very little away. His place was a mess of stuff that needed to be thrown away.) I told him that I felt that him NOT throwing it away was an insult to me. We had very different interpretations of the same event and thus very different reactions. We each had to change our thoughts about what the circumstances might really have meant.

ANGER

Your childs' tantrum in a public doesn't cause your embarrassment and anger. It's your thoughts about it that causes the feelings of embarrassment or anger. "People are going to think I'm a bad parent." "People are going to think I can't control my child." "We are bothering all these people. They are all looking at us with nasty thoughts." If instead you thought people understand when kids act up, or that he's just tired and you need to get him home, then you won't be nearly as bothered by the tantrum. If you change your thoughts, you change your embarassment and anger.

When someone cuts you off in traffic and you feel angry, it's because of your thoughts. Thoughts like "How dare he do that to me"."I'll show him". "I don't have to take It". "Nobody treats me like that". Flood your mind. If your thoughts were less aggressive, benign or understanding like: "That wasn't too smart." "He's not paying attention, I better give him some room." "Someone is in a hurry." You have calmer feelings. You just needed to change your thoughts.

Emotions in General

At one point in life I thought emotions just were. That they didn't need, indeed have, any reason. Didn't have any basis in rational thinking. They were pure instinct. When I learned differently, big changes started happening.

Stop the Auto pilot

When you learned how to ride a bike or tie your shoe you thought about it very carefully. After a while they became automatic where you didn't have to consciously think about the mechanics of it.

That's what happens to many of our emotions. They become automatic because of what we repeatedly think about with various situations. You need to become aware of your automatic thoughts but don't throw them all away.

When you think about different cultures around the world, you can see how perception can be involved in emotional responses. An extremely polite society could be aggravating to someone from a more straight forward, no nonsense culture, the no nonsense person just wants then to get to the point instead of going through a lot of polite rituals. But that no nonsense person would be insulting to people in the polite society when they just dive right to the point instead of going through the rituals.

Change your thoughts and you change your feelings. Change your feelings and you change your life.

If you can control your thoughts, you control not only your reactions but your actions as well. If you think you will succeed, you will put forth the effort to succeed. If you think you can't succeed, you won't put forth nearly the effort you would otherwise. Why should you? It won't make a difference anyway, right?

You need to change your thoughts to success thoughts that you truly believe in. Just repeating "I think I can. I think I can" doesn't change the belief. You either believe you can, believe you can't or are unsure.

You need to develop your belief in your success. You can do this by first, disputing the negative thoughts and feelings. Then building positive thoughts, feelings and beliefs. This is a step beyond positive thinking, it's positive believing.

This is a recurring theme in most of my pages. It goes along with The Law of Attraction, Intention Manifestation, and Overcoming Shyness among others.

It is the core of Cognitive Behavior Therapy (CBT) developed by Aaron Beck and is part of Explanatory Style developed by Martin Seligman. It even follows parts of most religions.

Change your thoughts. Change the way you perceive the world around you and you change everything.

The article Finding Your Blocking Belief details how to find and change those negative thoughts..

Explanatory style is very similar and deals primarily with having a optimistic or pessimistic view of life but it too deals with changing your thoughts to develop a more positive attitude and a happier life. I'll be writing about that shortly.

I'll talk about how this fits with religions in a series I'm planning on spirituality. In the meantime, Change Your Thoughts and change your life.