Negativity affects all aspects of life, not just when you trying to quit drinking alcohol. I think negativity is a contributing factor in people drinking in the first place. Negativity distorts the world around you, at least your view of the world. It can become habitual, leading to poor physical and mental health, and can result in wrong thoughts, wrong decisions, and ultimately wrong choices.
It’s virtually impossible to have a positive life, if you’ve got a negative mind.
Negativity is just such an insipid thing that affects everything, your relationships, your job, how you exercise and view yourself, your past, your future and how you view yourself in the present time.
When I’m talking about a negative mind, I’m talking about negative thoughts.
We all see things in a different way, similar maybe, but different. Everything we do is based around our perceptions, what we see, hear, feel, taste and everything that comes in through our senses and to a large extent you can’t control that.
You look out and you see what you see and hear what you hear. What you can control is the thoughts and how you interpret those perceptions, how you interpret life around you and the things that you’re doing, this is where you have all your control.
You can’t control all of them, but you can control your conscious thoughts and I’ve spoken about this before, where your thoughts turn in actions, and actions can turn into behaviours and rituals, which turn into habits and a lot of those habitual behaviours and thoughts happen below the surface, you don’t know about them and are unaware that they are happening.
But if you could bring those unconscious thoughts and behaviours to the front and start thinking about them – then that is the place where you can change them.
The problem with a negative mind or with negative thoughts is that it distorts the world, you see things in your own way and through your own framework and that framework is based on so many different things education, time you were born and everything you’ve learnt from the day you were born and the time before you were born even, but we’ll stick to life on this planet.
Everything that you’ve ever done in your life moulds and shapes you, directs your thoughts and how you see everything else in the world, so a negative frame of mind and negative thoughts are going to alter how you see the world.
Positive minds also alter how you see the world but having a positive mind and positive thoughts directs you into a positive way, so it’s only going to be positive for your life.
I’m not saying all negative thoughts are bad and that you should never have negative thoughts – that’s bullshit and something that none of us are ever going to achieve in our lives because it’s impossible.
We all have negative thoughts at one stage or another, but what we talking about here is the way that you predominately think, the direction that your mind is predominately going, whether it’s positive or negative.
If you’ve got a predominately negative mind, bent in the way that you think, then it’s impossible, I’m not even going to say virtually impossible, it’s impossible to have a positive life.
If you think about it your negativity, your negative thoughts become habitual. They start to reinforce each other and one of the oldest things, an old part of psychology is Pavlov’s dog where they ring the bell and the dog salivates.
They deliberately conditioned the Dog to respond to a certain stimulus and the response is the certain thing – salivation.
He responds to the bell and salivates when the natural response for the dog was to see the food and respond by salivating to the sight or the smell of the food, or the can opening.
We’ve got Cats at home and they start going mental as soon as they hear the sound of the cat food being opened in the kitchen, they start running around and that’s what they do. They’ve been conditioned to do that.
That’s what we’re talking about here, your negative thoughts can reinforce things and you can condition yourself just to think negatively in this way, one negative thought conditions or reinforces another negative thought.
You have a negative thought in the past and you have another one now and that reinforces the negative thought in the past and you know, we’re taking two here but negativity comes in thousands and thousands of negative thoughts that are just reinforced and reinforced and eventually you just see everything as shit.But you can get out of it.
That’s the point. What you have to understand about negative thoughts is that they produce negative actions. They produce negative behaviours, rituals and habits of their own. Once you think negatively about a certain thing then it’s going to push you in a negative direction.
If you think negatively about quitting drinking alcohol then it’s not something that will stay sustainable, because we don’t like negativity in our lives. Even though we might consistently think negatively, we want that positivity. We want to try and draw in as much positivity as we can.
Our whole lives evolve around avoiding pain and pursuing pleasure and negative thinking, is painful.
It’s painful to think negative thoughts about ourselves and our environment and the people around us. We don’t like doing that and negative thinking is damaging to your health. It causes you to make wrong decisions, whether it’s regarding your habits, health or whatever it is, you’re not going to make the right decisions if you’re thinking negative thoughts.
You have to think positively and be positive if you want to have positive outcomes. I’m not saying that you’re never going to have positive outcomes if you think negatively, you will, but they’re going to be more by chance than by design.
You’ve got to understand where the root of all this negatively is. The negative mind is based around the fundamental thing which is the negative thought.
So, that is generally where you need to start, you need to start with the thought, it’s the thought that creates all of the other things and we’ve talked about triggers in other Videos, alcohol triggers that make a certain behaviour and ritual trigger off and it all boils down to the same thing.
It’s the thought in your head and that thought leads to another thought or it leads to an action, the same thing with your negative thoughts. Negativity is generally a sequence of events that happen – something happens on the outside and you think negatively and then you think another negative thought and another and so on and so forth.
There’s not a lot you can do about it, if you’re not aware of the negative thought, so the first thing is to become aware that you are thinking negatively and then do you damnest to replace the negative thoughts with positive ones.
Replace, “I can’t do this” with “I can do this.” Negativity is along those lines. I can’t do this, I can’t say that, I can’t go to this place, I’m stopped from doing this because.
For instance, to give an example, a lot of people say to me that I quit drinking because I moved to a different Country and that it was alright for me because I was able to do that. At the end of the day it wasn’t alright for me that I was able to do that.
I had to make massive sacrifices in my life to be able to do that, and I had to think positively about each step of that way. I left my Son back in Ireland, he is the one person I care about most on the this Planet, end of story.
I Just met my Granddaughter, my Son’s Daughter and she’s gorgeous and I love her to bits but I still love my Son and to take that decision to leave him behind in Ireland when he was just becoming a man – he was in that cusp of going from a child to a Man – was a massive decision that I had to make.
But I had to think about it from a positive perspective, I couldn’t think of it from a negative perspective because I wouldn’t have gone and if I stayed in Ireland I wouldn’t like to think of where I would be now, so I had to make the decision, I had to take the tough choices and I had to make the tough moves to be able to go where I am now.
I am doing everything in my power to try and get my Son over here believe me, short of kidnapping him and tying him up and tying him to a plane – that wouldn’t be that good, so anyway, negativity, no matter what way you look at it in life is always going to hold you back because it’s only you that can change it, nobody else can change this for you.
People can give you directions but only you have got the answers in your own mind to answer these questions.
You’ve got the solutions inside your own self for a lot of these questions, everything that happens to you in life whether it’s if you want to change from being a drinker to a non-drinker, you want to quit smoking or get a better job, relationship or whatever it is in life you want, only you have the power to do that and it starts with positive thinking.
Thoughts talking down to the most essential thought, which is one positive thought after the other and just as negativity become a habit, positively also becomes a habit in the long run.
Stay positive and always remember that it’s always got to be onwards and upwards, never backwards and downwards. Take Care.
“The primary cause of unhappiness is never the situation but your thoughts about it”
Until next time…
Onwards and Upwards!
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