FROM STRESS AND WORRIES TO NEGATIVITY, HEALTH LEARNS JUST HOW POWERFUL OUR THOUGHTS REALLY ARE AND THAT HOW WE THINK CAN ACTUALLY AFFECT OUR HEALTH.
BE CAREFUL WHAT YOU THINK
Most of us have heard the saying “EVERY THOUGHT IS A PRAYER” and according to Dr. Saliha Afridi, Clinical Psychologist and Managing Director of the LightHouse Arabia: Community Psychology and Psychiatry Clinic, this essentially means if you think it, then you are attracting it.
7 Highly thinking patterns you need to ditch
1. Unprocessed emotional and psychological pain: These emotions have associated negative thought patterns. If unprocessed and invalidated, they exist inside of you at an unconscious level and dictate your negative thoughts, dysfunctional behaviors, and toxic relational patterns.
To do: Release unprocessed emotional and psychological narratives associated with these emotions. This requires self-analysis, finding closure to the things you are holding on to, making an active choice of releasing them and validating your experience.
2. Disempowering Belief patterns: A person can have everything but if they have self-limiting thoughts or thoughts that give their power to others then they will always remain disempowered which can result in disease.
To do: First you must become aware of your disempowering belief patterns. Raise your awareness by paying attention and observing your thoughts when you experience strong feelings. Just bringing things to awareness can sometimes make us realize how dated some of our thought patterns are.
3. Catastrophizing: Inability to distinguish serious concerns from the lesser issues of life. This thought pattern can always keep the body in fight or flight mode, resulting in eventual adrenal fatigue and possible more serious diseases like metabolic syndrome, and heart disease.
To do: Ask yourself will this matter a year from now? If it won’t matter now, then don’t stress about it now.
4. Denial: It takes a lot of mental, spiritual, and emotional energy to remain in denial against something your intuition is telling you is not good for you. The more energy you leak and give to denial the more likely you are to get sick.
To do: You may be pretending to be in denial, but you are actually afraid. Underneath denial is a whole lot of fear of change and a lack of courage to make the necessary changes.
5. Negative thought patterns: Simply put, this is being a pessimistic. Each thought carries energy, and if it’s negative thoughts then it will be negative energy.
To do: Try wearing ‘rose colored glasses’ for a day and focus only on things that have been good and pleasant in the day. Even the worst of days has something that you can be grateful for.
6. Reacting versus Responding: This thinking pattern affects all areas of life. We can chip away at our energy and drip cortisol into our systems even with the most mundane of tasks such as driving a car, or going to the grocery store, if we react to everything that we encounter.
To do: Be mindful. Stop before you react. Then respond to the event from a thoughtful and calm place.
7. Operating from a deficiency model versus an abundance model: Individuals who operate from a place of ‘there isn’t enough” are always triggering their survival mechanisms, which are a very narrow and uncreative way of living and being. Those who operate from an abundance model have a positive outlook, they believe in the generosity of the universe, they have more open energy and believe “there is enough for everyone.”
To do: whenever you find yourself panicking, you can say to yourself “there is enough” and “I will be fine” and “I believe in abundance”—You may also try giving a smile, charity, your time, your love to someone who cannot give it back to you.
