Think about all the occasions when you have felt down, depressed, despondent or worried and stressed, on closer look you will realise that when you feel this way, you think in a very negative and belittling way about yourself and your own life.
Ever thought, "What's the point anymore", or "How can I go on?", these feelings of inferiority and the negative way of thinking, cognitive therapists regard as the primal reason why people become depressed.
The solution to this, when dealing with your problems, is to think about them in a more practical and positive way, this will increase your self esteem and well being and lead to better productivity. Becoming disheartened and overwhelmed will worsen your situation as it will bring on feelings of hopelessness and despair.
To stop getting into bad moods or at least dwelling on them, you have to understand that these negative emotions are the effects brought about from thinking negatively, and more often than not these thoughts are distorted and inaccurate.
If you think due to splitting up with your partner or getting a divorce it makes you feel like you'll never get close to someone again, then that is simply an unrealistic way of thinking. Time will go by and you will eventually meet someone else more akin to yourself and will wonder why you had ever thought that way. Simply put, during that particular time, your negative thoughts seemed realistic and true, but that wasn't the case.
Remove the habit of Negative Thinking
Or others yet take one aspect of something going wrong, and believe that it will be an on-going pattern, tending to overgeneralize their situation or even over exaggerate the extent of the problem and dwelling on it only, without seeing that perhaps other things in their life are going right and that maybe the problem isn't as big as first thought.
Jumping to conclusions is another mistake that people often do. Presuming the worst, reading people's minds without knowing for certain what they actually are thinking or knowing the facts, or predicting that things will go wrong before anything actually does.
Spotting these patterns in your everyday life is important, because dwelling on distorted thoughts, and not realistic ones, will eventually steer you to more negative feelings and emotions, such as depression, as well as anxiety, and will eventually become a way of life.
How long have you been hanging on to negative feelings? Do you think there is any point in feeling so bad for so long? It's only human nature to feel upset when things don't go according to plan, when you've failed at something, or been put down or rejected, or due to losing a loved one. It is important that one does grieve and mourn over this loss and let your feelings out instead of bottling it up inside you, because during these painful times in our lives, there is actually an opportunity to grow and learn from these experiences. But one must remember that if you beat yourself up about it, berate yourself as worthless and of no value and insignificant - you will be ushering yourself into thinking unrealistically and thinking distortedly, and will break down your self esteem and simply waste your time and energy.
Your self esteem is based on accepting yourself as you really are, right now, including all your qualities as well as imperfections.Realising that only you and how you think will make up how you feel, no one else has that power unless you let them.
And only in realising this can you really move on and accept responsiblity for your choices and actions, and getting on with your life productively and ultimately to the fullest.
