Tips for Challenging Negative Thoughts & Self-Lies

Everyone is troubled with negative thoughts or cognitive lies about themselves or situations or abilities at some point in their lives.

When the brain goes into a negative mode, it can eat away your positiveness, productiveness, creativity, and general fulfillment. 

Negative thoughts are harmless unless you believe in them. In fact, believing in negative thoughts permits harmful content more influence and power over how you act, believe, feel, react, and think. 

Whether aware of it or not the average person thinks anywhere from 11,000 to 70,000 thoughts or more per day. Amazingly, 85 percent of people's thoughts are negative. Repetitious negative thinking trains the brain to focus more on the negative rather than positive thoughts. It is human nature to focus on the negative thoughts to fix them or make things right and take positive thoughts for granted. To be more positive and productive negative thinking, ruminations and cognitive lies have to be turned around by taking away their power, and you accomplish this task through confronting or challenging them. 

The essential elements to turning around negative thoughts, ruminations, and cognitive lies in positive and productive thoughts are as follows: 1) identifying and recognizing the negative core beliefs which are generating your thoughts. Two, challenge those negative beliefs by denouncing them. Three, replacing those negative beliefs (aka mind code errors) with definite ideas which are more accurate and correct beliefs. Shifting negative beliefs into positive ones end in a more positive inner voice also. 

If negative thought, ruminating, and cognitive lies go unchecked then the result could be a thought addiction, stronger negative thoughts, and influential cognitive lies that turn into fact and truth while causing false emotions, and inappropriate behaviors or acting out.

Distorted thoughts do not start at the thought level. If cognition is attempted to be corrected at the thought level, then the mark has been missed. Thoughts are a byproduct of what is called negative core beliefs that are generated from one's mind code. Mind code is the accumulation of data accepted from life experiences and situations that turn into self-messages (aka core beliefs). If core beliefs are negative, then one’s inner voice is negative.

Personal Philosophy Restructuring is a coaching method based on the understanding that your mind code influences the creation of core beliefs or self-messages which feed content to your inner voice. Your inner voice then produces and governs the formation of thoughts which determines and manifests in emotions and behaviors. 

Look at it in a different way. Data gathered from life experiences and situations are accepted and stored in the subconscious mind (mind code, core beliefs, core values, and core expectations). Subconscious data become conscious once the data passes into conscious awareness at the inner voice phase and thoughts are actually formed and generated through your personal voice statements. At this point, no one or the outside world can see or know what is occurring in your head. Thoughts influence and govern the production of behaviors, emotions, and reactions which everyone can understand. 

So, when you change your core beliefs to positive and productive which will drastically interrupt the sequence just described resulting in altering your thoughts, and subsequently, you act and react differently as well as feel different.

Therefore, if the data you absorb (aka mind code) from your life experiences are critical, hurtful, judging, lies, harmful, or painful your core beliefs will be self-critical, hurtful, self-judging, lies, cynical, and full of pain and the end result will be that your behaviors tend to be inappropriate and not helpful in situations. Also, your emotions will be false based on distorted data.

What can be done?
Negative thoughts and self-lies are the results of formed negative beliefs. When you don’t have all of the knowledge of what is happening to you or why our thoughts are so distorted, skewed, and negative, you have a tendency to believe them, and they become your self-truths. Then your life becomes a burden and ultimately unfulfilling. 

Empowering yourself with the first step of identifying and recognizing is essential. Here are tips to help you to allow yourself by challenging your core beliefs. To be empowered you have to face your negative thought and cognitive lies directly.

How to Challenge  Your Negative Thoughts and Cognitive Lies

Answering these questions will empower you in discovering the truth of your core beliefs which are generating negative thoughts & cognitive lies.

How do I know if my thoughts are based on accurate and truthful core beliefs?

What evidence or fact do I have to support this belief?

How can I do to test my belief to find out if it’s accurate?

Do I have a trusted friend, loved one, or family member who knows me well enough that I can check out my beliefs with?

Is this belief helpful, positive, or productive to my life?

Are there other ways that I can believe in myself or life situations?

Am I too critical, judging, negative, or punitive toward myself?

From my history, who else or what situations contributed to me believing this way about myself?
Are my actions, feelings, and thinking really under my control?

Am I overthinking my beliefs about myself or over expecting to the point of being disappointed in my performance?

What would I say to another I was emotionally attached to expressing the same beliefs about themselves in this situation?

Do I always view the best in others and the worst in myself?

Am I doubting who I believe I am or holding myself to unreasonable standards?

Are my beliefs (self-messages) I have about me - 1. true or false, 2. real or illusion, 3. productive or unproductive, or 4. healthy or unhealthy?

You can challenge your negative core beliefs and self-lies with the questions above by making a list of all the beliefs you have toward yourself. This can be hard, because some beliefs have become so distorted, so ingrained, and so deeply embedded in your subconscious mind that they have become your self-truths, therefore, you do not recognize them as a lie, or you challenge their validity. 

Take Away

When working on discovering your negative core beliefs and listing them try to have a positive mindset, be mindful, open, and consider all possibilities. Merely doing this exercise can help you to understand why you act, feel think, and react toward yourself and in situations the way you do. 

The belief list can show you which of your beliefs are not true, which were based on made-up judgments from others, which are illusions you have about you from others, which are not productive and the ones that are exceptionally mentally, emotionally and physically unhealthy. So you don’t have to own them anymore. Detach and discard the beliefs that don’t serve you and replace them with strong beliefs that will empower you and enhance your life.

Visit my website and click here to download a free eBook for more information on this topic.
                                     Coach Bill