Negative thoughts can be really dangerous, but there is good news: You have the power to change your thoughts

About 50,000 thoughts make rounds in our brain every day. Many of them are repetitive, negative, and can disturb the tranquility of the day. Thoughts result in action and if thoughts are negative, actions will also be negative. Thoughts that are destructive and have potential to disrupt tasks, relationships or any plan, are negative in nature. Thoughts that are constructive and have potential to accomplish work, bring happiness, peace, success are positive in nature.
Suppose you are driving a car and you have to go left and you turn the steering wheel towards left but the car moves towards right; it will be, naturally, frustrating. Something that you have power over is behaving against your will. Cars in real life may work against your will only when they are malfunctioning. However, a perfectly fine human being can act against their own will because of something going on in their head. A small event such as a child throwing a ball at you can send your thoughts spinning. You may not vent out your anger at the child instantly but can go ahead and shout at your employee two hours later for a silly mistake. Human beings sometimes work like a malfunctioning car even though they seem to be fine. It is because of the negative thoughts they carry. Therefore, it is important to learn to manage thoughts.
Negative thoughts come uninvited. Something from the past can float up and disturb the present. Sometimes worrying about the future can destroy the present. Sometimes events in the immediate past can disturb future events.
If you are convinced that negative thoughts can be really dangerous, there is good news for you. You have the power to change your thoughts. All you have to do is to ignore some thoughts. At first it will be difficult but with time you will be able to disable them. If left unattended, they snowball and keep gathering all the negative thoughts from your memory. They can also build some on their own and make one big mountain out of them. You have to be proactive in ignoring negative thoughts. Involve yourself with some task, go and play with a kid, sit with a family, talk to someone, watch something that will lift your mood. Don’t sit alone, don’t sit in the dark. Once you realize that your mind is about to create a mental snowball, dismiss the thought. Don’t give it any significance. Say it is okay, all is well. At the end, it is just a thought, be it a new one or a ten-year-old one from your childhood. You can dismiss it, ignore it, not allow it to disturb your present.
Every time you dismiss a negative thought, you move a step ahead to a positive mindset. Once you have a positive mindset nothing can really hurt you. You will be able to make all the negative thoughts powerless. Be they from any event or from any person. This will give you immense, invisible power. Start doing it as soon as today.

The writer is an Advocate at J&K High Court at Srinagar. [email protected]

Sufi Mohammed Hussain