Research estimates that about 90% of people experience stress, depression, worries, anxiety, fear, and anger, and they are unable to control such toxic emotions. Serious anxiety can restrict you from enjoying life’s opportunities.

Just like many other people, you may not be aware of how to control and regulate your feelings and thoughts. A significant relationship between your thoughts and feelings is that your thoughts stimulate an electrochemical response that creates emotions. And emotion produces attitude, and attitude creates behavior.

Negative thought creates toxic emotions, and consequently produce toxic attitudes that lead to toxic behaviors. Your emotions are the byproduct of your thought life. If you can learn how to manage your thought, you will manage your emotions and feelings and overcome negative thoughts.

The Five Main Negative Thoughts

A Thought (beliefs, perceptions, and memories) is what makes you conscious of things. Your thoughts determine the orientation of everything you do.  They evoke the feelings which frame your world and motivate your actions.

Your thought can be both positive and negative, but you may not know that negative and positive thoughts affect your body differently. Research shows that 87% of illnesses are caused by human thought life, and about 13% are caused by genetics, diet, and environment.

Positive thoughts secrete “feel good” or “upper” chemicals in your brain which make you feel positive, excited, happy, and joyful. On the other hand, negative thoughts produce “downer” chemicals in your brain that make you feel down, worried, fearful, depressed, stressed, and anxious.

If you can learn how to overcome negative thoughts (such as regrets of the past, fear of the future, unhealthy comparison of yourself with others, negative self-talk, and temptations to flee or quit rather than remain determined, or retaliate instead of being patient and work hard), you will curtail negative thoughts you think on a particular day.

The Sources of Thoughts

The sources of thoughts vary, but the main ones include personal social interactions/contacts, specific events (both negative and positive), self-talk (things you experience and believe to be true), and sensory mechanism (the five senses).

Based on the sensory mechanism perspective, most of your emotions, feelings, and thoughts come from the five physical senses (smelling, touching, hearing, seeing, and tasting). Sometimes, you may feel they you are pitiful of your own emotions and thoughts because of what you’ve heard or seen.

Self-talk is an internal dialogue which you encounter on a day-to-day basis. For example. if you grow up in an environment where you repeatedly hear that you are worthless, unloved, and unwanted, subconsciously and over time you will consciously start to believe it to be true. You will develop an internal dialogue that “you are worthless.”

Also, your thoughts are produced by specific events which may trigger a series of negative thoughts. For instance, disappointing events like job loss, relationship break up, and others may cause anxiety and stress on you.

Social interactions and contacts are sources of thoughts. Interaction with people who are positive. affirming, and supporting, will inspire positive feelings and thoughts in you.  But if you interact with people with small-minded, negative, and critical views, their negativity and criticism will create negative thoughts in yourself.

Take Away

You can never overlook thought management tips as they are essential and can greatly help you to overcome negative thoughts and their sources. You have an internal voice which constantly speaks to you. You need to check the nature (negative or positive) of thoughts, and therefore challenge, change and reframe negative thoughts.

The best way you can challenge negative thoughts is by writing your thoughts down. Talk to yourself to recognize and analyze their nature and sources and eliminate the myriads of negative thoughts.

It’s advisable you equip yourself with effective thought management tips to discover and overcome negative thoughts that can result in a serious experience of anxiety and depression.

Such tips can help you to learn how to detoxify the five main negative thoughts as well as their sources and renew your mind progressively with positive emotions like contentment, peace, joy, and aspirations.