40 Days of Positive: An Update

How do you return to the positive from the negative?

This is the greatest challenge I am finding as I go through my 40 day challenge of positive thinking.  I am very accomplished at bringing myself down - how can I be at bringing myself up?

I am not going to lie - for me, it is a lot harder than it originally sounded.  I all too easily get myself into a dark funk where one negative thought takes root and before you know it all that it bouncing around inside my head are thoughts that go nowhere but down.  I am sure it has always happened this way, just that I was not aware of it.

How am I combating it?  One is simply by becoming conscious that such a thing is happening.  It takes a certain stepping outside of one's self to get the perspective, an acknowledgement of what is going on - almost as if I am outside of my head looking in on it, an active watcher to my own thoughts.

The second is then to consciously redirect my thoughts to something else.  If I am driving, doing some sort of language learning seems excellent for this - it forces my brain to actively engage on learning instead of theorizing and hypothesizing.  Another thing that seems to work well is to focus not on my  current situation but on the goals that I have set for the year.  This gets my focus off of whatever is going on in my head and onto the future and the things that I can control to get there.

(It probably goes without saying that Iai and Exercise will drive the thoughts out of my head as well - focus on form leaves room for little else).

Is this what I imagined it would be?  Not entirely, no.  But am I making progress?

Undoubtedly, yes.