What If We Obsessed Over The Positive Instead Of The Negative?

I had an “ah hah” moment this week. I was laying in bed, thinking about something that happened that day and I couldn’t get my mind to leave it alone. I was running it through my head again and again, coming up with some sort of catastrophic story. I could feel my blood pressure rise and my heart race while making up a worst-case scenario story and replaying it over and over. What’s funny is as I sit here now, I don’t even remember what I was so worried about and never (not once) has something I laid in bed all night worrying about come true. Never.

It made me think: what if we put the same passion, intensity, and headspace into telling ourselves a GOOD story over and over? I don’t think I’ve ever laid in bed at night and obsessed over something that made me smile that day or a success I had or an exciting dream that was about to come true. While I’m an extremely positive person, it’s in those quiet, late-night moments that my brain loves to obsess over the negative and often breezes over the positive. 

I remember reading somewhere that your brain can’t think two different thoughts at the same time. So the next time I start slipping into that hamster wheel of replaying a negative thought over and over and coming up with a doomsday scenario about how it could all go wrong, I’m going to pull a positive moment from the day and consciously replay that. I’ll choose to take a seed of something good and imagine it as an incredible success and highlight in my life.

The negative thoughts will still happen and that’s normal and probably even healthy, but even if we can spend half as much time on those and replace the other half with intentional positive obsession…that’s a pretty great start!