Thought stopping is a free way to get your self back on the track to happiness. When you have a negative thought about your self or about something that is going on, you stop the thought and self repair your thought direction.

Now how do you do that? Well, some people find that wearing a rubber band on their wrist helps. Whenever they find themselves heading into negative thinking, then they snap the band against their wrist. It hurts but sometimes self repair hurts. This is a physical way to remind yourself that you don’t need to think pessimistically.

It is also a tried and true way to cause your mind to associate pain with something that you don’t want to do anymore. And no one likes pain, so they will avoid doing whatever they are trying to do. Vice versa, if we associate pleasure with something, then we will want to do it more.

Another exercise to increase your self-observation and stop your thought process is to take a few less busy days and write out everything that you are thinking. Every two hours, you can get out your journal and write down all of the negative things that you are thinking. Although this doesn’t seem like it would work to stop the thoughts, merely recognizing them will lessen their chances of returning and self repair your negative thinking.

Have you ever kept a food diary? Even if no one ever saw it again, by the third or fourth day, you started to change the way that you were eating because you realized that you weren’t doing the best things for yourself. Of course, you will also need to be completely honest with yourself.

Many people can work on thought-stopping through the act of meditation. Meditation is an ages old way to calm the brain down and release it from thinking for a while. This is not about incense and flowery music; it is about getting into the trenches of your brain and quieting the storm.

Some people (I’m one of them) do use a simple way to self repair pessimism - whenever they have a negative thought within their minds, they think of something that makes them happy for a moment (15-30 seconds). Believe me, this is a simple yet very effective way to change your pessimistic way of thinking.

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