Master Your Thinking

by Alexander Parker

  Negative labeling—these kinds of people, you will now most often find either in an office or in a high school. These kinds of people don’t know how to properly get positive attention from others, so they outwardly label themselves as negative. However, negative labelers often have trouble with labeling others around them as only their negative qualities. The negative labeler put simply, is usually a person who themselves was labeled negatively throughout a lot of their past. Often, we see that people who treat others poorly and see the world through his kind of cut and dry, black and white spectrum were first exposed to that spectrum when it was used on them. They were likely surrounded by people in their childhood who looked at life in a similar way, blaming others and themselves for their misfortune yet doing nothing to actually intervene and stop it. The laziness of this type is also often simply contributed to whomever they say in their past actions that way. As children so often do, the negative labeler is simply picking up where that person in their childhood left off, acting the way they do because it’s the only way they know how to deal with those kinds of issues. Negative labelers also have an affinity to see things in a very cut and dry way, similar to the “black and white” type in part one. These people want things to go their way, or else the fault lies either in the other party or themselves with little to no remorse. They know how to blame themselves but not how to do anything productive about it to fix the problem. This occurs in a lot of people—they have a kind of defeatist attitude, yet do nothing to stand up and actively engage in fixing anything or making a mistake better. Once they feel they’ve done something wrong, they let it go until it comes back around and bites them hard enough to force them out of their chair. A quick solution for negative labelers is to force them to be more proactive in their lives. Because they so often take a back seat to their own decisions, they might not know what it’s like to actually take responsibility and fix it. The problem arises most when people let their mistakes go after letting insults fly—when they do nothing to resolve the issue, not only are they letting the issue go free, but they’re also letting their relationships with others deteriorate when they don’t do anything to repair them. These people need a harsh wake-up call, something bad to happen to them and someone to be upfront with them, tell them that these bad things wouldn’t happen to them if they would simply fix their initial mistake. What negative labelers might think is a constant circle of negative events is really a circle of events that sprung from their initial mistake, which is now going to come back and bite them over and over and over again. Negative labelers are people who are unlikely to do anything about their situation until something serious happens, and what defines “serious” for them will range from person to person.

  “Should have, could have, would have” statements—this kind of thought trap occurs mostly in people who are not opportunistic, but who might wish they could be more so. People who often fall into this trap think of themselves as inferior or not reaching their full potential because they don’t act on their wishes, yet still don’t act on them. Very similar to the negative labeling type, this type of thinking trap often doesn’t actually motivate the person in question—it only digs them deeper and deeper into their hole of self-doubt, without encouraging them to do anything about it. This is because not only does this kind of thinking trap the person in the idea of what could have been and set them up for failure by placing their standards much too high for themselves, but it also places them in the frame of mind that they are powerless or too weak to perform the actions they want to, or say the things that are most on their mind. They think that they have to act a certain way, that it’s the only way to achieve their goal, and they don’t open their eyes to the benefits of what they actually did. People who fall into this thinking trap usually have a lot of trouble letting go of the past and making peace with their decisions, often suffering from the “grass is always greener” sentiment, believing that their situation would be different, and better if they had made completely different decisions. Sometimes, they may or may not know deep down that this simply isn’t true, that no matter what they had done in the past, it wouldn’t at all improve their present state. Nevertheless, people who fall into this kind of thinking trap, or negative loop of feeling, usually still find themselves feeling anxious and defeated over their own past choices. The best way for this kind of logic to be defeated is to force them to stop thinking about the past, and the decisions they made. Instead, the best way to counteract those feelings of regret is to focus on the present instead. Instead of thinking solely on the past decisions they made and the repercussions on them, they can focus their attention on the decisions they have directly in front of them or close ahead of them. They often hyper focus on the regrets they have on the past decisions in their life, when they could instead be focusing on putting more thought and careful deliberation into their management decisions. When you put your focus into the decisions you can control, you end up having significantly fewer regrets in the future. Positive affirmations also help when facing regret and sadness over a decision you feel may have been made in poor taste. Although you can’t change the decision you made in the past, there are always ways you can counteract the change you’ve made in yours and others lives. Not only can you focus on making better decisions from now on, but you can also try and correct the repercussions your bad decisions have made in your life and in the lives of others. Showing that you want to change will encourage others not only to forgive you but to help you and form relationships you may have lost from those bad decisions. In general, for those who suffer from this kind of regret, keep in mind that although your decisions are permanent and, in and of themselves not able to be changed, you have the power to control where those decisions ultimately take you. You can control how you react to situations thrown your way, and you have the power to change much more about your path in life than you might think.

  Chapter 5

  Thinking Traps, or Thinking “Sandpits”, if that’s More Your Style (Part Three)

  Mind reader—this kind of person is often incredibly confident and insecure at the same time, somehow. They manage to have such incredible confidence in their predictions of the world around them and the people they interact with, yet all of those predictions reflect negatively on them. It’s common that you find people who act this kind of way, somehow simultaneously overly confident in their abilities, but only in their abilities which encourage negative thinking about themselves. Like many of the types on this list, the mind reader has an incredibly low amount of self-esteem, and so seeks out the validation and praise of others by asserting their negative opinions about themselves as a fact, or at least as disproportionately probable to the reality. Unlike some of the more hyperbolic types, like the labeler, the mind reader doesn’t cast their negative view of the world on others. The pessimistic labeler would resort to insulting others to validate their own misfortune or mistakes; the mind reader simply assumes that people think poorly of them. This “mind-reading” often has very little to do with their judgment of the people around them. In fact, they often find themselves praising people who they predict think poorly of them. They accept all negative treatment from others as deserves, as though they’re serving some cosmic criminal sentence for their behavior in a past life. This kind of low self-esteem most often comes from a home life of neglect, or even abuse, mostly verbal and emotional—although physical and verbal abuse is not often seen without each other, in most abusive homes. So, at least in most extreme cases, those who suffer from this kind of thinking trap may actually be best suited to professional help, like therapy. Having someone licensed to help them get through any trauma they may have can sometimes be the best, or only, the path to breaking free of that self-loathing filled cycle for that person. They often have trouble seeing the positive side of life, at least for themselves, and really struggle to think of themselves as even the standard in sense of being “good enough”. Whether that means attractive enough, smart enough, or strong enough,
the mind reader often sees themselves as incredibly inferior to their peers and even to strangers, who they often know nothing about. They assume the worst about themselves and often assume the best about others. They usually know that thinking this way is false, not to mention unhealthy, but they lack the confidence and the conviction to believe in themselves enough to do anything about it. Part of them believes that they will always be inferior to their peers, and to everyone around them. Whatever impacted them earlier in their lives to make them believe themselves to be terrible people, or simply people who will never be worthy of their achievements, their accomplishments, or anything they do that others might view as worthwhile, or worth praise, they believe that impact from others will always be with them, now a part of them determined never to leave. For some people, it truly never does—they incorporate their abuse into part of their coping system, and drown their despairs and concerns in dismissive pessimism, believing that they will never change and that things will never get better for them. The best medicine for people, who suffer from this kind of thinking trap, as I said, is therapy, ideally undergone with a support system beforehand. Often people who feel this way, who feel that everyone around them is judging them and hates them, need to learn how to trust people again before they can erase their negative thought process. Usually, therapy is an ideal way to go about building up the ability to forgive oneself and to trust people around you again. For people who feel they may fall under the “mind reader” type—you are not hated. You’re enough, and will always be enough.

  Mental filter—a more general description of a lot of different kinds of people who suffer from many different kinds of thinking traps, those who have a mental filter, or more specifically a negative filter, don’t necessarily perceive the world in a warped or deluded way. Unlike the mind reader type, the negative filter doesn’t think wrong things about people. They don’t assume the worst about things and people without knowing the facts about their situation. Instead, those with a negative filter ignore positive aspects of events or their situation almost entirely, depending on the severity of their problem. They focus often solely on the negative sides of an issue, focusing on what makes them feel sad, disgusted, lonely, angry, or otherwise puts them in a bad frame of mind. This can happen for any reasons—sometimes, it’s a matter of neglect in the person’s past, like many of the other types. Sometimes the person’s past guardian had that same habit of only focusing on the negative, and the person, as a child, simply followed suit, as a child does. Sometimes the habit simply develops on its own, sometimes when the person has a contrarian attitude. What I mean is that often when a person purposefully adopts a negative attitude that was not caused directly or at least partially by their surrounding in the past, that attitude is mainly adopted in the first place because the person in question is annoyed by the majority. They’re hellbent on being separate from the crowd, and therefore adopt a much more cynical outlook on the world. They may feel that when you focus on the positive side of a situation, you’re deluding yourself into thinking the world is better than it actually is. This creates almost a kind of paradox when the person in question instead resorts to the opposite extreme and adopts an outlook so cynical that they themselves are deluded into thinking the world is worse than it actually is. This edgy way of looking at the world becomes habitual and eventually develops into a cycle that the person often isn’t even really aware of. So, that habit of pessimism chips away at the person day after day as they become a cynic, unable to form optimistic thoughts and ultimately becoming a shell of their former self, to be melodramatic. Of course, this isn’t always the case with people who look at the world this way. Sometimes, it can develop out of a fear of being deluded. People who develop habits this way often fear that by being optimistic, they’re somehow being tricked. This paranoia develops until the person is pathologically negative to the point where, again, they simply adopt the opposite side of the continuum, becoming deluded into the idea that something bad is going to happen to optimistic people, and that this event will shatter their optimism and leave them broken. The reality is quite the opposite, actually. Those who are more pessimistic are more likely to be negatively affected in the long term by dramatic or even traumatizing events. On the contrary, those who have a more positive, optimistic outlook on life are more likely to affect in the short term, but because of their positive attitude—provided, of course, that this positive attitude is intact and relatively unchanged after said event—they are able to recover quickly, and recover more, while their pessimistic counterparts have more of a tendency to hold on to things for a much longer time before letting go and healing. This can, of course, cause a lot of trouble for pessimists, as they are often disillusioned to believe that they have the upper hand. This comes from the confusion between pessimism and realism, which will be gone over in more detail in later chapters. Pessimism derives from the expectation of the worse, while realism does not have an expectation. This difference plays a key role in the way that pessimists react to things. The best way to “treat” this kind of thinking trap is to make sure that they focus as much as possible on the positive side of things. Those with a negative filter on their life often don’t understand that things aren’t always negative and that there’s no harm in being optimistic. However, once people with this kind of filter understand that their situation doesn’t change if they become more positive—even that their situation becomes better with this shift in perception—they are often much more likely to keep being more positive in the long run.

  Chapter 6

  Escaping the Thinking Sinkhole, Sandpit, and Common Trap

  The number of ways you can “go wrong” in the way you think is vast and numerous. There are perhaps too many ways that you can go wrong with your thinking, it’s about time that we cover the many ways you can reverse your steps and instead, go right with your thinking. It’s easy, so don’t worry, as long as you’re consistent.

  Consistency is the key when dealing with something of your own creation. If you aren’t being forced into something, you have to make your own force. Unfortunately, spur of the moment passion and excitement don’t last forever, especially for someone who doesn’t particularly find themselves to be very excitable people. Nevertheless, you have to substitute that excitable behavior and enthusiasm for slow and steady persistence. Being persistent in your life endeavors always leads to fulfilling results. As a wise man once said, “Ambition is the path to greatness. Persistence is the vehicle which you arrive there in.”

  Now that we’ve gone over, in more detail, the different kinds of thinking traps that are most common in today’s world, it’s important to understand how best to get out of those traps. While yes, I did explain some of the more specific things about a few of the different traps, here are some of the more general options to you when you come to terms with your thinking trap.

  Separating your thoughts from reality—as I mentioned briefly in the previous chapter, there’s actually a massive difference between pessimism and realism. While yes, obviously pessimism is to look at things negatively and realism is to look at the start truth with both its ups and downs, there’s a bit more to it than that. For one thing, pessimism derives all of its conclusions by looking at things in a negative light. It derives its conclusions from negative assumptions about the world and about your experiences in it. Meanwhile, realism doesn’t really have anything to derive conclusions from on its own. Ideally, a realist makes no assumptions other than correlations and conclusions that could have been arrived at without the use of human error or bias. In a perfect example, realism only uses factual information and the unbiased truth of reality to answer questions about that reality. Of course, it’s impossible to completely avoid any human error or bias altogether, but ideally, a realist tries their hardest to eliminate all previously existing bias before making an assessment. Most people who struggle with thinking traps struggle the most because they have such a disconnect between their assumptions and reality. This di
sconnect could have arisen from many different places, from neglect in the past or childhood trauma to a number of many different things that could have occurred in the person’s past, but if you’re someone trying to get out of a thinking trap and want to try reconnecting the reality of your world and your experiences in it, ask yourself some of the following questions when you begin to make assumptions or feel yourself falling back into that thinking trap--” What happened?”, only including facts and information that everyone who witnessed the event or was participating in the experience can agree on unanimously without the use of bias or assumption, “What am I thinking?”, analyzing your conscious thought process, what you’re telling yourself, dissecting your thoughts so that you can easily tell the difference between the facts of a situation and the assumptions you make based on your past experiences or bias you had before being placed in the situation, “How am I feeling?”, analyzing your emotions and the effect that your thoughts are having on your emotional state, learning to separate your thoughts from your feelings so that you don’t confuse them, which would allow you to make more biased decisions based of unreliable information that you feel is true, but don’t know is true, and “How am I dealing with it?” analyzing your coping mechanisms and making sure that however you deal with it is healthy as possible. Your coping mechanisms can include separating yourself from other people so as not to bias your opinion of the experience or event, taking deep breaths and physically calming yourself so that your emotions become more stable as a result, and relying on your support system to only feed you information that is unbiased and reliable, instead of further indulging the thinking trap that encourages you to make decisions and come to conclusions based of unreliable info and your emotions instead of facts. When thinking about how you deal with a situation, it’s also important to analyze and understand how you personally react to different situations. Understanding yourself better and how you react to things before you even begin to make assumptions and spiral can be a massive stepping stone for you, in terms of helping you better control possibly dangerous impulses of yours.