How to Stop Negative Thinking and Depression

Think back to the last time you blew something out of proportion. Maybe you flubbed one task and immediately decided the next one was doomed too. Maybe, after a rough stretch, the word failure started attaching itself to you. Those reactions have a name, and the name is negative thinking. A lot of clinicians trace depression back to exactly this habit of mind.

Everybody has these thoughts sometimes. Feeling low after a disappointment is ordinary, even healthy. The trouble starts when the gloom stops being a reaction to one event and settles in as a permanent filter, running day after day without a break.

So what are we actually describing? Negative thinking, or pessimism, is the pull toward seeing and expecting the worst possible version of any situation. It fixes your attention on bad outcomes, on what could go wrong, on the flaws in whatever you are looking at. When that pattern stretches on and refuses to lift, treat it as a possible symptom of depression rather than a passing mood.

The opening move against it is almost embarrassingly simple: admit the problem exists. That might read like a worn-out line. It still happens to be true. With any condition, naming it is the step everything else depends on, and it signals that you are willing to start climbing back out.

Chris Woolston, in his article Overcoming Negative Thinking, sorts these thought patterns into categories, and researchers generally recognize several distinct kinds. Four of them show up more than the rest.

All-or-nothing thinking paints the world in two colors only. There is no middle ground, no plan B, no partial success. You chase a version of perfection that nobody could actually reach, and anything short of it reads as total failure.

Diminishing the positives is the habit of scanning for the bad even when life is going well. A person stuck here brushes off praise, waves away a reward from a boss or a friend, and somehow always finds the dark lining. Compliments slide right off them.

Labeling and mislabeling happens when you collapse who you are into what you did. One mistake and you are not a person who made an error; you become the error.

Overgeneralization takes a single occurrence and stretches it across your whole future. It went wrong once, so of course it will go wrong every time after.

The remaining types Woolston covers are personalization, the mental filter, jumping to conclusions, the binocular trick, emotional reasoning, and the tyranny of should and must. His article goes into each one if you want the longer version.

If you want to loosen the grip of these patterns, a few practices help. Keep a journal. Putting your thoughts on paper gives you distance from them. At the end of a rough day, write out what went sideways, then draft a different way you could have responded to the same thing.

Work on your self-esteem, since negative thinking tends to ride along with a low opinion of yourself. Try listing the harsh things you believe about yourself, and beside each one write its opposite. Where you wrote I am ugly, write I am pretty.

Spend time with people who carry a lighter outlook. Misery really does look for company, so the company you keep matters. Being around people who handle setbacks in a steadier, more flexible way rubs off on you over time and quietly retrains how you respond.

Read. Books on positive thinking and on managing stress give you tools and language you did not have before.

Negative thinking lands on each person a little differently, so build a habit of pausing before you react. Ask yourself whether you are jumping to conclusions, or whether you are taking something personally that was never about you. There are guides built around questions like these, such as a set of 20 questions to challenge your negative thoughts, which you can lean on while you practice.

And learn to put things down. A lot of situations are smaller than the story your mind tells about them. Work at these steps and your default way of meeting the world starts to tilt in a better direction. Give it a while, and you may notice you feel a bit lighter. Heather Browning, MBA, BA.

Sources: Glasgow SPCMH, 20 questions to challenge your negative thoughts, retrieved January 12, 2015. Dictionary.com, Pessimism, retrieved January 12, 2015. Woolston, C. (2014, March 11), Overcoming Negative Thinking, retrieved January 12, 2015.