10 Dec 10 ways to change your thinking for more happiness
via Psych Central by John D Moore
How you think about problems matters a lot
Does thinking about your problems cause lots of stress? Do you feel overwhelmed when facing a life challenge? Hoping to find strategies to help you feel more empowered?
If the answer is yes, you’ve come to the right place. That’s because I’d like to share with you ten cognitive restructuring techniques designed to reduce your stress and generate greater happiness.
Some of these may seem like no-brainers. Others may cause you to pause and reflect. I encourage you to read them all and see what best applies to your life.
Check it out.
1. Avoid the playing the blame game
It takes courage to recognize you are responsible for many challenges you meet. Even if someone’s mean, how you view circumstances is up to you.
When you blame another person, you let them control your well-being. It’s far better to take charge of your destiny.
Accept culpability and you have the power to improve your life.
2. Create new mental pictures for stressful events
Whatever you picture stays alive in your mind. You feed memories when you go over them and focus on the worst parts.
As you do so, you revive painful emotions and deepen neural pathways in your brain that help you return to angst.
If you can’t stop creating mental images of unwanted memories, play with what you see. Change them from color to black and white.
Put a frame around them. Shrink them and add a silly cartoon character voice to lighten the mood and the pictures may fade.
3. Recognize life lessons
Everyone must deal with problems. Happy people consider setbacks stepping-stones to their greatest achievements though. Without them, they wouldn’t discover what to do or increase resilience.
Think of problems as life lessons. As long as you learn from them, they are valuable…
…keep reading the full & original article HERE