13 Things Mentally Strong People Don\'t Do: Take Back Your Power, Embrace Change, Face Your Fears, and Train Your Brain for Happiness and Success pdfdrive com

SHIFT YOUR THINKING
Dwelling starts out as a cognitive process, but eventually it influences your
emotions and behavior. By shifting the way you think about the past, you can
move forward.
• Schedule time to think about a past event. Sometimes our brains need a
chance to sort things out and the more you tell yourself not to think about it,
the more those memories can crop up throughout the day. Instead of battling
to suppress the memories, remind yourself, I can think about that after dinner
tonight. Then, after dinner, give yourself twenty minutes to think about it.
When your time is up, move on to something else.
• Give yourself something else to think about. Create a plan to help you think
about something else. For example, decide that whenever you think about
that job you didn’t get, you’ll shift your focus to thinking about planning
your next vacation. This can be especially helpful if you’re prone to dwell on
the negative right before you go to sleep at night.

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• Establish goals for the future. It’s impossible to dwell on the past if you’re
planning for the future. Establish both short-term and long-term goals and
begin working on the action steps needed to achieve those goals. It will give
you something to look forward to while also preventing you from looking too
much into the past.
Our memories aren’t as accurate as we think they are. Often, when we recall
unpleasant events, we exaggerate and catastrophize them. If you think about
something you said during a meeting that you later regretted, you may envision
that other people were reacting much more negatively than they actually did.
When you recall negative memories, try these strategies to keep your
experiences in perspective:
• Focus on the lessons you learned. If you’ve endured hard times, focus on
what you’ve learned from that experience. Accept that it happened and think
about how you may be a changed person because of it but realize that doesn’t
necessarily have to be a bad thing. Maybe you learned to speak up because
you allowed yourself to be treated poorly, or perhaps you learned that you
need to be honest if you want relationships to last. Some of the best life
lessons can be learned from the toughest times you’ve endured.
• Think about the facts, not the emotion. Thinking about negative events can be
very distressing because you’ll likely focus on how you felt during the event.
But if you recall an event by walking yourself through the facts and details of
the memory, your distress decreases. Instead of dwelling on how you felt
when you went to a funeral, recall specific details about where you sat, what
you wore, who was there. When you begin to take away the emotion
surrounding an event, you’re less likely to dwell on it.
• Look at the situation differently. When you review your past, examine what
other ways there are to look at the same situation. You have control over how
you weave the story. The same story can be told countless ways and still be
true. If your current version is upsetting, see how else you can look at it. For
example, Gloria could have reminded herself that her daughter’s current
choices weren’t all related to her childhood. She could have recognized that

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although she may have made some mistakes, she was not responsible for the
choices her daughter was making now.