If you think you might be suffering from an addiction to negative thinking/feeling (take the quiz at to find out), admitting it to yourself is the first step to freeing yourself from your own inner turmoil. Coming clean that you can’t seem to stop thinking negatively or feeling negative emotions is the truth that will set you free and help you break the cycle, finding joy in your life once again.
Admit you have a problem…
Most people live their lives in one of two ways. They either go through their days being negative all the time but have no desire to stop indulging their own misery (or the misery of anyone who gets within a few feet of them). Or they are secretly negative, but walk around with a big smile on their face, pretending to be positive all the time. Both of these ways of dealing with the world are no fun and create a lot of suffering for everyone involved. When you admit you have an addiction to negative thinking and feeling, it’s like you immediately feel ten pounds lighter; because you stop with the pretending (which takes up a lot of unnecessary energy) and you give yourself a break, knowing that addictions ask for our compassion, not our self judgment.
An addiction is anything we feel we can’t stop doing or feel compulsively motivated to act on. If you feel anger on a chronic basis or fear or stress or overwhelm and you can’t seem stop (without the help of a glass of wine or a whole pepperoni pizza-which are what I call “sub-addictions” – addictions that are a result of the basic addiction to negative thinking and feeling), then the first thing you need to do is to admit it to yourself.
Take an honest look at your emotional life. Are you able to easily manage your emotional states or are you overwhelmed, on edge, fearful, depressed, stressed, or angry on a chronic basis and can’t seem to snap out of it?
Then admit it. At least to yourself.
Get Help…
The next step is to get help. But you can’t get help if you don’t admit that you are not able to manage your emotional states.
You can learn to manage your emotional states and reprogram your mind to feel habitually happy. It’s quite a journey, rediscovering your inner bliss. It’s not easy (at least at first) to break this addiction to chronic negative thinking, but it is the best thing you will ever do for yourself.
If you’d like to get a free download of our first class for Overcoming Negativity Addiction, click here.