Seven Tips to Help You Become Less Negative

All people can change, and this includes altering the way you look at your life. The first step is to begin to value the good in your life and start to relativize.

Do you consider yourself to be the kind of person who only sees the bad in everything that happens to you? Being negative is an attitude that causes you to focus on the negatives rather than the positives. In this way, all your attention is directed towards what “didn’t go well”. It also involves losing hope (hopelessness) or believing that things can’t change and that they don’t depend on you (learned helplessness).

In this article, we give you some ideas to move away from this kind of negativity, hence be a less negative person overall. It doesn’t mean you need to foster naive positivism, but rather simply balance the scales a little. In other words, to verify that in everything bad you can also find something good.

Seven tips for being less negative

How can you be less negative? Here are seven guidelines for you to start working on.

1. Value something good every day

Try to find something good every day and value it. This doesn’t have to be a “big deal.” It could be the fact of having met someone on the street who you haven’t seen for a long time, chatting with your sister, seeing a beautiful landscape, feeling more secure, reading a fragment of your favorite book… It means valuing everyday actions in order to escape, little by little, from negativity.

2. Write down what you like about yourself

Write down what you like and value about yourself. For example, what are you good at?

This is a way of injecting some more positive language into your day-to-day routine. In fact, it’s not only about the things that you like about yourself but the words that you use to describe them.

3. Apply the yin and yang

The yin and yang is a symbol wrapped in two concepts of Taoism and used to represent duality. This philosophy describes the two opposing and complementary fundamental forces found in all things (that is, all the good and all the bad).

Try this exercise. When you feel negativity taking you over, try to find the positive in what’s  happened to you. Although sometimes it can be difficult to find or might be extremely minimal, it’s always there. In fact, sometimes the positive simply involves what you’ve learned from the experience.

4. Don’t be a victim

It’s a good idea to practice self-compassion in accepting your pain and negative emotions. However, it’s not so beneficial to move from self-compassion to victimhood. Furthermore, there’s a really fine line between the two.

However, self-compassion isn’t the same as feeling sorry for yourself. Self-compassion means listening to yourself, understanding yourself, and allowing yourself to be wrong. On the other hand, being a victim means you indulge in your suffering and seek to blame something or someone. For this reason, if you want to be less negative, you mustn’t be a victim.

5. Don’t be an extremist

Behind many negative thoughts, extremism is often hidden. In other words, you tend to assess everything in an extreme manner. However, why does everything have to be black or white?

Try and be less extreme in your thoughts and actions. Try to relativize when thinking about what’s happened to you. Ask yourself, is it really that bad? Attempt to move away from your extreme position and place yourself at a mid-point instead. Try it and you’ll notice the difference!

6. Be creative

It might sound rather odd, being creative to be more positive. Nevertheless, the truth is that creative ideas allow you to get out of your comfort zone, open your mind, and become more flexible. These are all qualities of positivism.

Therefore, thinking creatively will allow you to open the doors to new perspectives. Furthermore, there’s the possibility that they won’t be as negative as you originally thought.

7. Surround yourself with positive people

Your environment influences how you feel and what you think. For this reason, if you want to be a little more positive, you must surround yourself with people who are also positive. Or who, at the very least, aren’t negative, and certainly not toxic.

Test it out. Surround yourself with people who give out good vibes and, above all, who don’t continually complain.  You’ll soon see, little by little, that your energy has changed.

Being less negative isn’t about seeing everything through rose-colored glasses or being blindly optimistic. However, it does mean changing your attitude, relativizing, and seeing beyond the negativity. This kind of attitude often comes from fear of change or mistrust. Remember, that if you change the way you see things, the things you see change.