How To Make Your Thoughts Benefit You

Thoughts are a major part of who you are and how you function in the world. The importance of your thinking (be it your thoughts themselves or your thinking patterns) shouldn’t be underestimated.

Your thinking has the capacity to take you far in life or hold you back.

If used correctly, your thinking can help get you on the path to success. Even more importantly, your mental health and even your physical health can be significantly impacted by the way you think.

It shouldn’t really need evidence; thoughts are important.

Still, sometimes thoughts are hard to control. Sometimes they’re negative and other times they’re positive. They can lift you up and push you down. What your thoughts are and what they do to you can vary depending on who you are and even how you feel.

Make your thoughts work for you. Don’t let them be neutral or (worse yet) be negative. Don’t let them take you down dark paths. Take ownership of them and lead them in the direction that’s best for you.

Ways to make your thoughts benefit you

Here are some ways to get your thoughts to benefit you.

1. Embrace bad thoughts

When/if bad thoughts strike there’s probably little that can be done about it. This doesn’t mean you’re completely powerless, just that options aren’t always plentiful.

While you can counteract negative thoughts with positive ones (more on that later), negative thoughts are hard to get rid of completely. Not impossible, but still a challenge for many of us.

Sometimes negative thoughts aren’t even really under your control. They can be intrusive – entering your mind without permission or conscious choice.

While countering negative thoughts with positive ones is an option, it’s not the only approach to dealing with them. If bad thoughts exist, let them. Don’t wrestle with them, embrace them.

Let them be. Let them enter your mind and leave without any reaction from you. Not every negative thought needs to be fought furiously. Observe, don’t react.

2. Be reasonably positive

Positivity can help uplift your mood and counter negative thoughts. Sometimes you can passively observe negative thoughts but other times you can also use positivity to counter them.

Not only that, but focusing on the positive (within reason) can help keep you cognizant of what you’re capable of. Positivity can help you realize your maximum potential. It can help take your mind out of worst-case thinking and keep you more grounded.

With that in mind, it’s important to remember that positivity must come with a hint of caution. A moderate amount of positivity is good.

On the other hand, excessive positivity may just turn into toxic positivity. This can actually be counterproductive and defeat the purpose of being positive to begin with.

You shouldn’t set unreasonable expectations nor should you inflate the positive aspects of a situation. While great things can happen in life, so can bad things. Failure can happen, you can experience disappointments, heartbreak, etc.

Being excessively positive just makes coping with life’s challenges harder in the event they do arise. This is why incorporating positivity into your mindset should be done in moderation.

3. Understand your thoughts

To take your thoughts in the right direction, it’s important to first understand them. At the root of most thoughts is a core thought that defines the larger one.

For example, if you’re sensitive to insults, you may have deeper insecurities that make you think a certain way about something someone said to you. It’s not to imply that insecurity is the only possible root cause here, this is just an example.

Larger thoughts and thought patterns are usually built on simpler but more deeply rooted ones.

When seeking to understand thoughts, it is important to understand what these deeply rooted thoughts are and why they exist.

Don’t act on each one of them (a lot of times they are impulsive and emotionally driven). Simply understand the what and why behind your thoughts so you can challenge them.

Use your understanding to help you redirect your thoughts and change them to your benefit. Ultimately, if you are able to change the foundation of what you think, you can change your thoughts.

4. Think with new perspectives

Thoughts are largely formed by perspectives. Your perspectives are the way you view the world. In the context of your thoughts, your thought perspectives are the core of your subjective understanding. These then lead to thoughts which can harm or benefit you.

If your perspective is bias in viewing you as the victim, for example, then there’s a good chance your thinking will follow. You’ll probably start to think like a victim – this can make dealing with challenges in life more difficult.

What’s important isn’t whether or not you are truly a victim. The reality is you may be one – but the problem arises if you view yourself as one all the time. This is just an example and you can extend this thinking to many other perspectives.

The point is your perspectives can affect how you think. That’s why it’s beneficial to change your perspectives if you want to change your thinking.

Understanding your thoughts can help give you an idea of what your perspectives are, as well! If you have perspectives that you feel lead your thoughts down destructive paths, change them.

Start viewing your life and the things that happen in it from a new proverbial lens. Instead of being a victim, be a survivor. Instead of being a loser, be a learner. Instead of being fragile, be durable.

5. Accept that bad things can happen but remember good things can, too

You’re probably not immune from bad things happening to you. While it would be nice to be, too many bad things can happen in life to logically think you can and will avoid all of them.

It’s a harsh truth but this is a bit of tough love here. It’s just the reality, bad things can happen. That said, this is simply a risk in life. You cannot and should not live your whole life based solely on the risks that a negative outcome could come to fruition.

What you should do is accept that life carries with it some risks and that’s okay. Accepting these risks and living despite them is your best course of action.

As much as positivity is nice, positive thinking is not always realistic.

However, with all that in mind, negative outcomes are in no way a guarantee. While accepting the possibility and reality of negative outcomes can make you a stronger person, this doesn’t mean you need to enter a slump because of them.

Remember that while bad things can happen, good things can and do, too. There’s almost always an equal or better chance that the good thing will happen over the bad thing. If bad things happen, that’s okay. But that doesn’t mean good things can’t and don’t happen.

Keep in mind that the favorable outcome is also a possible one. Use your understanding of negative possibilities to help you plan for and prevent them. Work towards ideal outcomes but don’t develop a sense of entitlement for things always going your way.

6. Slow your thoughts down

If your mind is rushing there’s a good chance you will stress yourself out and become anxious. Just the fact that thoughts are occurring so quickly in your mind can end up putting you on high alert.

Not only that, but when you think more quickly you also risk thinking more things. This means a higher chance that a bad thought or thoughts will enter your head.

By slowing your thoughts down, you can slow yourself down and set a more calming mental pace. This can help you relax and slow your heart down, as well.

Don’t rush your thoughts, keep them slow. If you find yourself thinking too quickly or too much, take it easy. Slow down the voice in your head and think to yourself calmly and slowly.

7. Think logically (not emotionally)

Emotions can cloud thinking and make logical thinking difficult. With emotional thinking, you risk not realizing your full mental potential. The reason being the fact that emotions compel you to think and act in ways that may not be suitable for you or the situation you’re in.

In a tough and emotionally charged situation, thinking logically may seem hard or impossible. After all, in some situations, you may feel backed into a corner and have no way to react other than emotionally.

Thinking logically, however, does not mean thinking passively. You can still find ways to solve problems – just by using your sound thinking skills. Thinking logically helps you find the logical solution and avoid doing something that ends up being worse for you.

If someone angered you, for example. You could react impulsively with anger, but the other and more reasonable option is reacting calmly and finding a logical solution. Getting angry could just end up costing you in the long-run.

Thinking logically helps you think of the best solution that is best for you.

But how do you think logically, especially if you’re used to thinking with too much emotion?

Well, one of the best ways to do this is to practice. Learn how to change your thinking and implement techniques to do so.

Put yourself in controlled stressful situations. Maybe do something that pushes your patience like knitting or learning a complicated skill.

Practice thinking logically in the event an unexpected obstacle presents itself in your life. Say, for example, someone angered you while driving. Practice staying calm and just avoiding escalation. Train to remain focused on driving and just get yourself to your destination without any emotional overreaction.

By training yourself you can be more prepared in the event you deal with an emotionally charged situation. You have the mental knowledge to navigate it intelligently.

8. Control distorted thoughts

Distorted thoughts negatively affect thinking and can make thinking for your own benefit a challenge.

A distorted thought is a flawed way of thinking. There are many of these, but here are some examples:

Magnification: giving a high level of importance to negative events. An example of this would be someone having a bad day and thinking this defines their week, month or even their whole life.

Overgeneralization: generalizing by inaccurately believing that there is a pattern to something negative. For example, someone getting dumped may feel that they are undeserving of love in general just because someone left them.

Emotional reasoning: thinking emotionally and attributing objective truth to emotional reasoning. Emotional reasoning involves one accepting how they feel emotionally as objective truth, even though there could be numerous other considerations.

Fallacy of fairness: assuming that life should be fair.

Mental filtering: means ‘filtering’ thoughts to include negatives while eliminating or significantly dismissing positives.

The list goes on. The idea is a distorted thought (cognitive distortion) can make your thinking your own enemy because it is (by definition) distorted.

When you view your life with a distorted mental perspective, you risk causing yourself distress and suffering.

For your thoughts to work for you, it helps if they are grounded in logical thinking. So make efforts to combat distorted thoughts and challenge them. Do not let them take your mind down dark paths.

Replace distorted thoughts with logical ones. Counter the lack of logic in a distorted thought with logical conscious thinking.

9. Be patient with yourself

Changing your thought patterns is an admirable endeavor, but it might also be a lengthy and complicated one. You may need to employ more than one strategy or technique in order to make real and major changes.

It might also take a while, and there may be ups and downs along the journey. Some days may be bad and others may be good. You may have times where you think it’s hopeless but you have to keep pushing regardless.

Throughout the process of changing your thoughts, it’s important to be patient with yourself and remain committed. Changing your thoughts isn’t an event, it’s a process. The sooner you start and the more effort you put in, the better.