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Positivity! 17 Healthy Ways to Remove Negativity from Your Life

Negativity is the process of getting into an unintended rut.

Fortunately, the way out of a rut is a positive thought followed by action. So, humans rarely have to stay mired in painful feelings for very long.

Positivity – thinking positive thoughts habitually – creates beneficial circumstances in the life of the person who adopts it.

  • Do you have the desire within you to become the best possible version of yourself?
  • Are you intrigued by positivity and wondering how life might improve if you think more positively?

The most efficient way to improve the circumstances of your own daily life is to upgrade the thoughts that play habitually inside your mind.

What follows are seventeen insights that will help you to remove negativity from your life.

1. Goodbye, Negativity! Cultivate a New Awareness

Everything begins with awareness.

Experiment with widening the perspective of your mind’s eye by paying attention throughout the day to things you wouldn’t usually notice.

How do you walk? How do you breathe? When do you laugh?

You especially want to pay attention to how you feel during your daily routine.

Awareness is the first step to releasing negativity.

man dispels negativity by jumping joyfully into water

2. Identify What You Don’t Want

Only ruminate about a problem long enough to identify it. After that, switch immediately into solution mode.

Theoretically, it’s best to identify what you want, but not everyone automatically knows what they want in life.

If you’re unsure what you want, notice what you don’t want.

Once you know what you don’t want, think about it only briefly.

Next, think of its opposite. “If I know I don’t want this, then what is the opposite of this?”

There are few things more haunting than feeling your potential bubbling within you – all of your talent, creativity, skill, and uniqueness – but not knowing exactly how to apply it in the world.

Ironically, sometimes the more creative, intelligent, and passionate a person is, the harder it is to determine new life goals – because almost everything looks interesting.

What if you sense that there’s something else you should be doing – but aren’t yet clear on what that is?

“What do I want?” seems like such a simple question to ask yourself, yet answering that question can be one of life’s significant challenges.

I don’t normally advocate focusing on negativity for the simple reason that what you focus upon, you get more of.

The law of attraction teaches us that it’s better to focus our time, energy, and feelings on positive things – so that we magnetize more of that good stuff.

But for some people, it’s helpful to first briefly imagine what they don’t want, in order to cross those items off their list.

For clarification, get out a piece of paper and quickly write down the types of things you know you’re not interested in. Then put the list away for a day, and when you return to it with fresh eyes, you’ll be able to see a pattern.

This works no matter what decision you’re needing to make – choosing the ideal mate, the perfect vacation destination, or where to go to graduate school.

Contrast (identifying the opposite of what-you-don’t-want) is a crucial step to releasing negativity.

3. Ask Yourself the Prosperity Question to Avoid Negativity

Success and prosperity are charged words that can activate different emotional reactions, depending on the person who hears them.

Because our values can evolve as we acquire life experience, it’s vital that each of us periodically consider what the words “prosperity” and “success” mean to us as individuals.

Strictly speaking, the word success means the accomplishment of an aim or purpose.

Success also refers to the attainment of prosperity.

However, each of us defines prosperity differently.

Healthy, mature couple swimming happily together.

You can turn up the dial of your personal growth to warp speed by asking yourself, “What does prosperity really mean to me?” and then answering that question with all of the brutal honesty that you can muster.

Healing your personal associations with money is key to releasing negativity.

4. See Negativity as Disease and Health as Wealth

When we’re feeling unseen, it’s tempting sometimes to dial down our vibration so that others might notice or value us.

But it’s unwise to lower one’s frequency for any reason.

It’s like when people agree to be guests on Jerry Springer. Seems like a good idea (free hotel, get to be on tv), but it backfires. One’s life is not enriched.

Personal growth is the process of looking closely at how you handle life from the inside – and making the most of your potential before you die.

Whether you have ambitious, clearly defined goals – or simply the sense that you could make even more of a positive difference in the world – looking at your life objectively can help you to realize your dreams.

“…one’s only rival is one’s own potentialities; one’s only failure is failing to live up to one’s own possibilities” — Abraham Maslow

Life has taught me that true prosperity is excellent health. Because when you enjoy excellent health, all of your other values become more expressible.

For example, if you value relationships, then having robust health will provide you with the physical energy and time to be fully present for your friends and loved ones.

happy, mature woman drinking a mug of tea avoiding negativity

You have to actually be alive in order to be in close and consistent relationships with other human beings, and it also helps to have sustained energy.

People who are always slightly tired and harried have a more challenging time being fully present for those they love. Excellent health can be the antidote.

Imagine that negativity is detrimental to cellular health and that positivity is restorative and healing.

5. Acknowledge that There Is More to Learn about the Consequences of Negativity

I remember, back in my younger days, feeling haunted by my unrealized potential.

I knew I had much to offer the world, but sometimes I felt like I was just spinning my wheels.

By focusing on my own frustration and shame, I became that much more mired in negativity.

Have you ever had the lingering sense that you could realize even more of your own potential?

I’m happy to report that I’ve learned a few things over the last 57 years, but I still have to remind myself periodically that I have so much more to learn, experience, and remember.

There’s something about middle age that makes you tempted to think you’ve already learned most of what you need to know.

Those jaded thoughts are the beginning of degeneration, and you can replace them with feelings of enthusiasm for exploring more of life’s mysteries.

Your journey of discovery is not yet over.

Muscled, older athlete avoids negativity and demonstrates standing facing pulls with a battle rope, outdoors.

6. Develop a New Self-Soothing Strategy to Replace Negativity

“Metabolize” is an internal process in which you take something potentially harmful and turn it into something useful.

For example, taking a fearful thought and turning it into a realization that you are stronger than you previously thought, or taking a nervous thought and turning it into excitement.

It’s hard to really get much momentum going on your personal growth if you don’t have a good strategy for metabolizing anxiety. Because when it comes time to recognize something about yourself – something that you sense will be momentarily painful to see – you might let yourself get distracted to avoid the pain.

Anxiety is part of life on earth. Suppose you don’t deliberately find healthier ways to deal with daily emotional discomfort. In that case, you might be tempted to “medicate” your anxiety with something less healthy, like sugar, denial, cigarettes, prescriptive opiates …whatever.

“You can find yourself in a rut by having habitually negative thoughts. Negativity can lead to stagnation – leaving you feeling stuck in your life and lessening your joy. It’s an internal pattern of behavior that – over time – can lead to the external appearance of unwanted circumstances. Though negativity can sometimes seem difficult to change, it’s not impossible. By identifying negative thoughts and replacing them with positive ones, you can infuse your daily life with more moments of contentment and improved health.”

There is no “one” right way to deal with anxiety. Everybody’s a bit different. Explore your options.  For me, I find slow, thorough breathing to be grounding. Also, when I exercise daily, it seems to help my brain chemistry. It keeps me brighter and more optimistic.

Additionally, the ability to witness my own thoughts calmly as I think them, and to observe patterns in my thinking, has been enormously helpful. When I objectively see myself thinking with negativity, I can stop, and course-correct before I stress myself out too much.

What self-soothing strategies might work well for you? Finding healthier ways to lessen anxiety can help release you from negativity.

Dane Findley age 54 helps others achieve stellar wellness and a healthier physique.
Dane has a master’s in Depth Counseling and has spent decades as a professional fitness and Pilates trainer. Today, Dane is a Healthy Lifestyle Advocate who curates the popular Quality of Life Newsletter – a free weekly update for those who want to increase their daily joy.

7. Believe in Something Stronger, Smarter, and More Loving than You

To dramatically increase your physical health and happiness, you’re going to need to be able to surrender your frustrations to something Higher than you. Otherwise, all the world’s problems might drive you nutty.

A spiritual or religious tradition can work. It helps to imagine that there is an infinite field of intelligence, compassion, and creativity of which you and everyone are a part – but, if that’s too squishy for you, maybe you can simply remember that, even though you don’t have all the answers, you still have faith that the planet will be spinning tomorrow just like it did today.

Experimenting with new, more supportive beliefs can also help to release you from negativity.

8. So Long, Negativity! Generate a Different Kind of Gratitude

I know, you’ve heard this one before. But here’s something that you may not have tried:  instead of just having the intellectual thought of gratitude (in other words, identifying something for which you can or should feel grateful), try turning that thought into an actual, physical, visceral feeling.

Here’s what works for me:

  • decide on something for which you can be grateful, then hold that image peacefully in your mind for a moment.
  • next, imagine your heart becoming very light, your chest actually lifting a bit.
  • beam joy and appreciation from your heart until you imagine your whole body glowing.
  • let that feel good.

Thinking grateful is good. Feeling grateful is even better.  What’s more, your body’s cells will thank you for it in the form of improved health.

Gratitude is absolutely essential for releasing negativity.

9. Own Responsibility for What Happens (Every Time)

It can be especially challenging for each of us to own specific responsibility for our lives and what occurs within them.

To make this work, you need to pretend that “you get what you vibrate.”  It’s even better if you can believe it. But for those of you who don’t believe that you create the circumstances of your life by your thoughts, just pretend that it’s true for now, and act accordingly.

When something unfortunate happens, ask yourself calmly and lovingly, “How exactly did I create this, and what can I do to create something better?”

“You’re not going to disappear, die or go crazy if you take responsibility”

Resist the temptation to make a case for why this isn’t true. You don’t need to play the role of a lawyer and cite examples of starving children.  For this exercise, you don’t need to focus on other people’s tragedies.

Focus instead on keeping your own side of the street clean.

What helps this strategy work exceptionally well is paying attention to the energy behind the owning.

Owning circumstances with a sense of guilt or shame differs from owning with two feet planted firmly and a chin held level.

When you ask yourself, “how did I create this?” ask it not from a victim-place but from the part of you where common sense resides.

By the way, if you mess up with someone, then name it. Say what you did, express regret, say it won’t happen again (and mean it), and – for more serious transgressions – make it up to the person.  Don’t worry that it conflicts with the vision you have of yourself. You’re not going to disappear, die, or go crazy if you take responsibility.

Personal responsibility is key to releasing negativity.

10. Be a Work-a-Frolic Instead of a Workaholic

When something goes right in your life, celebrate that success in your mind. By celebrating your successes and cultivating and focusing your passionate energies on the tasks, projects, and people you love most, your success can increase exponentially.

11. Start Fantasizing

Turn off the television, turn off your phone, and let your mind wander:

  • what are you dreaming about?
  • in your daydreams, where are you?
  • what are you wearing?
  • how, exactly, are you feeling?
  • who’s with you?

At this point in the process, you want to avoid critiquing your thoughts, or evaluating what’s realistic or obtainable:  let your imagination run wild!

12. Move Toward Authenticity

As you start to have ideas for what you can do, resist the temptation to imagine what other people will think about it.

At this point, you want your creative gates to open widely.

If you have a visual image of having fun as a trapeze artist in the circus… go with it.

13. Ask Yourself, “How Long Might It Take?”

This one’s important. There are some dreams that sound nice. But if it took 10 years to achieve them, you know you’d lose interest.

By gauging the time a goal might take to accomplish and then imagining yourself traveling through that process, you can get a much clearer picture of whether or not that goal is meant for you.

For instance, you might like the image of yourself as a concert pianist, but you realize that 8 years later – or 12,000 hours of practice into the process – you would become bored.

Whatever length of time your idea would take, you also want to be able to mostly sustain the fire of passion in your belly throughout that period.

14. Craft Some New Goals

Most people know about the importance of carefully setting new goals, yet only 3% of professionals actually undergo this vital process regularly.

Using project and task lists effectively can improve your life and create more time for play.

If you want to become even more organized, it’ll help you to accept lists as part of your daily routine.

I encourage you to stop beating yourself up for not being perfect – and, instead, approach your list with a lighter, more playful energy.

Stay out of the shame zone. It’s a complete waste of your mental and emotional energy. If you decide to experiment with using lists each day, just give yourself permission to blow off lists on any day that you’re not feeling it. This sounds strange and unlikely, I know, but the fact is that you will be more likely to stick with lists if you know you have the option to take a day off from a list whenever you feel like it.

If you’re going to take time off. At least enjoy it!

When it comes to our task list, what most of us need even more than another new system is a new perspective. So what I suggest is this: don’t resent the list. Don’t rebel against the list. Don’t feel oppressed by the list. The list is not saying you’re a mess or, “look how you ignore me.” If your list could talk, it would instead simply say I am a tool designed to help you if you need me. I’m here for you.

The reason you craft goals is that tracking and achieving goals helps to make you happier at work and improves your productivity and prosperity.

Would you like to avoid negativity? Here are some important considerations as you set new targets:

  • exactly what do you intend to accomplish?
  • a good goal isn’t nebulous and is easily verifiable by others.
  • dream big, but still keep your goal within the realm of realism.
  • how does might this goal increase your revenue?
  • how might this goal increase your joy?
  • figure out when you want to complete the big goal, then work backwards creating milestones along the way (this is just to give you a general idea as, ultimately, the universe has its own timetable).

15. Start Recognizing the Patterns in Your Life

There is a connection between the things you think and the things you experience.

Everything in the universe is comprised of energy – even your thoughts.

Your thoughts are vibrations; they’re like little messages you send to the universe.

If my method for feeling gratitude is too corny for you, then try this: imagine for a moment that the universe is configured to give you more of what you’re habitually focused upon.

Try to remember that your vibrations and your prosperity go hand-in-hand.

For example, everyone has secret beliefs about money. A person’s relationship with the energy system that is “money” creates a vibrational field.

This means that the universe is eavesdropping whenever you have a thought or feeling about money.

When the universe witnesses a repeating pattern in your thoughts about money, it sends you an experience to help you validate that habitual thought.

This is why it becomes necessary to periodically monitor our own inner “mind chatter.”

Some afternoon when you’re busy-as-usual, if you were to turn off your phone and sit down for ten minutes of quiet meditation, you could objectively listen to your mind as it prattles away.

This objective inner-listening process might seem like a waste of time, but you’ll soon discover that it’s one of the most productive things you can do.

As you get better at witnessing your mind-chatter objectively (“watching the watcher” it is sometimes called), you will soon be able to recognize differences and label specific segments of the chatter:

  • “oh, that’s a thought”
  • “oh, that’s a feeling”
  • “oh, that’s a belief.”

People who meditate regularly are able eventually to be even more specific when identifying the chatter that plays inside their mind:

  • “oh, that’s a judgment”
  • “oh, that’s the emotion of shame”
  • “oh, that’s sadness”
  • “oh, that’s anxiety” 
  • “oh, that’s humor.”

And, the more consistently a person meditates, the more he or she can sustain moments when there is no mind chatter at all, just an abiding inner calm and peace.

Dr. Wayne Dyer called this “the gap,” and often said that one second in the gap is worth more than an hour of sleep and that you can get the equivalent of a full night’s sleep by spending a few moments in the gap – that’s how restorative it is.

You can also get rich by being bombastic, ruthless, or exploitative (plenty of people get rich that way) but those people tend to have poorer health, disappointing life reviews, and – perhaps most significantly – only the most shallow kind of happiness.

I’m assuming you want to feel the kind of soulful, boundless, vibrant joy that improves your health and also touches the people around you, making a positive difference in the world.

 

Too busy to read the rest of this article now? Pin it for later.

light reflecting demonstrates how positive thinking and avoiding negativity works

16. Begin Thinking of Your Mind as a Magnet

Are opportunities appearing in your life regularly?

Feelings are astoundingly powerful.

The key idea of the law of attraction is that your most dominant and consistent feelings will eventually find a way to manifest.

The strategy of leveraging the law of attraction is to recognize when internal habitual feelings eventually manifest real-life external circumstances – and then to celebrate the positive manifestations (to attract more of the same).

To lessen the frequency of negative manifestations in our daily lives, we can change our thinking and beliefs, releasing thinking habits of negativity and replacing them, over time, with more positive ones (see #9,  above, about the freedom of apologizing and #17, below, about the freedom of forgiveness).

To me, “prosperity” means more than money. In fact, money is just one expression of the energy system that is prosperity.

I experience prosperity most deeply as excellent health.

I feel strongly that when a person has excellent health, they enjoy the ultimate abundance – because with robust, perfect health, almost anything is possible. The world is your oyster, as the saying goes.

Right now, at this very moment, you have a vibrational frequency that the universe is reading.

What sort of vibrations are you sending out to others?

What kind of response are you picking up?

The solitude of early morning often provides ideal opportunities for self-reflection and honest evaluation.

I continue to believe in the importance of looking objectively at our everyday rituals and habits.

During a recent thirty-day experiment of waking and rising at 4:15 a.m., I could experience those quiet moments and give my mind a chance to clear and focus – a somewhat uncommon feat in this age of multi-tasking and instant media.

One concept that my mind kept returning to was the vast power each of us has to set the tone of our own lives – to wield more significant influence in the experiences we have.

What my life experiences have taught me so far is that the energy we put forth is not only absorbed by others but is also reflected back to us.

The key to enjoying life is to tend to your inner world as if it were a garden.

Dane Findley, age 55, eats an anti-inflammatory diet and lives the longevity lifestyle.
Discover the fulfillment and joy from living the anti-inflammatory lifestyle:
• Get lean strength and high energy
• Develop supple joints and better posture
• Dissolve brain fog and improve mental clarity
• Reduce visceral fat deposits around the waistline.

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As Mister Rogers liked to ask, “what are you growing in the garden of your mind?”

At least twice a day, intentionally take yourself off of autopilot mode by returning mindfully to the sensation of your own breath. Release judgment and cultivate gratitude.

Then, allow yourself to feel the actual physical sensation of gratitude inside your body (you will feel your heart lighten, a joy-rising). This will absolutely change your vibrational field.

You can shape these vibrations into strong self-perpetuating loops, often referred to as winning streaks, good habits, symbiosis, or being “on a roll.”

Generally, the energy of prosperity – and, again, I include good health within the definition of the word prosperity – is not strongly pulled to a person’s ambivalent thoughts.

Habitual ambivalence disallows the flow.

Money and health energy systems are powerfully attracted to feelings of joy and enthusiasm (this is another reason mornings can be a perfect time to celebrate your successes).

(By the way, this tremendous manifesting power can also develop into patterns of negativity as well – resulting in frustration, fatigue, or general malaise. So, be mindful.)

It can be so beneficial to regularly explore and adjust the feelings and mindset we are cultivating inside of ourselves.

Tending to our mind in this way improves our thoughts and feelings – and even our beliefs – giving us a more positive outlook, which, in turn, raises the frequency of those vibrations we emanate, which then attracts a better set of circumstances. The higher our vibrations, the better quality of people we attract into our lives.

You don’t have to get up before the sun to keep tabs on your vibrations, but I do encourage you to set aside time – daily, if possible – for repose and reflection.

If you can train your mind to think more positively, you will have unlocked one of the keys to feeling prosperous and joyful.

17. Understand that Your Brain Has a Soundtrack

There are proven relational habits that help humans to live longer and healthier:

  • laughing more
  • having sex more
  • owning a pet
  • being married

Research shows that one is at greater risk of heart disease without a strong network of friends and family.

Loneliness can cause inflammation within the cells of the body, and in otherwise healthy people isolation can be just as dangerous as having high cholesterol or even smoking. (This is tricky for someone like me – an extreme introvert who requires enormous amounts of solitude in order to recharge my batteries. I counteract that by spending time in remote nature – another effective way to get emotional stroke needs met – and by keeping a tuned ear on my own thoughts).

When we take the time to witness our thoughts as they occur, we recognize that they are often centered in the future or the past, which is usually not calming to our bodies.

New research from a long-term aging study reveals that happy people not only enjoy life more but also have more lifespan in which to enjoy it. This is why it can be enormously helpful for us to pay close attention to our thoughts and then re-direct them when we witness ourselves thinking with negativity.

This is also why forgiving others is one of the most healing things we can ever do for ourselves, as the act of forgiveness can help derail the runaway train of repetitive, negative thoughts.

Remember that sometimes during our busy everyday lives, dropping into an actual feeling is oddly challenging. We tend to intellectualize gratitude. And that’s okay. Start there if you need to (see #8 above).

After you think about something for which you can feel grateful, then move past the idea of it into the actual emotion itself.

I like to imagine my body getting lighter and my heart floating up like helium, radiating playfulness and love. Heck, sometimes I even throw my hands up over my head in celebration! Judge me if you will, but I’m telling you, it works for me.

Negativity leads to unfortunate events.

To be healthy for the long haul, the words that play in our brains need to be as positive as possible:

  • which of the above insights are you already using masterfully?
  • which are you eager to strengthen?

Conclusion – Keep Negativity Out of Your Life

As your thoughts become habitually more positive and joyful, you’ll develop a sort of momentum.

Good things could start to happen with greater frequency.

This occurs in large part because of relationships.

As you become a brighter person, you’ll attract a brighter circle of people into your daily life.

The more joyful people you know, the more prosperity you will experience.

“You cannot struggle to joy. Struggle and joy are not on the same channel. You joy your way to joy. You laugh your way to success. It is through your joy that good things come.” – Abraham-Hicks

You can use the laws of attraction to align with the energy of prosperity and create more opportunities in your everyday life:

  • a positive inner dialogue leads to a giving off of positive vibrations;
  • positive vibrations attract positive outcomes;
  • the healthier the chatter is inside your mind, the healthier your outer life will become.

Essentially, this is accomplished by focusing your time, energy, and attention on what you want (as opposed to what you don’t want).

mature woman enjoying the sunrise and ocean breeze, avoiding negativity

The law of attraction is when habitual feelings eventually manifest in real-life external circumstances – a natural law operating within the universe of like-attracts-like.

By honing in, habitually, on either positive things or things of negativity, one can bring about positive or negative results.

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