How the Science of Hope Can Change Negative Habits Into Positivity
Feel the Pull of Your Habits
Your mind will continually make the choices that you’ve made in the past. We are creatures of habit, but not only habits of behavior—habits of thought and feeling as well. Over time, patterns of thoughts, feelings, and behavior become the default response to a situation. If you’ve avoided challenges in the past and were passive in your response to them, avoidance would be your thought habit. If you then became anxious about the consequences, ruminated, and then became depressed—anxious and depressed would be your feeling habit. Good or bad, we get used to being in the world in a routine way. To change these habits requires deliberate effort. You must change your focus so past choices don’t become the default.
How to Change Your Thought and Feeling Habits
You can learn how automatic your habits are the next time you take a shower. Try using the opposite hand to brush your teeth, shampoo your hair, or wash your body. You’ll see how challenging it is to go against the usual way of doing things. We normally don’t even think about the routine—it’s automatic. The sequence, temperature of the water, and physical routine of each task are barely conscious thoughts. By doing something different, you awaken your brain to the routine that is happening just under your awareness.
Adjusting your thoughts from negative ones to positive ones can become your new routine. From there, you can build your emotional resilience.
Thought habits operate under the radar most of the time too and are no less difficult to change. The good news is that once you have made the adjustments, they can become the new routine and you can build your emotional resilience. The key is repetition. Whatever repeats endures.
Chronic Negative Thoughts Can Be Habitual
Chronic negative, anxious, or depressing thoughts come from a habit of thinking. This tendency of thought shows up in a brain pattern that, as mentioned, is the default network. The brain’s DN is a collective set of areas in the brain that kick in when we aren’t specifically thinking about something or attending to a task. In other words, when we are daydreaming or not engaged with a specific external event, the DN is activated. While the research on the default network is still emerging, there are some interesting findings about how we worry—and what can be done about it.
Researchers who study the DN note that when people ruminate, they are “focused on their present mental and related autobiographical information rather than the future.” This is important information about how negative thinking keeps us stuck. Just like the routine in the shower is barely noticed—the default network keeps us unaware of the habit of thinking we are using. If we are ruminating in the moment, then the default network keeps us going in that loop.
The Psychology of Positivity: Changing the Track of Our Rumination
Think of a toy train that keeps going in a circle even though there are other connected tracks it can take. Unless the railway switch moves the train off the track to a different direction, it will just keep going around and around. This is what happens during rumination. The default network puts us on a circular track, and we are likely to stay there until the railway switch changes our direction. If we are not looking for this switch, there is no chance we will flip it.
The science of hope tells us that confident people have learned how to find and flip that switch, because they are looking to do so. This empowers them to not get stuck going in circles. They have learned how to set that switch and deliberately take their thoughts into the future. They know how to break out of the default network. It all begins by first recognizing that the DN, the loop leading to nowhere, is happening. This is the essential first step in noticing that a change is needed.
Thoughts Are Like Water—You Can Choose the Water Source
Let’s go back to thoughts being like water for a moment. Imagine you are getting your water from a stream. You grab a bucket and get water from the closest part of the stream—but the water from that section of the stream is stagnant and murky. You can taste it when you drink it. But the place you are getting it from is close by, so you keep getting it from that spot. It is the most available, so you keep going there.
When you recognize that you are getting the same unwanted results by doing the same thing—that is, when you are motivated to change—you will take deliberate action to go look for cleaner water. Once you realize that you are the one responsible for choosing that spot in the stream and returning to it—you are empowered to change.
With deliberate effort or deliberate rumination, you can replace the negative pattern with a new, positive one. You can direct these thoughts. They will then repeat—with some effort at first, because they are not as close and familiar as negative ones. If you don’t steer them where you want them to go, they will take you back to where you’ve been. I invite you to explore how this works for yourself.
