Clean Up Your Thoughts
Since the early 1900s, popular self-help books like: The Power of Positive Thinking, Unleash the Giant Within, and The Secret have all been deemed as best sellers containing valuable information regarding success. Using the Law of Attraction, these books explain that the frequency of your thoughts emit energy that attract the same things back. While this is probable, the psychological concept ‘confirmation bias’ has long ago discovered that humans have limited brain capacity to think about multiple things at once; therefore, we only focus on certain things. Along with this, the confirmation bias theory states that you only focus on the thoughts that reaffirm your beliefs. For example, if you have a fight with a close friend then you will ignore all of the happy memories and focus on anything shady they have done in the past that confirms why you’re upset with them.
Your thoughts determine your feelings, and your feelings dictate your actions. You can’t control what’s going on around you or how you feel, but you can control what you focus on. Many people understand this and believe it means: ‘only think happy thoughts’; however, that is not the case. I’m sure everyone has tried to get rid of a thought just for it to grow even stronger. ‘What you resist will persist’.
Whether you try or not, both positive and negative emotions will always pop up in your mind. The key to controlling your thoughts is not to ignore “bad” thoughts, but acknowledge and take possession of them to push them away and not identify with them. Replace thoughts that say “I am nervous” with “I feel nervous”; I am not depressed or alone, “I feel depressed or I feel alone”. Small distinctions like that seem trivial until you put it into practice. When you change the way you perceive negative things, you start to believe they are temporary feelings that you have the ability to change.
Experts report that humans have about 50,000 fleeting thoughts daily, and only a small percentage can be processed by the brain. Your thoughts reflect who you are. What you believe about yourself matters. Out of all the things flying around in your head, you will only focus on the things that agree with who you think you are. So how do you think about yourself?
Don’t forget the happy thoughts; all you need is happy thoughts
2 Corinthians 10:5 – ‘We demolish arguments and every pretension that sets itself up against the knowledge of God, and we take captive every thought to make it obedient to Christ.’
