Mark Manson's video, "3 Steps to Stop Negative Thinking," provides actionable advice on managing negative thoughts, emphasising a shift in perspective rather than outright elimination of these thoughts.
Step 1: Accept that failure is a natural part of life.
- Recognise Self-Invented Failure: Understand that your definition of failure is almost always self-invented. Goals for money, profession (e.g., the corner office), or social life (e.g., number of friends, dating attractive people) are arbitrary benchmarks you set for yourself.
- Adjust Mental Standards: Nothing in the real world is ever as good as it is in your head. Holding yourself to a mental standard or fantasy created in your own mind will lead to misery and can make even "super successful people" hate their lives. Hold these mental images loosely, as reality will have problems and shortcomings.
- Avoid Spirals of Your Own Making: When you define success in a rigid way and don't meet it, it can lead to feeling like a loser and getting caught in negative spirals.
- Exaggeration Tendency: Your mind tends to exaggerate and amplify feelings or expectations, both good and bad. Remember that "nothing is ever really as bad as we think it is either".
Step 2: Practice self-forgiveness.
- Separate Action from Intention: When you (or others) make mistakes, try to separate the action from the intention. Often, people intended to do something good, even if the outcome was "stupid or fucked up". Focus on the underlying positive intention.
- Understand Motivation and Empathise: After identifying the intention, try to understand the motivation behind your actions. Empathise with yourself, acknowledging that "I didn't know better back then, I was kind of a moron and that's okay because we're all morons sometimes".
- Derive Value and Learn Lessons: The most crucial part of self-forgiveness is to draw a lesson from the failure. Ask yourself: "What can be learned by this intention that failed in action? What could I do better next time? What will prevent me from doing something so stupid next time?". Learning from mistakes turns them into something beneficial, making you a better person.
- Embrace Failures as Helpful: If you train your brain to do this, you'll start to realise that failures are good and helpful, eventually leading to a point where you "secretly enjoy your failures".
Step 3: Don't judge your negative thoughts with more negative thoughts.
- Break the Negative Spiral: Many people fall into the trap of becoming insecure about being insecure, or anxious about being anxious, creating an endless spiral. The only way out is to simply not judge negative thoughts negatively.
- Normalise Negative Experiences: Understand that negative thoughts and emotions (like anxiety or making mistakes) are normal human experiences; "everybody experiences it too".
- Re-evaluate Positive Thinking Culture: Our culture's "delusional level of positive thinking" often backfires, creating unrealistic expectations of constant happiness. This leads to upset over trivial things and a belief that something is wrong if you're not always happy.
- Embrace the Negative: We need to become more comfortable with the negative as a culture. Ignoring the negative means losing the positive. Learn to embrace negative thoughts and understand that they are not a judgment on your character.
- Recognise the Usefulness of Negative Thoughts: The harsh truth is that you will never stop having negative thoughts, and you shouldn't want to. Negative thoughts are "fucking useful"; they help you correct mistakes, change actions, and become a better person. The problem isn't having them, but how you deal with them.
By following these steps, you can reduce the suffering caused by negative thinking and foster a more balanced and effective approach to life's challenges.