Training Our Trains of Thought

When negative thinking becomes habit, take heart. With compassion, mindfulness, and gratitude, it's possible to retrain our neural pathways for the better. To start, we become mindful of what's going on inside our heads. Thoughts and feelings come and go -- they don't stick with or own us. Realizing this gives us the space we need to observe them without letting them carry us away. By treating them with compassion and without judgment, they eventually lose their power. However, like a muscle, the mind still wants to work to fill in the space where the negativity resided. This is where gratitude comes in. Instead of looking for evidence and ideas to support our negative thoughts, we use our minds to look for things that are going right, to be grateful for. In this article, Kristi Nelson describes how she transformed her own negative thinking patterns into a healthy habit of gratitude.

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