Re-Training

As I was falling asleep last night, I noticed that most of the thoughts that were going through my head were negative. I was telling myself all of the negative things about me and how I need to change them. Don't get me wrong, I think that when we see a shortcoming in our lives that it is good that we notice them and work to make the change, but that is not what I am talking about. The thoughts that were going through my mind were completely negative and useful for nothing more than putting myself down. As I was laying there, I became more and more frustrated with myself, which then caused me to begin to criticize myself on how I always think negatively. A cycle that is humorous, but somehow possible. This morning, I have been focusing on the idea that I need to re-train my thoughts. Telling myself to simply stop thinking those things is not going to work. In order to re-train my thoughts, I need to replace the negative thoughts with positive ones. Just to make sure that I am working my hardest on this, why not think of 2 positive thoughts for every negative? I kind of relate this to dieting. If we want to stop eating junk food, we can't simply tell ourselves to just stop eating. We need to replace those unhealthy foods with more healthy ones. The same principle can be applied to our thoughts. In order to drown out the negative thoughts and train our minds to focus on the positives, we need to replace the negative thoughts with positive ones.