3 Unusual Causes of Negative Thinking

During the month of September, I am focusing heavily on the topic of negative thought patterns and limiting beliefs. In this blog, I want to highlight three things you might not know are the causes of your negative thoughts.

This concept often holds women back from having healthy relationships and pursuing their true desires. It is so important that I made it the entire first module of the Sober Freedom Inner Circle program.

Let’s get into it!

1. Emotional exhaustion. Different things can cause emotional exhaustion and create both physical and emotional effects. Emotional exhaustion changes your mood. You may notice you feel more pessimistic than usual, begin to lose motivation to work and socialize, and even take care of yourself. This exhaustion will eventually lead to feelings of anger, hopelessness, and failure. And people who are consistently having these feelings are not speaking kindly to themselves! Thus, negative thoughts arise, or are extremely activated if they have once been put to bed.
   
2. You have to many commitments. If you are like most people in our society, you are running on busy! If you have kids, a partner, a job, pets, friends, and family most likely you have A LOT of commitments. When you get spread too thin over time, this leads to emotional exhaustion (see above) and mistakes. We can’t be doing all things really well at the same time. When you are killing it at home with the kids you are likely letting something to at work or missing social events. When you are having fun, working at a high level or serving others you are likely missing important family events. Be sure to check your commitments against your personal core values. If you don’t know what yours are, this is what we do in the Sober Freedom Inner Circle. What needs to be put to the side until another season. This way of life can cause you to think you aren’t good enough, you are a failure or there’s something wrong with you.
   
3. Physical health. We all know that having a healthy body is important and it leads to a healthy mind. It also is a huge part of your sense of self, confidence and identity. If there are things about your health that are bothering you, it can easily become a heavy focus in your life and create negative thoughts about yourself. If you have gotten out of shape, are struggling with chronic illness or have stopped doing necessary preventative care you may compare yourself to others or your old self and start running down negative lane. It’s not hard to be down on yourself when you aren’t where you would like to be physically.

We all have external factors affecting our lives all the time. Therefore controlling the internal factors becomes increasingly important. Ask yourself honestly how these three things are playing out in your life. What can you do in each area to make a slight improvement that will lead to huge changes over time?

One thing could be the 5 Day Negative Thinking Challenge, that is a great first step. Another would be to completely commit to growing in recovery now that you have been sober for a little while!