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How to transform negative emotions
1. 
Identify:
to change your emotional state, you must identify what
emotion you’re feeling. In Sarah’s example, she felt sad and afraid.
After delving deeper, we identified that Sarah also felt neglected and
insecure.
2. 
Challenge:
the next step would be to question yourself: Why do you
feel the way you do? What thoughts are responsible for this?
Sarah felt sad because she didn’t get a text back. The thought that
played back to her was that no one had time for her or was interested
in her because she was ugly. This made her feel lonely and insecure.
At this stage, you have consciously begun to observe your thoughts.
A lot of the beliefs we have are based on exaggeration,
misconception and opinions imposed on us by other people.
Therefore, we can challenge these erroneous ideas and judgements in
our mind. We can analyse our thought processes and change our
negative thought patterns to more positive ones, in a logical way.
Begin to challenge the beliefs behind your thoughts by questioning
their validity. For example, Sarah asked herself: Is it true that no one
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has time for me because I’m ugly? In thinking deeply about this
question, Sarah began to learn a lot about why she felt the way she
did. At this stage, you can ask questions that force you to dig deeper.
You can also ask extreme questions, because they’ll inspire extreme
answers. In our example, Sarah went on to ask herself: Does this
mean I’ll never be happy?
Sarah pondered on these questions and saw that she was exaggerating
the situation. One man failing to text her back didn’t mean that she’d
never be happy. She was reminded that her joy wasn’t dependent on
how others interacted with her.
Posing questions to yourself can reveal limitations in your thinking,
as they did for Sarah. You’ll begin to realize that you have made false
assumptions and focused on the negative aspects of situations in your
life.
Try it. Perhaps bring up a past experience that made you unhappy,
and ask yourself direct questions that help you get to the heart of the
matter. It’s important to realize that we create our own sadness by
attaching negative conclusions to these past experiences in our
subconscious mind. Here we must challenge these conclusions, which
are stored as lessons. Failing to correct the negative lessons means
they’re replayed in your subconscious mind. Over time, these lessons
on repeat can weigh you down and induce depression.
3.