The Dark Side of Positive Affirmations: How to Shake Negativity Bias
Intrusive Thoughts and How to Make Them Stop (so you can finally manifest your dreams)
Have you ever tried positive affirmations, but, no matter what you do, the negative, self-destructive thoughts keep crowding back in?
Or, every time you say your affirmation, your mind replies with horrible, bullying thoughts about yourself?
It feels like the dark side is always fighting to survive. And that it’s actually winning. Like it just doesn’t want us to succeed or to be happy.
This used to happen to me (and still does happen occasionally). So, what do you do? Give up? Or just let your thoughts discourage and torment you?
Intrusive thoughts — negative thoughts that just won’t let go — are the #1 reason people give up on positive affirmations before they ever see the beautiful, life-changing results.
Why are negative thought forms so hard to replace with what we want to be thinking? Why do negative thoughts feel so much stronger and more powerful than positive affirmations?
If you’ve been practicing negative beliefs for a long time (you grew up with them or you have had a long string of negative experiences) this negativity bias has gotten stronger and stronger and tends to act as a shield that won’t let anything good get through to you. Author Eckhart Tolle even coined an expression to describe it: “the pain body”.
Let’s talk about what these thoughts really are, and what we can do about them.
Did you miss the first part of this series, where we deep dive into what positive affirmations are, how to find the right affirmation for you, and how to use it to change your life? Here’s my step-by-step article all about it.
Are you really here to look for a way to use affirmations to attract “the one”? Check out this blog post about exactly how to do that.
Or, keep reading for everything you need to know about why affirmations haven’t worked for you so far . . .
What Are Intrusive Thoughts?
Intrusive thoughts show up in many different ways, and some of them are even pathological. But we’re talking about garden-variety intrusive thoughts right now: those daily uninvited thoughts that just won’t go away — or won’t go away easily.
These thoughts are not useful or practical. They’re usually unrealistically negative, fearful, self-critical, or unnecessarily critical of others. But yet, they feel so important, right?
You’re engaged in an activity when suddenly you realize that your thoughts have been somewhere else. These thoughts are really dragging you down — it’s already been five minutes or ten minutes or more. Why did you start thinking about that? No idea.
Are you really angry at so-and-so?
Are these thoughts helping you to come to a useful decision about something?
Are you in a crisis situation right now?
No, no, and no.
That’s intrusive thoughts at work. You were just minding your own business — or repeating your affirmation to yourself — and suddenly, your stomach is twisting, you’re remembering an inpleasant thought or experience that’s really not that important . . . and now it’s totally hijacked your moment (or a chunk of your day).
The more we allow ourselves to be host to these thoughts, the lower our overall vibration becomes and we settle into a negative holding pattern . . . or a downward emotional spiral.
And, we’re helped to stay down by something called negativity bias.
Not interested in learning about the “why” and just want to know how to make affirmations work?
Scroll down to the subhead: OK, So What Do I Do Now?
What is Negativity Bias?
It’s the human tendency to pay more attention to negative information than to positive information.
This means that, even when things are happening that are positive or neutral, the few things that are less than perfect tend to carry greater weight in our minds and emotions.
Negativity bias causes us to dwell on the negative, making bad experiences seem much more important than they really are. If we nurse those negative experiences and hurts, they’ll grow and grow in the amount of mental and emotional real estate they take up.
Depending on the research you read, it takes between three and five positive experiences to drown out one negative experience. So just one offhand comment from a colleague or loved one can eat at you for days, weeks, or months — especially if it eats at your sense of competence, likeability, or self-concept.
What if your previous life experiences have influenced you to habitually talk to yourself in a self-defeating, self-belittling way? You may be poisoning yourself from the inside out. And every casual slight you receive in the outside world just confirms and strengthens the negativity bias.
According to Dr. Barbara Fredrickson, positivity researcher at the University of North Carolina, "The potential for life-draining negativity lies within you, just as does the potential for life-giving positivity. You have more say than you think about which you feel and when."
Enter positive affirmations.
But let’s not go there just yet. There’s one more level of hell to visit — muah-ha-ha-ha [evil laugh] — the pain body and why you can’t ignore her.
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What is The Pain Body?
In his book The Power of Now, Eckhart Tolle calls the whole range of negative thoughts and feelings “the pain body”.
According to Tolle, the pain body is a mass of negative energy that is like a separate entity that hijacks your body and mind. It takes control of you whenever it is triggered:
by your own thoughts,
memories of painful past experiences,
something someone says to you,
a frightening or dismissive incident . . .
virtually anything unpleasant that you think about, see, or experience.
The pain body takes over when we identify with the emotions and thought forms it produces. Tolle describes it as the “energy field of old, but still very-much-alive, emotion that lives in almost every human being.”
The “pain body” is a great way of describing that your negative thoughts or emotional states are “not you.” It’s as if the pain body is a separate “being” that has been created by
our genetics,
our ancestors and their beliefs,
our upbringing,
our culture’s written and unwritten rules about how various groups of people should behave and what they should believe . . .
and every negative experience that has never been healed within us.
In a way, the pain body is trying to protect us from being hurt again unnecessarily.
Once we know that the pain body isn’t who we are, we can separate from it and dissolve much of its power. Tolle clearly explains that we can never be wholly rid of the pain body. But we can permanently disarm it of its power.
How I started to dissolve my pain body:
When unpleasant negative feelings or inner self-talk grab hold of me, I smile and know that it’s just the pain body trying to protect me. I ask myself whether these intrusive thoughts are helping me in any way.
If they are really just old gunk, clogging the pipes of my beautiful life, I thank them for their service and let them know that I can’t hang out with them any more right now. I wish them well, and say goodbye.
They will usually slink away all by themselves — until the next time they think I’m in extreme danger for:
wanting to spend time doing something I love (“if you don’t work all the time, there will never be enough money”),
writing an article that I think will help people (“no one will ever read thaaaaat”),
making tarot or magical videos (“there are already a million people doing those”),
or doing almost anything that makes me happy.
Notice how the pain body almost always wants to get in the way when you’re doing something you’re passionate about.
But it can also get super grumpy when I’m doing the $$$ work. (Hey, I thought that’s what the pain body wanted me to do!)
Then it says,
“This isn’t even worth doing. Come on, it’s only paying $XX/hour.”
“It’s only contract work.”
“Why did you give her a discount?”
“You’re so stupid charging super-affordable prices after more than 20 years of experience.”
All of these thoughts bring me to a lower vibration level. And that lower vibration level will attract more lower-vibration experiences.
So, I say a friendly “ta-taaaa” to the pain body, knowing that she’s only trying to keep me on a safe path. Doing what my parents did. Doing what my grandparents did. Staying under the radar and staying safe.
And, I continue with my affirmations.
My special “no opinions” technique:
This is what I say to myself when the pain body is really acting up. Try it and tell me how it works for you.
This is my personal script (adapt it to your needs and self-talk language):
“I don’t need to have an opinion about how this is going. I don’t have to have an opinion about any other person. I don’t have to have an opinion about what I’m doing right now or what I did yesterday or what I did 10 years ago. I’m just relaxing into doing the next thing I want to do (or need to do). Adjust as necessary. It’s all ok. I am ok. In ten minutes, it will probably feel better than ok.”
You also might have to come up with a script to counteract whatever “tough love” the pain body is currently dishing out. My feedback to myself is always “Good job! 98th percentile! We are learning! We are growing!”
Who is the “we”? Me . . . and my spirit team! Or maybe it’s just the royal “we”. Not sure about that.
I love this 6-panel comic about the pain body by artist Yumi Sakugawa. And keep reading, because there are two more more super-useful tools before we’re done: the mood meter and your vibrational set-point.
“OK, So What Do I Do Now?” (Three Easy Steps)
1. Find Your Vibrational Set Point On the Mood Meter
In law-of-attraction speak, a vibrational set-point means the place in your emotions that you’re most often attracting from. If it tends to be a negative or pessimistic place, this is the thing that’s causing your affimations to backfire.
You might tend to wake up at one typical set-point and change to different typical set-points throughout the day. It’s fluid. Yay. That means we can consciously change it.
What usually happens is that we let our emotions drive our day — even though this may be unconscious.
But let’s just stay with that for a minute. Because when something makes us happy, we can use those serendipitous moments to keep the ball of happiness rolling. (And, when we do that, amazing things manifest.)
What to do when something good happens:
If something good happened, you can choose to keep reinforcing that happiness throughout the day by talking to yourself about it, talking to others about it, silently remembering and reliving it. Every time you do this, you elevate your vibrational level — and that snowballs more good events into your life.
The opposite is usually what happens, though.
What to do when you’re having a bad day (or week, or month):
The same thing happens when you’re having a bad day. You tend to keep on thinking about it, ruminating about it, wondering it something was your fault or having bad thoughts about someone else. If you think this way long enough, it becomes a pattern of thought and emotion that becomes stronger and stronger . . . and part of the pain body. Noooooo!
But we each also tend to have a vibrational set-point. This is our typical mood: how we feel most of the time.
The Mood Meter is my favorite tool for helping clients to determine what vibrational level they tend to occupy most of the time as well as how to change it, if they want to. (This tool was created by the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence).
Take a look at the graphic below, and first determine whether you’re feeling low-energy or high-energy right now.
Next, what word box most accurately expresses what you’re feeling right now. (If none of the words resonate, use your own word.)
Do you usually tend to feel that way? If yes, that’s your vibrational set-point.
If no, look for the word that most accurately describes how you usually feel (or use your own word).
Scroll past the Mood Meter for what to do next.
2. Change the Set Point and Watch Your Affirmations Start Working
If you can get your feelings to the right side (the positive side) of the scale, your affirmations will start working in your life.
Let’s try it out.
Go back to the word on the mood meter that best expresses how you feel at this moment. Let’s see if we can move it one box to the right. Or, if you’re already in the right-most column, try moving your emotion one column higher.
For example, if you’re feeling Apathetic, one box to the right brings you to Calm.
Just feel how not caring about anything (apathy) actually can feel calm and peaceful rather than bored or sad.
If you’ve gotten to Calm, feel how that feels. Is it a little bit nicer? It might make you feel that there are many things you feel Satisfied (the next step to the right) about in your life. Have fun thinking about the things that are actually going right (or tend to go right for you most of the time).
Wow, you just moved two levels toward the positive. Now is the time to look around for something that can make you feel really good right now. Can you get there? It can be something really small and insignificant. Someone’s yard looks pretty. You see a cute child or puppy. Someone smiles at you or says, “Hi!”
As soon as you notice that you’re starting to feel calmer or more relaxed or better in any way, try saying your affirmation.
How does it feel now? Do you like that affirmation? Do you want to change to a different positive affirmation that feels more true right now? Is there something about your affirmation that just doesn’t hit right? What is an affirmation that you feel more peaceful or confident about?
If you missed it, here’s the positive affirmations article where I talk about all this.
You can choose your own vibration words, too:
If you don’t like the words that are listed in the Mood Meter, you can create your own. What word would you choose for how you feel right now? Now that you have that word, what emotion would be one step up from where you are now?
Example: If I’m feeling angry, one step up for me might be cynical, and one step up from cynical might be disinterested. And one step up from that would be looking around for something I can be interested in. And, once I’m feeling interested, I can try working with my affirmation.
The process is:
become aware of your exact current mood, and
nudge yourself up to a slightly better-feeling mood so that
you realize you do have a lot more control over how you feel than you might think.
You do this by actively looking for something that might make you feel that next-step-up mood.
For example, if I want to go from angry to cynical, I can start thinking, “You know, it really doesn’t matter what that person does, anyway. Who do they think they are — they’re not all that!”
And, once I get to cynical, I can get to disinterested by thinking, “You know, why does that person’s opinion seem to be so important to me? I’m tired of thinking about them. Whatever!”
From there, I might start thinking about what I feel like doing right now. I might decide to put off something I don’t want to do in favor of something that would make me feel happy or good about myself.
Life Hack: I keep a list of things I’ve put off doing, and when I check back later, a shocking number of them end up being unnecessary to do, or they take care of themselves.
3. Have Fun Playing With This (We All Have Negativity Bias, and That’s Normal)
Try these simple ideas to deal with intrusive thoughts and say buh-bye to the pain body. You can decide how you really want to feel. All it takes is a little bit of practice.
And, remember, none of this is happening just to you. Negativity bias is part of the human condition. We all have it. But we don’t have to let it have us.
