Many things in life are tied to our state of mind. If you are in a depressed state of mind most things in life will be over-shadowed by this negative mindset. The main problem is that no matter if something really good happens to such a person, the positive moment will be pushed away and becomes covered by negative thoughts. Many psychologists try to go back to the source of the negative moment that start all this. I personally do not like this approach as it is a) very time consuming and b) often requires the individual to go through that pain again and again. In my opinion this reiterates the negative moment and makes it even more difficult to overcome the source of pain and negative thinking.

While I am not a psychologist I do feel that my own experience has shown me for myself that there are better ways to overcome such a state of mind. And I feel it is fair sharing this experience with you because I honestly feel that instead of spending months or years on a couch talking about your negative experiences that you deserve better.

In my article (mentioned above) I mentioned that I feel that we human beings are capable of programming ourselves. The most critical point is to associate situations with a positive picture and not to let negative impressions immediately erase the positive effect of a situation. To be able to do you need to take a closer look at those situations when negative thoughts are taking control of your brain and your mindset. You need to ask yourself questions why are those thoughts coming to your mind and what has triggered them. You need to analyze why they erase any positive thoughts immediately. Then you need to analyze those moments when positive thoughts are crossing your mind. What triggered them and what made them positive?

Now here is an important lesson to remember right now. Did you see that I said that bad or negative thoughts are taking control of your brain and mindset. Would you agree that if negative thoughts are taking control of your mindset, that it should be possible that positive thoughts are taking control of your brain and mindset? I am not speaking of this very moment when negative thoughts are coming up, but more about the fact that if something negative is able to take control, that something positive can do that, too. Once you are able to accept this as a fact you can attack the problem and work on giving those positive thoughts a boost and to help them to take control.

Since this website is about pregnancy, parenting, and getting pregnant I will use this topic to further explain my strategy for you. You might be struggling with getting pregnant and with every ovulation cycle going by that does not bring you closer to being pregnant, your stress level increases. You become more obsessed with getting pregnant. You become more and more frustrated because you are able to get pregnant. You start looking for reasons why nothing is happening. You eventually starting to doubt yourself, more and more negative thoughts are entering your mindset. Making love with your spouse or partner is becoming a more and more technical event of finding the right timing and the right position for baby making sex. It’s neither fun nor romantic. It’s an obligation. Your mindset is becoming polluted with negative thoughts. From there it goes downhill. Fertility testing for you and your spouse, but no smoking gun sticking out. You start looking at exotic techniques or herbal stuff that eventually shall help. You get the idea – there is no light at the end of this tunnel.

It is time to re-program yourself as otherwise things will get really difficult. Many couples have been divorced because it never worked out with having a baby. Once the old lover is left behind and a new one enters your life it magically happens and suddenly you are pregnant. Have you heard of those stories? I certainly have. So, coming back to the whole negative mindset thing it is time to undo the damage and to remove the negative pollution from your mind. How do you do it?

Identify the moment or situation that triggers negative thoughts entering your mind. Find out situation what pushes you to the dark side. Let’s say the moment you think about making love with your honey, you start thinking about all the unsuccessful attempts to have a baby. You start thinking about how the romance is gone and that you just kind of wish to let’s get over with the sex thing as fast as possible. All you want is to turn around and try to sleep once the act of making love is over. You do not think about how safe and secure and protected you used to feel laying arm in arm in bed afterwards. You do not think about all the fun and excitement you had, you do not think about how much you wanted that moment to never end. Instead you are thinking “I hope this would be over as quickly as possible.” You do not want to be touched too much. Anything other than the actual act of making love is too much. It makes you feel sad, it makes you feel depressed.

Ok, this is where you need to start to re-program yourself and trust me, it is actually quite easy.

How do you re-program yourself?

We’re humans and our brains are wired a certain way. Our brains behave a certain way – sometimes in a good way and sometimes in a bad way. Let’s make this work in your way. Life is too short to be depressed. In the last step we identified a moment that causes negative thoughts to enter and to control your mind. Now you need to take that moment and to associate it with something positive. Go back in your relationship and find a very special moment between the 2 of you. Be it the very first romantic date where you wished that night would never end. Maybe the moment you kissed for the very first time, or when you were holding hands the very first time. Take that special moment and the moment you feel negative thoughts entering your mind you need to go back to that positive moment and actively push the negative moment out of the way. There are 2 important things you need to keep in mind. Just thinking about the positive moment is not enough. That would be too easy. The human brain works and learns through repetition. It also learns through some actions that accompany certain moments. So, you can pick any kind of action to associate it with the moment when you think back to the positive situation. You can twist yourself or you can “push” the negative thought away from you by making a specific move with your arm and hand or you can use a certain word and associate it with this moment. Have you ever slammed a door or pushed a drawer back into the cabinet really hard? That type of event makes a specific noise – try to make that noise verbally and associate it with this moment of action. Of course you can physically slam the door into the “face of the negative thought”, but you might not have a door to slam handy all the time. Anyway, you identified the negative moment now and you associated it with a positive moment as well as you associated it with an additional action. Now start repeating this over and over again. Think back to when you were rehearsing a play back in school. How did you learn your role? By repeating and practicing it over and over again. It’s a different play now, one that is much more important, so make sure to spend time repeating it over and over again. You might be surprised that this process will not take weeks or months or years. Use your imagination to picture the negative signal entering your mind. Picture the positive moment to be very small that moment. Now you blow up the picture of the positive moment to overlay the negative picture and then use your action that you associated with this moment and push the negative image further away.

I have used this method myself to get rid of negative thoughts and habits. I am not saying I invented this method. I kind of used this method for a while without really realizing its potential. I used it for a while before reading about similar concepts in a few books. When I heard about it the first time I realized that I was actually on the right track and started investigating it more and more. I see the power it has and this is working for me. I confess that there are many challenges along the way and it is easy to give up and to follow the easier way (giving in to the negative thoughts). I think I am wired differently and I do not like to give up. I don’t want to go the easier way because it is not easier. It looks easier and requires less work, but the pain that often comes with such a decision is not worth it. For the longest time using the easy way was what I did until one day I overcame a certain limitation and fear and then realized that I am capable of doing much more. And I honestly believe the same is true for you.

Please post your thoughts below. I am very interested in hearing more from you about it.