Why Is It So Hard To Think Positively When You’re Anxious?

Have you ever noticed how easily your mind can find something to worry about, even when everything seems to be going reasonably well? You might have had a perfectly pleasant day, enjoyed a conversation with a friend, finished something you’ve been putting off and perhaps even received a compliment. Yet when you settle down in the evening, what do you find yourself thinking about? Quite possibly the one thing that didn’t go according to plan.

Perhaps somebody made a slightly thoughtless remark. Maybe you forgot something you meant to do, or you’re wondering whether a friend seemed a little distracted when you spoke to them. Before long, those small concerns have taken centre stage, while everything that went well has quietly disappeared into the background.

Negative thinking and anxiety often go together, and it can be frustrating when you know you’re concentrating on the wrong things but can’t seem to help yourself. The trouble is, telling yourself to think positively isn’t necessarily the answer. If it were that simple, we’d all be wandering around feeling marvellous most of the time.

Why Does Anxiety Make Us Focus On The Negative?

Our minds have a rather useful ability to notice things that might be dangerous or troublesome. From an evolutionary point of view, paying attention to potential threats has helped human beings survive. If something could cause us harm, it’s sensible to notice it.

Unfortunately, the part of us that’s good at identifying possible problems doesn’t always distinguish particularly well between genuine danger and everyday uncertainty. When we’re anxious, we can become more sensitive to anything that suggests something might go wrong. An unanswered message, an unfamiliar physical sensation or a small mistake at work can suddenly seem much more significant than it really is.

Psychologists sometimes describe this as a negativity bias, our tendency to give unpleasant or threatening information more attention than positive or neutral experiences. Anxiety can make that tendency particularly noticeable. It doesn’t mean you’re naturally pessimistic or that there’s something wrong with your personality. You may be a cheerful, capable person who simply finds that worry takes over in certain circumstances. The difficulty is that the more attention you give those worries, the more opportunities you may find to worry.

When Your Mind Becomes Its Own Worst Critic

Negative thinking doesn’t always involve imagining disasters. Sometimes it’s much quieter than that. You might finish a presentation at work and immediately concentrate on the sentence you stumbled over, rather than the twenty minutes in which everything went perfectly well.

Or perhaps someone compliments you on something you’ve achieved, and you find yourself explaining why it wasn’t really that impressive. We can be remarkably inventive when it comes to dismissing our own successes.

A friend doesn’t reply to your message, so you wonder whether you’ve upset them. Your manager asks for a meeting, and you immediately assume you’ve done something wrong. Someone looks distracted while you’re talking, and you begin wondering whether you’re boring them. There may be dozens of perfectly ordinary explanations for these situations, but anxiety tends to favour the less reassuring possibilities.

This is where negative thinking becomes particularly exhausting. You’re not simply dealing with what happens in life. You’re also dealing with the meaning your mind continually attaches to it. And sometimes that meaning is based on very little evidence.

Why Trying To Think Positively Can Make Things Worse

You’ve probably been told to look on the bright side at some point in your life. Perhaps you’ve even said it to somebody else, with the best of intentions. There’s nothing particularly wrong with encouraging someone. But when a person is experiencing significant anxiety, being told to think positively can feel rather like being told to cheer up when they’re thoroughly miserable. It isn’t always helpful.

You might try replacing a worrying thought with a reassuring one, only to find yourself immediately arguing with it. “I’m sure the meeting will go well.” “But what if it doesn’t?” “There’s probably nothing to worry about.” “Yes, but how can I be certain?” Before long, you’ve managed to turn positive thinking into another argument with yourself.

Trying to suppress unwanted thoughts can also make them seem more persistent. If you’ve ever tried very hard not to think about something, you’ll probably know how irritatingly difficult that can be. A more useful approach is often to become curious about your thoughts rather than trying to force them to change.

Is this something I know to be true, or something I’m imagining? Am I overlooking another explanation? Is there anything useful I can do about it now? Sometimes the answer is that you don’t know what will happen, and that’s uncomfortable. But uncertainty doesn’t automatically mean something bad is going to happen.

When One Worry Leads To Another

Negative thinking can become a habit without us being particularly aware of it. Perhaps something bothers you in the morning, and you find yourself returning to it throughout the day. Each time you think about it, another possibility occurs to you. By the evening, a fairly minor concern has become a complicated collection of imagined problems.

You may even feel that thinking things through repeatedly will help you find an answer. Sometimes it does. But there’s a difference between considering a problem and repeatedly going over the same ground. If you’ve reached the point where you’re no longer discovering anything new, your thinking may have stopped being useful.

This is particularly noticeable with anticipatory anxiety, where worrying about something that hasn’t happened yet can take much of the pleasure out of the days leading up to it. Negative thinking is a little broader. It can affect how we interpret the past, how we feel about ourselves and what we notice in the present, as well as what we expect from the future. And this brings me to something I’ve always found rather interesting.

Reasons To Be Cheerful

A few years ago, I wrote about the idea of keeping a gratitude journal. I described it as setting aside your cynical inner grumpy default for a moment and looking at what’s actually good about your life. I still rather like that description.

Now, I appreciate that gratitude journalling can sound suspiciously like the sort of thing you might find in a self-help book promising to transform your entire existence before breakfast. And if you’re feeling particularly anxious or miserable, being encouraged to write down three lovely things about your day may be the last thing you want to do. But there’s a useful idea behind it.

When our attention is repeatedly drawn towards what’s wrong, we can gradually lose sight of the things that are going reasonably well. Deliberately noticing positive experiences gives those experiences a little more room. It’s not about pretending that your problems don’t exist or being grateful for things that are genuinely unpleasant. Nobody needs to feel thankful for a difficult boss, financial worries or a painful medical condition. It’s simply about recognising that those difficulties aren’t necessarily the whole story.

Perhaps somebody was unexpectedly kind to you. You enjoyed a conversation, completed a difficult task or spent half an hour doing something you love. Maybe you had a really good cup of tea. These things aren’t particularly dramatic, but they still happened. And they deserve a little attention too.

How To Keep A Gratitude Journal Without Becoming Irritatingly Cheerful

You don’t need an expensive notebook, a special app or a collection of inspirational quotations. A piece of paper will do perfectly well. Set aside a few minutes, perhaps in the evening, and think about something that went well or that you appreciated during the day.

It can help to be specific. Rather than simply writing that you’re grateful for your friends, you might remember a conversation that made you laugh or somebody who took the trouble to ask how you were feeling. You could also notice something you did well yourself. That last one can be surprisingly difficult for people who are accustomed to criticising themselves.

Perhaps you handled an awkward conversation more calmly than you expected. You managed something you’ve been avoiding or simply recognised that you’d had a difficult day and needed a rest. None of these achievements has to be enormous.

Try keeping a few notes for a couple of weeks and see what you notice. There’s no magical number of days that guarantees a new habit, and you don’t need to force yourself to do it when it feels unhelpful. The point isn’t to produce a daily list of things you ought to be grateful for. It’s to make a little more room for experiences that might otherwise go unnoticed.

Research into gratitude practices suggests they can produce modest improvements in wellbeing for some people, although the results vary. They aren’t a cure for anxiety or depression, and they shouldn’t be treated as a substitute for appropriate professional help. But as a small exercise in directing your attention, gratitude journalling may be worth exploring.

Learning To Notice The Whole Picture

There’s another way of approaching negative thinking that I often find useful. Instead of asking yourself to look for something positive, try asking whether you’re seeing the whole picture.

Imagine that you’ve had an awkward conversation with a colleague. You leave feeling embarrassed and spend the afternoon thinking about what you should have said. Your mind might be concentrating entirely on the uncomfortable moment. But what else happened?

Perhaps the conversation was difficult because you were discussing something important. Maybe you expressed yourself more clearly than you would have done a few months ago. Perhaps the other person was having a difficult day themselves. You don’t have to convince yourself that the conversation went brilliantly. It might not have done.

You can simply acknowledge that the uncomfortable interpretation isn’t necessarily the only one. That’s quite different from forced positivity.

You’re allowing yourself to consider a more balanced account of what happened, rather than automatically accepting the most critical version. Over time, becoming aware of these habits can help you recognise when anxiety is influencing the way you interpret everyday situations.

When Negative Thinking Is Part Of A Wider Anxiety Problem

Sometimes negative thinking is a temporary response to a difficult period in life. At other times, it becomes so persistent that it affects your confidence, relationships, sleep or willingness to do things. You may find yourself constantly questioning decisions, looking for reassurance or imagining that ordinary situations will end badly.

In my work with people experiencing anxiety, I’m interested in understanding these individual patterns. What happens when a worrying thought appears? How do you respond to it? What do you find yourself doing to feel more comfortable? For some people, the problem is closely connected with particular experiences or situations. For others, the tendency to expect difficulties has become so familiar that they hardly notice it happening.

Hypnotherapy, sometimes alongside cognitive behavioural techniques and practical exercises, can be used to explore these responses and practise different ways of thinking and reacting. The aim isn’t to make somebody permanently cheerful or convince them that life will always go according to plan. That would be neither realistic nor particularly useful. What matters is developing a greater ability to recognise when thoughts are helpful, when they’re unnecessarily frightening and when it’s time to give something else your attention.

You Don’t Have To Be Positive All The Time

I think there’s something rather liberating about accepting that we don’t have to feel positive about everything. Some days are difficult. People can be inconsiderate, plans go wrong and there are times when being worried or unhappy is a perfectly reasonable response to what’s happening.

The problem isn’t having negative thoughts. It’s when those thoughts begin to dominate our experience, leaving very little room for anything else. Perhaps the answer isn’t to try harder to think positively, but to become a little more aware of what you’re paying attention to.

Notice what’s worrying you, certainly. Deal with problems when there’s something useful you can do. But try not to overlook the ordinary pleasures, small successes and moments of kindness that are also part of your day. Your cynical inner grumpy default may still have plenty to say. You don’t necessarily have to give it the final word.