Hour One: Your Starter Package of Strategies for Tipping the Ratio
If you understand the main aim — to tip the ratio of positive to negative thoughts — it is essential that, when you start doing it, you have a clear perspective on where this is going.
This is going to be a list that helps you start from minute one.
I call it “semantic loosening“.
Semantic loosening is what you need to focus on first, because the following strategies will be so much easier when your ratio gets more and more in the direction of tipping the ratio.
Semantic Loosening: The Basis Where You Start
Semantic loosening needs four factors.
Factor One: Realising That a Thought Is Not Beneficial
Something that is ruminating on a non-semantic level can only be recognised when it is deliberately put into proper sentences or words.
Sometimes you have a sense of a thought, or a mere rumination in the back of your mind, and then it is not so easy to detect it. But once you think, “Oh, what was I thinking about? What weird, blurry things are happening in the back of my head?” then you will usually be able to name it.
It might be a bad expectation, a slight worry, or a negative thought.
Factor Two: Becoming More and More Aware of Your Thoughts with Mindfulness
This is the main strategy for getting better at factor one! You will pay more and more attention to your thoughts and you will actually be aware of what you are thinking. Not only sometimes, but over longer periods of time.
The more you practise mindfulness meditation, awareness, or simply being in the moment and being aware of the moment, the more it will help you investigate your thoughts and really get a clue about how detrimental or bad they are.
Factor Three: Examine Problematic Thoughts
Once you have really mastered factors one and two, you will notice negative thoughts.
For instance, when you drop a can of tomatoes, you might usually think, “Oh, I’m so dumb.” Maybe, at times, you would not even know that you are thinking that.
But now, if you get awareness of the rumination and maybe can even put it into words, you realise, “Oh, this is a negative thought.”
You will become more and more able to examine problematic thoughts. You realise: “Okay, I was just insulting myself because I dropped a can of tomatoes.”
Factor Four: The Donut-and-Carrots Strategy
This is the moment where the fourth factor comes in: the donut-and-carrots strategy I mentioned before. This is something you can use to tip the ratio.
In the tomato example, it could mean thinking: “Nobody is perfect, and a little clumsiness might even make people find me more likeable than if I were perfect.”
Or you could even find it funny that you drop things.
And this is actually what happens if you get more and more positive: you might even just laugh about your clumsiness because of your altered thoughts.
After Semantic Loosening: Gratitude Becomes Easier
After semantic loosening, it gets so, so much easier, because your mood lightens up massively.
Gratitude becomes easier and easier. Use it in the mornings. Make a short list of things, humans, and events you are grateful for.
Engage in feeling grateful when driving your car, travelling, waiting, and so on.
There is even a second layer of gratitude for me. When I am queuing at Lidl and realise that I am grateful, I tend to become more and more grateful. It feels so good: I feel gratitude about knowing about this, and about being grateful, being in the moment, and feeling this good feeling of gratitude.
There is a level of knowing: I am right here, and I initiated the feeling that I am feeling right now.
When Others Are Bored – You Are Entertained
Let’s say you are anywhere on the brink of getting bored. Do Metta meditation, or Ho’oponopono, any mindfulness practice, or the grandparents/ ancestors game.
The ancestors game is not something I invented. I think it is a Buddhist practice.
Imagine walking around with a very curious ancestor. I imagine my grandma Marianne, because she was always stunned by human inventions and science.
Talk to them in your mind about the things you have, the things you can do, and the things they do not know about — things they would never have expected to be possible.
It is such a fun game.
