Negative thought disposal

We are all prone to negative thoughts on occasion. That’s OK but you don’t want to let that negativity become a regular part of your consciousness because there is plenty of evidence to show that negative thought patterns produce negative health outcomes. There is lots of advice as to how create a positive mindset but a first step to that is banishing those negative thoughts. A new study has suggested that all you need to do is throw them away.

The study involved subjects being asked to write down either positive or negative thoughts about their own body. All of the subjects were asked to then look back at the thoughts they had just written down. Half of them were asked to think about their thoughts and check their grammar, while the other half were asked to throw them in the rubbish bin. As part of the instruction for throwing the thoughts away the subjects were told, “Your thoughts do not have to remain with you”. Then all subjects rated their bodies on three nine-point scales (bad to good, unattractive to attractive, and like to dislike).

For those who kept their thoughts and checked them there was a direct relationship between what they had written about their bodies and how they then rated them. If they wrote more positive thoughts they then rated themselves more positively and so on for the negative side. However, when people threw away their thoughts that relationship disappeared. It was as if those original thoughts had not existed.

Subsequent studies showed that this principle held true for doing the same process on a computer but instead of physically putting the thoughts in a bin the subjects used a mouse to click and drag them to the recycling bin. Interestingly, simply imagining throwing the thoughts away did not have the same liberating effect as actually doing it (either by hand or by mouse).

Your choice then is to magnify your negative thoughts by keeping them close to you, or you can free yourself of them by throwing them away.

Based on this, a first step to improving our democracy might be to have bigger rubbish bins placed inside parliament house.