Negative thinking has a significant impact on our daily lives, from our physical health to the way we feel. Perhaps the largest impact, however, is on how we interact with others. Negative thought patterns often make us doubt our own abilities and serve to reaffirm negative beliefs about ourselves.
In fact, a lot of the social anxiety we feel rests entirely on patterns of negative thinking. Thoughts like “everybody thinks I’m annoying,” “nobody likes me,” or “my boss thinks I’m incompetent” can leave us distracted and unable or unwilling to engage with others to our fullest potential. The effects of negative thinking on our social skills can take many forms, and it can help to understand some of the most common symptoms.
Unwilling to Engage in Social Situations
Negative thinking often takes the form of jumping to conclusions, both about what others are thinking and about what the future could hold. Thoughts like “Other people find me boring” and “I would embarrass myself at that party” may lead you to avoid social situations altogether. You may find yourself justifying this by thinking that the people would probably prefer that you were not there anyway and that they would have a better time without you.
This can also result from overgeneralization, which occurs when one negative experience is used as a reason to assume all future encounters will proceed the same way. This can lead to significant limitations on the way you live your life. For example, embarrassing yourself in just one get-together with coworkers may leave you thinking that any future outings would end the same way, regardless of how unlikely this is.
Difficulty Communicating with Others
Negative thinking may leave you nervous and fearful of engaging in communication with others. This can occur when you engage in emotional reasoning, which is a pattern of negative thinking that commonly takes the form of believing that if you feel something, it must be true.
This means that if you feel anxious in a social situation, you may believe that there is actually something to be feared, which can leave you feeling even more nervous and prevent you from engaging in meaningful communications with others.
Damaging Meaningful Relationships
Negative thinking can play a major role in how we feel as well as our outlooks on ourselves and others. Negative thinking can lead to feelings of doubt and destructive behaviors, including
- Blaming others for everything
- Overdramatizing situations
- Continuously focusing on what could have gone better in the past
- Continuously seeking the approval of others
- Avoiding confrontation of relationship issues
These behaviors can lead to self-loathing and the avoidance of creating new meaningful relationships. This can also damage existing relationships with others, such as family, friends, and romantic partners.
Fighting Negative Thinking
Negative thinking, both conscious and subconscious, can have a very powerful effect on emotions and behaviors as it contributes to social anxiety disorder. It is important to overcome these thought patterns, and here are a few ways you can get started.
Look for Perspective
It is easy to exaggerate negative situations in your mind and blow their significance completely out of proportion. Words like “always” and “disastrous” may appear in your thinking, but these words are highly unlikely to actually describe a situation despite their significant impact on your thought patterns.
Try to think logically about the impact of perceived negative events and how you might view them if they occurred to a friend instead of yourself. Chances are that even if you really did make a mistake, it was not that big of a deal. Think of what impact it will really have a month or a year down the line.
Journal Your Negative Thoughts
It can help to write down your negative thoughts and revisit them later when you are in a calmer mood. Not only can the act of putting your thoughts down on paper help to organize your thoughts, but by reading them later, you can view them with a different perspective and judge what merit they have—if any. Revisiting these thoughts in a different state of mind, you can see if they still make sense or if the situation was not as it seemed at the time. If there is any merit, then you can look for ways to cope.
Practice Makes Perfect
Practicing positive thinking while you are in social situations can help. After a while, you will likely find that you no longer think of social situations in such negative terms. One possible option is to take a class at a social skills center, whether online or in person. This could give you a chance to be in social situations with other people who have the same approach to them as you, and this may make you more comfortable practicing your new skills. However you choose to practice positive thinking, just keep at it. Things will get better if you try.
Final Thoughts
It is not easy to become more positive once you get into the habit of negative thinking. Negative thinking involves doubting yourself, which can make it more difficult to make an effort to change things. But if you start making some of the changes recommended in this article, you should start to see some positive changes, and in time, with practice, you should be able to overcome your habit of negative thinking.
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