Word of Wellness: Ending the Cycle of Negativity

When we become stuck in a loop of negativity, it can be hard to find a way to make change. Life often works in cycles. Our simple everyday choices have an effect on much more of our lives than we want to concede. Everything is ever-changing yet it seems to be so easy to find ourselves tunneling into a negative loop. It can become quite exhausting and almost seem unchangeable, but how can we break this cycle?

First, it’s important to understand and recognize that it is impossible to remain positive all the time. Emotions and weird phases are part of the human experience, we can’t deny the existence of negativity entirely. (However, you can learn perseverance in any situation.) Happiness gains its value from the existence of an opposite. Negative emotions are not always bad. It is important to experience the bad just as well as the good, and it’s important to feel the bad things that make us human, but sometimes we are the ones at the fault of our own suffering. Toxic positivity is a big issue in social media. We are told that certain steps like “just think positive!” and “simple self-care!” are utterly life changing, and while those mindsets can be helpful to some people, it doesn’t help the majority of people feeling lost in their negative loop. Toxic positivity is just as bad as negativity. It’s a glamourized idea of reality.

 Student Journalist Eden Neihoff had her own comment on the topic. “You always see things on social media platforms like TikTok saying ‘How to be THAT girl in 2023.’, ‘Self-care changes your life’, ‘You have to be productive!’ They make it seem like life is supposed to be perfect- like feeling unmotivated isn’t normal. Everyone tries to tell you what your life should look like but not how to actually make it happen. We’re told that we have to become constantly happy in order to have a meaningful life, but we’re never taught how to actually do it.” This mindset that everything will become a perfect utopia is harmful, as we are all human and we can’t always escape our feelings. Nonetheless, sometimes our negative cycles are unnecessary. Understand that your emotions are all under your control. We create our own reality, and a large portion of our suffering as humans is self-made. life will not always be positive, but the rough patches often have something to teach us. Either way, they are never permanent. We can still control how we react to given situations. Acceptance itself is already a big leap in change.

Give yourself grace. You are the only one with yourself 24/7, it is highly important that you create a positive relationship with yourself. A good relationship with self creates a foundation for everything else in your life. Surely you’ve heard the term “You can’t love someone else if you don’t love yourself first.” sometime in your life. And while you can obviously experience love for other people, your love becomes more prosperous and beneficial to others when you learn to give yourself the love you need. The way you speak to yourself should be beneficial and uplifting. The way we speak to ourselves has a huge impact on our entire day-to-day lives. Treating yourself with the same kindness and patience you would give others is a great way to develop self-love. It is also a more realistic form of self care. Real self care often looks more like fundamental actions, simple things that we don’t realize are regular. Become self aware, study your actions, thoughts, and words. Realize that you are a person deserving of good things, and you have the power to create it. Perhaps, for instance, you’re spending too much time on your phone, which is only compelling you to continue lazy habits. Maybe you’re letting the little nagging negative thoughts about your friends completely navigate how you treat them. These habits are blinding and unproductive. They blind your focus on what’s truly important, and they distract you from your purpose. To start, you need to recognize that you are producing these negative habits and thoughts.

Change is not always a grand epiphany; start small. Take things slowly. Your life isn’t always going to be a picturesque self-care routine with no rough edges. Healing, change, and positivity are real experiences that can start with the smallest choice of action. You can build good habits consciously just as you built the bad ones. Sometimes a starting point can be intimidating, but it really doesn’t have to be. Work on your state within and over time your outside world will follow. In being conscious of your actions, you may catch yourself feeling things like judgment or even self-judgment. These thoughts are not because we truly feel them, but rather because there is something bigger at the root. Identify what the problem really is and move on from there. Break the loop and build that new foundation. Creating positive actions eventually creates good habits, which eventually creates a positive loop. 

The possibility of peace is already within you. You have the ability to take control of your life, to take control of this negative cycle that seems immovable, and turn it around to profit you. In most cases you are the source of your life’s outcome. But when we allow ourselves to ignore change and stick in this negative loop, we’re furthering it just by being stagnant. We aren’t allowing ourselves to be in the present, and we aren’t being self-aware.

“When we find ourselves in these negative loops, we lose sense of what there is to be thankful for; because all we’re doing is producing negative action after negative action. Then we start to fog our own lens up- our own sight up. And then we don’t see the world for what it truly is, we see it from a place of resentment, we see it from a place of worry- a place of fear. But we know the strongest vibration we need to move in is a loving vibration.” stated wellness podcaster HINDZ in an episode about negative cycles.

Losing that healthy connection with yourself has a major impact on the negative cycle you’re in. Remember that you are in control of your life and how you shape it.