Positive thinking is a good thing. But without being vigilant about the power of negative thinking, all the good thoughts in the world will not defeat negativity if you give it space to flourish.

Are you convinced that in order to succeed at anything, you must think the right types of thoughts? As a result, do you often try to fix your thinking? If so, what you're actually doing is thwarting the success you want so badly.

Do you have that negative voice in your head, the one that just won't go away and keeps telling you what a mess you are? If so, it doesn't mean you're crazy. In fact, it actually means you're programmed well to stay alive.

By Christie Wilcox for YouBeauty.com Take a moment and think about where you will be in five years. What will change between now and then? What wil...

If you, too, struggle with a restless, anxious mind, you've probably noticed that the chatter can be especially negative and annoying at the most inopportune moments.

I often see patients in my psychotherapy practice who are unable to make changes in their life and do not understand why they keep sabotaging their efforts. Usually this is due to a hidden resistance or unwholesome belief associated with the desired change.

Whether self or externally generated, our thoughts set the stage for how we feel, perceive, act, and react. When a thought makes itself at home in our brains, it prompts the formation of neural pathways that prove highly resistant to change.

By learning to control our thoughts, we slowly, ever so slowly learn to control our emotions -- without sacrificing our capacity to feel. As we control our emotions, we ever so slowly alter our perceptions.

What's the alternative when your negative emotions take center stage? The simple answer is to use them to get back on course.

When you stop and consider how many thought-seeds are blown, dropped, or purposefully planted in your mind on a daily basis, it may cause you to tend to your mental garden with a bit more regularity.

There are certain types of meditations where you simply sit and notice that you are "here" and your mind is out "there." There is a clear distance between you and the mind.

As we intentionally practice and repeat having these experiences they get stored as implicit memories. These are the memories that influence our immediate snap judgments and decision making from moment-to-moment.

The moment I realized I was lost, there was an immediate surge of fear. In situations like these, where we suddenly experience an intense emotion, we often find ourselves facing a storm of "what-if" scenarios.

We cannot always control our thoughts, especially when life comes unhinged. But that makes it all the more important to control the thoughts that are manageable.

For the most part, we're so used to our negative thinking that we aren't even aware when we're doing it. Consequently, we need to listen closely to the content of our thoughts, and we need to hear our words as we speak them.

A lot of people sit at home, dwell on the negative, getting deeper and deeper in their depression. Psychologists call this style of repetitive negative thoughts "rumination."

Taking in the good is a brain-science savvy and psychologically skillful way to improve how you feel, get things done, and treat others. Three simple steps on taking in the good.

Conscious forgetting means letting go of the event, to not insist it stay in the foreground, but rather allow it to be relegated to the background or move off stage.