The 3-Step Process To Transforming Your Negative Thoughts Into Positive Action

This is for moms all over who are dealing with doubts, fears, and limiting beliefs. 

It was 3:30am and I was lying in bed staring up into the darkness, my stomach in knots. I was feeling a crippling anxiety and it was getting worse by the hour. Earlier, I had tried many things to fall asleep: meditation, reading a book, writing -- but nothing was working. My child was happily sleeping in his crib in the other room. 

So what gives? Is this what being a mom really felt like? Shouldn’t this be the most joyful time of my life? Am I a terrible person for not being happier right now? Questions swirled around my head in a whirlpool of discontentment. 

Most people are familiar with postpartum depression and how common it is. But according to one Canadian study, perinatal anxiety (a condition that can cause women to feel a constant, paralyzing sense of worry and make them unable to eat or sleep) could, in fact, be more prevalent than postpartum depression. While I wasn’t medically diagnosed with these conditions, I still felt miserable. 

Regardless of whether you have these conditions or not, as a mom, it’s absolutely normal to feel heightened states of anxiety. After all, the stakes in life are even higher. There’s a little person now in this world whose life is unequivocally intertwined with yours and he / she depends on you. 

So how did I get through this dizzying spiral of worry and transform my negative emotions into something positive? 

After reading several books about happiness and scouring many blogs and news articles, I noticed some key ideas emerge. These ideas have been distilled down into a three-step process below.

​Step one: Write your emotions down. 
Countless studies have supported how writing down emotions may ease stress and trauma. And this is simple enough to do, but it’s often surprising how few people actually put this into practice. 

There a number of ways you can go about the process of getting your feelings recorded. Likely, the most efficient and effective process to getting in tune with your emotions is to create a list.

Step two: Reframe your emotions. 
Thoughts are simply thoughts -- they are not reality. They are narrow viewpoints of what you’re thinking that moment. According to the Dalai Lama in the “Art of Happiness,” “narrow-mindedness only looks at the short term, ignores the wider picture, and can lead to extreme thinking. And this creates problems.” 

For example, worrying about being a terrible mother is a form of extreme thinking. No parent is perfect, but is this worry grounded on anything real? By adopting a wider perspective, and reframing your worry from another angle, you can take yourself outside of your limiting, extreme view. This new angle is likely a more accurate picture of your reality. 

Step three: Convert your emotions into positive action.
Now that you’ve made progress on transforming your negative emotions into something positive, jotting down the actions you can take to further liberate yourself is also valuable. Writing down your actions and executing on them transforms your perceived reality into actual reality. It’s important to start smaller with something you know you can achieve so you feel like you’re making progress towards changing your overall mental state. 

So how exactly did this process play out for me? Take a look at my exercise below as a guide to help you process your own thoughts.