Negativity limits your potential to become something great and live a fulfilling, purposeful life. It has a tangible effect on our health, too.
Research has shown that people who cultivate negative energy experience more stress, more sickness, and less opportunity over the course of their lives than those who choose to live positively.
Learning how to get rid of negative energy can have a significant effect on your mental health.
When we make a decision to become positive and follow that decision up with action, we will begin to encounter situations and people that are also positive.
Although negative and positive energy will always exist, the key to becoming positive is to limit the amount of negativity that we experience by filling ourselves up with more positivity.
Here’s how to get rid of negative energy and become more positive:
1. Laugh more, especially at yourself
Becoming positive means taking life less seriously and letting yourself off the hook. This is the only life that you get to live, so why not lighten up your mood?
Laughter helps us become positive by lightening our mood and reminding us not to take life so seriously. Are you sensitive to light sarcasm? Do you have trouble laughing at jokes? Usually, people who are stressed out and overly serious get most offended by sarcasm because their life is all work and no play.
2. Help others
Negativity goes hand in hand with selfishness. People that live only for themselves have no higher purpose in their lives. If the whole point of this world is only to take care of yourself and no one else, the road to long-term fulfillment and purpose is going to be a long one. To learn how to get rid of negative energy, look outside yourself and begin to help others.
Helping others will give you an intangible sense of value that will translate into positivity, and people might just appreciate you in the process.
3. Direct your thinking away from negative energy
We can either be our best coach or our best enemy. Change starts from within. If you want to become more positive, change the wording of your thoughts. We are the hardest on ourselves, and a stream of negative self-talk is corrosive to a positive life.
Changing our self-talk is powerful. If this is particularly difficult for you, try to sneak in some meditation each day to absorb negative energy. Meditation offers your mind the space to identify negative energy and let it be with you in order to be analyzed and accepted. You will learn to identify negative thoughts and neutralize them with true words.
4. Surround yourself with positive people
We become most like the people that we surround ourselves with. If our friend group is full of negative energy-suckers and drama queens, we will emulate that behavior and become like them. It is very difficult to become more positive when the people around us don’t support or demonstrate positive behavior.
Change is scary, but cutting out the negative people in your life is a huge step to becoming more positive. Positive people reflect and bounce their perspectives on to one another. Positivity is a step-by-step process when you do it solo, but a positive group of friends can be an escalator.
5. Turn negative energy into positive action
Negative energy and thoughts can be overwhelming and challenging to navigate. Negativity is usually accompanied by a “freak-out” response, especially when tied to relationships, people, and worrying about the future. This is debilitating to becoming positive and usually snowballs into more worry, more stress, and more freak-outs. If you’re learning how to get rid of negative energy, you need to turn this into positive action.
Taking yourself out of the emotionally-charged negative by moving into the action-oriented positive will help you solve more problems rationally and live in positivity.
