By Seppo | Natural News

In the midst of all the insecurities humanity is facing these days the question begs to be asked: ‘How do we avoid thinking of all this negativity?’ It would seem that it is almost impossible to avoid negative thinking; however, according to a recent study, there is a simple way.

The study carried out at Universidad Autonoma de Madrid in Spain, by researchers, Pablo Brinol, Margarita Gasco, Javier Horcajo and Richard Petty explored the theory that when people write their thoughts down on paper and then discard or keep that paper, they mentally discard or strengthen the thoughts at the same time.

There are already several methods employed by psychologists who encourage patients to discard their negative thoughts in some way but one of the researchers, Richard Petty, professor of psychology at Ohio State University, said that as far as he was aware, this was the first study that actually validated the approach. The idea that thoughts can be discarded or protected as though they were material objects might seem a little farfetched to some but the results speak for themselves.

“At some level, it can sound silly. But we found that it really works-by physically throwing away or protecting your thoughts, you influence how you end up using those thoughts. Merely imagining engaging in these actions has no effect.”

The study, which was split into three related experiments involved Spanish high school students. In the first experiment participants were given three minutes to write down positive and negative thoughts about their bodies. Once they had done that, researchers then asked half the students to throw their thoughts in the trash and the other half to correct their thoughts for grammar and spelling errors. According to Petty, students who threw their thoughts away no longer considered the thoughts, whether they were negative or positive:

“When they threw their thoughts away, they didn’t consider them anymore, whether they were positive or negative,” Petty said.

Interestingly, students who simply corrected their thoughts were influenced by them later when rating their bodies, whether those thoughts were positive or negative. So from the first experiment alone, the researchers were able to distinguish a clear difference between the two groups and back up what they had already suspected – thoughts become stronger or weaker depending on what you do with them in a physical sense.

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