You have probably heard it’s important to think positively, but sometimes that’s easier said than done! If you’ve ever tried to monitor your thoughts and change your worrying into optimism, you’ve quickly found out how hard that is to do!

Sometimes it seems like our thoughts have a mind of their own and they are thinking us. Just try to stop thinking about something you don’t want to think about, and you’ll see exactly what I mean!

The harder you try to stop thinking about something you don’t want to think about – the more you think about it!

This is because we all have habitual patterns of thoughts that have a lot of energy and momentum attached to them.

A lot of these habits of thinking were learned when we were kids, and they are based on beliefs that feel true.

Remember the Law of Attraction? Well, it helps you out (maybe not so much) by continually feeding you more thoughts that feel like what you’ve previously been thinking. This makes it almost impossible to just stop thinking about them!

Also, there is something called “Negativity Bias” that comes into play. Your brain is programmed to look for and focus on potential problems and threats.

Our tendency to pay more attention to bad things and overlook good things is likely a result of evolution. Earlier in human history, paying attention to bad, dangerous, and negative threats in the world was literally a matter of life and death.

Those who were more attuned to danger and who paid more attention to the bad things around them were more likely to survive.

This tendency to dwell on the negative more than the positive is one way the brain tries to keep us safe.

• The human brain has between 50,000 to 70,000 thoughts per day which equates to about one thought per second of every hour you are awake.
• 95 percent of those thoughts are the same thoughts you had yesterday and the day before and the day before that.
• 80 percent of those habitual thoughts are negative for most people!
• Which means that the average person has more than 45,000 negative thoughts a day!

How Do You Change Those Thoughts?

So, what can you do? Are you doomed to keep thinking what you’ve always thought? No! Absolutely not!

But changing your thoughts can be a bit tricky because you can’t just make a decision to start thinking more positively if that has not been your habit in the past. It is too much of a change in the frequencies – you’ll be working against the power of the Law of Attraction and also your mind, which likes what’s familiar to it.

Your Mind Likes What’s Familiar

Your mind likes what’s familiar to it because what it already knows feels safe, and because of the neural pathways that are formed when you do something over and over again. These neural pathways make it much easier to think and do what you’ve always done before.

But you can make what’s been a familiar habit of thought, unfamiliar by focusing on and putting your attention on something else, something new, something you want that feels good when you think it!

When you consistently focus on something new for about 30 days, you create a new neural pathway in your brain which makes the “new thought” feel “familiar” and eventually it becomes a new positive, habitual pattern of thinking.

That is what you are doing with the Appreciation Game. You are creating new positive habits of thought and new patterns of thinking about things

You are creating habits of thought that feel really good when you think them!

Today, become a seeker of what is working and what’s right and what you like best about everything and everyone!

Give your mind the job of seeking blessings, beauty and goodness wherever you are, whoever you are with and no matter what you are doing, look for things to appreciate!

Give it a try and let me know how it goes. – Bonnie