If you are one of those unlucky souls who are plagued with negative thoughts all the time, you should try to be more in tune with your emotions. When you feel a certain way, try to understand what exactly made that emotion come on. You may have to stop right in your place and try to figure out why you felt the emotion.
When you feel sad, try to understand what caused it. If it is you being self-conscious about something, you now know something that you need to try to fix. They are not always easy, but as long as you're putting forth an effort you are doing what is necessary to make your life better. Being happy is all that truly matters. We all know in our mind that most truly positive fixes are not quick. Unfortunately we know it, but do not realize it for our own problems. Most truly good fixes are lifestyle changes, people put too much emphasis on how it will make them seem to those around them instead of how it will benefit them. Imagine your family member was extremely obese. You see them working their butt off trying to lose weight, they are down because it is a slow process. As they feel down, you think they're a champion. Why is it that we feel that way for others but not ourselves? I think it is that we all have this role model in our head of who we want to be, and who we want everyone to see us as. Most media pushes negative role models, so we should look twice at the role model in our head. Is it what we truly want, or what we think is popular? Try to find the things in life that you feel are important.
Negative Visualization
[The Stoics] recommended that we spend time imagining that we have lost the things we value—that our wife has left us, our car was stolen, or we lost our job. Doing this, the Stoics thought, will make us value our wife, our car, and our job more than we otherwise would. This technique—let us refer to it as negative visualization—was employed by the Stoics at least as far back as Chrysippus. It is, I think, the single most valuable technique in the Stoics' psychological tool kit.
A very thing to note is trying to recall things that made you happy each day. Try to learn one thing each day, no matter how small and recall what it was at the end of the day. I suggest having a piece of paper until you reach the point where it becomes a habit. This has had made my life much more positive. It sounds so simple that you would not believe it works, but I assure you it does. Aim for at least three things that made you happy, smile, or laugh every single day. Try to find something you learned each day too, no matter how small. For example, one day at work we were tasked to rake around the entire building before we could leave. We filled over 50 trash bags, it took a very long time. One of our higher ranking individuals showed me a trick, he owned a landscaping business and showed us a way to rake even faster than we thought. That may sound stupid to you all, but it was a pretty big turning point in my life. At that moment I realized everyone has a little bit of something they really know. Someone has at least one little thing they can teach you. For instance, I had a roommate who was so stupid that he didn't even know how to register an online account because he didn't know that they don't let you skip the e-mail section. He spent twenty minutes asking me why it wouldn't let him go before I looked and saw the problem. He asked me "how do I go to irs.com" as a serious question. He ended up trying to teach me how to track stuff in the wilderness, I am an idiot when it comes to that. You can learn something from everyone, try to keep that in mind when you are writing people off left and right(I too still have a few problems remembering this all the time)
I had more in my mind, but I am too tired and forgot it for now. Hopefully someone takes something away from this, perception is everything.