“Rapid Fire Facts” a tool to increase positivy

Negative thoughts often enter your mind without your conscious decision to think of something negative. Most of us find it easier to come up with a negative thought than with a positive. Without wanting it, you can spend a lot of your thinking time thinking negative stuff.

Barbara Fredrickson describes tools to increase your positivity in her book Positivity. Here is a simple tool she describes, which is adapted from the Penn Resiliency Program and which helps to overcome negative thinking.

Write down a typical negative thought that could pop up in your mind, such as “overslept again”, “I can’t do it”, “nobody loves me”. It is important that the negative thought is realistic in the sense that it actually pops up in your mind sometimes. The negative sentence represents your inner critic, the skeptical voice that you sometimes hear in your mind and which undermines you. The idea is to write these thoughts on index cards. After you have written the cards with some of your regular negative sentences, pick one up at random and read it out loud. Then the “Rapid Fire Facts” part starts. This is the part in which you rapidly dispute the negative beliefs with every argument you can come up with. You rapidly fire contradicting facts at your negative sentence. When you run out of facts, pick another card and repeat the positive rapid fire facts. Coming up with contradictory facts may get easier and easier with each card.

With this tool you learn to become quick at contradicting these negative thoughts. You “nip them in the bud” before they get a chance to depress you.