Struggling to Think Positive? Why Negative Thinking May be the True Key to Success
By Alexine Jackman BMedSci(hons), MBBS, CSMC
Published March 21st 2025
Reading Time: 10 Minutes
When negative thoughts take over your mind it can feel like a dark cloud rolling in on a previously sunny day.
Interrupting your plans, consuming your focus and leaving you feeling gloomy, dark and grey.
Maybe worry, self-doubt and what-ifs hit you out of nowhere, like a sudden burst of torrential rain.
Or maybe your racing thoughts and negative self-talk are chronic and persistent, like a steady drizzle on an overcast day.
Whatever you experience, much like the inevitable shifts in weather, negative thoughts are here to stay.
But learning how to navigate the mental storm can be a bit more complicated than grabbing an umbrella or finding shelter from the rain.
The Truth About Positive Thinking
There are lots of tools for managing negative thoughts.
And maybe you've tried some of them, like meditation, mindfulness, cognitive reframing, positive affirmations, journaling, practicing gratitude, grounding or breathwork.
But what no one tells you is the hidden reality behind many of these methods.
And how often they work until, well, they just don't.
And whether you're battling with affirmations that feel awkward and just won't stick, feel like you're gaslighting yourself when you label rational fears as irrational "distortions", or you're part of the 1 in 4 people who experience meditation side effects.
You're not alone and you're not imagining it.
Negative thoughts have a sneaky way of coming back up to the surface despite drowning them in positivity, being in our bodies or staying in the moment.
And if there's one thing worse than negative thinking, it's the guilt and despair that comes from struggling to vanquish it.
Ater all, if mindset is the key to success, then what does it mean if you can't seem to hack it?
And if negative thoughts are due to a dysfunctional, traumatized or dysregulated brain, then how can you win against it?
Well, despite the bad rap that negative thoughts have gathered, negative thinking might not be as dysfunctional as we think.
And to show you how negative thoughts can function as physiological helpers, designed to help you overcome, succeed and win, we need to visit a unique time and place.
Not the psychology or self-help world, or your difficult past or tumultuous childhood.
But the intriguing space of the primitive landscape.
Negative Thoughts and the Primitive Landscape
In primitive days, life revolved around navigating the physical, primitive landscape.
And overcoming physical challenges that you stumbled across as you foraged for food, collected water, and built shelter, like a river that you needed to get across or a boulder blocking your pathway.
Now, imagine yourself in the primitive landscape, off to gather some juicy berries when you encounter that river that you need to get across. (Or if you have aphantasia, it's fine to just think about it).
Up against this physical challenge, what would happen to your mental focus, processes and overall mental state?
As you prepare to cross the river, you might find yourself zooming in on any pitfalls that you might face, like pockets of turbulent water, or the presence of high winds. Prompting you to avoid difficult areas and more effectively brace yourself.
As you cross, your focus might zoom in on the water in front of you, blocking out everything else around you, so you could carefully take the next step.
You might notice bad weather off in the distance or darkness closing in, driving you to move a little faster so you can get those berries and get back to your cave.
And if you were nursing an injury that could slow you down, you might hesitate a bit, assessing whether to push forward or try again with an earlier start on a clearer day.
And these mental changes would help you not just to successfully cross the river, but to do so in a way that supported the efficiency and integrity of your physiological state.
Negative Thoughts Meet Modern Day
Fast forward to modern day and instead of foraging for food, collecting water and building shelter, we spend our days navigating work, managing relationships and maintaining hobbies and leisure pursuits.
And instead of crossing rivers and pushing boulders aside, we face modern-day challenges like financial struggles, difficult people and relationship conflict.
But even though the landscape looks different, the way that our mental processes respond to it looks much the same.
Like think about a current, past or future challenge that you face.
Do you find yourself zooming in on all the things that could go wrong like our brains zoomed in on pitfalls in the primitive landscape?
Do you find yourself zooming on challenges and struggling to focus on anything else? Like your brain zoomed in on the river and taking the next step?
Do you become more aware of possible future challenges and feel an increase in urgency and tension as you prepare for the, like you felt with bad weather and darkness approaching in the primitive landscape?
And do you zoom in on your weaknesses causing you to hesitate until you can find a way to manage them? Like you took action to manage your injuries in the primitve landscape?
In primitive times these patterns didn't have names, but now we give them labels, like the negative mental patterns of negative focus, tunnel vision, fear of the future and self-doubt.
But just like the primitive landscape, these patterns play an important role in helping us not just to successfully assess, prepare for and navigate the challenges that we face but to optimize and guard our physiological integrity as navigate the challenges of the modern landscape.