thought on Negative Emotions

You will always find what you are looking for. Think about the difference between two birds: a vulture and a hummingbird. Vultures soar high in the sky, looking and searching. What does a vulture find...

One of my continual battles is the one that happens in my own heart and mind. I continue to discover and fight negative patterns of thought and emotion that are shaped less by Jesus and more by the wo...

Many of us tend to be passive with our thoughts and feelings. We treat them like they rule us, like they are in charge of us, and not the other way around. We forget that our thoughts and feelings are...

Did you know that more has been discovered about our minds in the last twenty years than in all the time before that? Did you know that an estimated 60 to 80 percent of visits to primary care physicia...

In recent years, an entire discipline of modern psychology has developed called cognitive behavioral therapy. This breakthrough teaching reveals that many problems, from eating disorders to relational...

I began to see a pattern at work in many of us. Our emotions were leading us to thoughts, and those thoughts were dictating our decisions, and our decisions were determining behaviors, and then the be...

The way you think determines the way you feel, and the way you feel determines the way you act.

A remarkable aspect of your mental life is that you are rarely stumped.

The average person has more than thirty thousand thoughts per day. Of those, so many are negative that “according to researchers, the vast majority of the illnesses that plague us today are a direct r...

What Determines Happiness?  Imagine a movie theater full of a hundred people. These hundred individuals represent the full continuum of happiness: Some are exceptionally happy, others less so, and ...

The insight that we can exercise some control over our thoughts and feelings is deep in Christianity.

In the first chapter of her book, Get Out of Your Head , author Jennie Allen shares a vulnerable and honest moment from her own life about just how hard it can be to focus in a world of distraction...

To most people nothing is more troublesome than the effort of thinking.

But it’s not so simple, that sort of “quiet hour”. It has to be learned. A lot of unimportant inner litter and bits and pieces have to be swept out first. Even a small head can be piled high inside wi...

When we have the same thought again, the line of the original thought is deepened, causing what's called a memory trace. With each repetition the trace goes deeper and deeper, forming and embeddin...

Those who can’t change their minds can’t change anything.

There is no way out of one’s inner life, so one had better get into it. On the inward and downward spiritual journey, the only way out is through.

Too often we give real estate to things in our lives that either haven’t earned their land or were never meant to occupy important space in the first place.

I have never wished to cater to the crowd; for what I know they do not approve, and what they approve I do not know.

If we examine our thoughts, we shall find them always occupied with the past and the future.

My thought it is a wanton ranger,  It skips away;  I fear 'twill bring my soul in danger  On Judgment Day...

An elderly man had horrible nightmares, the same event happening over and over in his dreams. He would dream that an enormous green dragon was chasing him, and he would become frantic. Then, just abou...

The great irony of our time is that even as we are living longer, we are thinking shorter.

It is often said that second thoughts are best. So they are in matters of judgment but not in matters of conscience.

A great many people think they are thinking when they are merely rearranging their prejudices.

Our lives are always moving in the direction of our strongest thoughts. What we think shapes who we are.

God's Word must be so strongly fixed in our minds that it becomes the dominant influence in our thoughts, our attitudes, and our actions. One of the most effective ways of influencing our minds is...

I would maintain that thanks are the highest form of thought, and that gratitude is happiness doubled by wonder.

The greatest spiritual battle of our generation is being fought between our ears.

The desert saints said that the beginning of renouncing a thought is simply noticing it. That is part of what I’m doing in my quarter hours—I am noticing, and naming, and then, for a few minutes, quar...