Why You Can’t Think Positive Thoughts or Be Joyful
“Whatever story you have in your mind is probably a reflection of whatever polyvagal [nervous system] state you’re in. And whatever polyvagal state you’re in is probably just a normal reaction to whatever you’ve been through in life.”-Justin Sunseri, LMFT
For the longest time I could not think positively or be in joy for the life of me.
I was always waiting for the other shoe to drop. I thought the worst possible thing was just about to happen, and my mind consistently gravitated towards whatever negative thing was going on. Nevermind the positive stuff that was happening simultaneously; I couldn’t see it.
My identity was steeped in struggle and pain.
I viewed life as one ongoing series of problems to solve that I’d never be free of.
And if I so happened to have a thought that I might be free of said problems one day, I always thought that it’d be because everyone around me finally got their act together.
(Let me take a moment to laugh while I’m writing this)
Seeing as though my propensity for focusing on the negative wasn’t feeling good to me and wasn’t actually “fixing” anything, I tried everything I knew to help me to see and feel the good in my life that I knew intellectually was also present:
Gratitude journaling
Morning routines
Attempting to focus my mind on the good
Constantly being vigilant and replacing my negative thoughts as they cropped up
None of it ever really “stuck”.
I’d snap right back into my negative thoughts, find it impossible to remain in joy, and then feel like something was wrong with me for not being able to change my thought patterns or control my mind.
If you find yourself nodding along, and you haven’t been able to force yourself to see the good or be in joy, I want to spill the tea and tell you why:
Our thoughts are informed by the state of our nervous system.
If we are stuck hanging out in chronic fight/flight/freeze/fawn responses (which I stayed in most of my adult life), your thoughts will be defensive, protective, and hypervigilant.
In other words, your brain will highlight the negative and not allow you to see the good as a way to scan your environment and protect you from threat (real or perceived) because you’re stuck in fight/flight/freeze/fawn response.
I couldn’t shift my thoughts, see the positive things that were happening in my life, or remain in joy until I was able to shift my nervous system out of the freeze and fawn responses that I’d been stuck in for decades.
Joy was always available to me and good things were always happening all around me simultaneously with the hard stuff, but I was unable to cultivate it or perceive it because of my nervous system state.
When our bodies have gotten “stuck” in a nervous system state that is signaling constant danger and threat, it makes sense that our minds and bodies wouldn’t be open to joy, ease, connection, pleasure, and the things you crave the most; your brain and body are in survival mode.
Survival mode breeds hypervigilant thoughts, and our biology cannot be overridden.
How To Begin to Shift Your Nervous System State:
- Honor Your Capacity
Honoring your capacity means getting intimately in tune with what you have capacity for, and learning to honor it.
What do you have emotional capacity for?
What do you have mental capacity for?
What do you have physical capacity for?
What do you have time capacity for?
When you check in with yourself, how much battery do you have to offer to XYZ activity that you feel like you need to do based on how you are currently feeling?
For example, when you check in with yourself, you may find now is not the best time for you to have a difficult conversation based on your current emotional capacity. Not only does this honor yourself, it gives the conversation the best odds of being successful.
Making honoring your capacity a daily practice cultivates trust with yourself, and it also paradoxically expands your capacity.
By honoring your capacity, you will ditch the overwhelm, and will be able to give from overflow in all you do. No longer operating from overwhelm expands your capacity for everything!
2. Welcome All Physical Sensations
Many of us have grown up thinking some sensations and emotions are “negative” or “wrong” and others are desirable.
This leads you to stuff, censor, and deny a large part of your human experience.
The physical sensations/feelings themselves only last 90 seconds, per research; it is our minds ruminating and avoiding the feelings that actually produce the inner turmoil and makes the sensations linger for longer than we’d like.
Welcome all your physical sensations and feelings as wise teachers and honor the message that they are trying to communicate.
Allow them to run through you without holding onto them.
This creates self-trust and deep self-acceptance. No longer fighting with yourself frees up a lot of energy and has a profoundly calming effect on the nervous system.
3. Resourcing
Doing a full body scan, what sensations do you feel?
Can you feel the physical sensation of your feet on the ground or your bottom in the chair?
Perhaps you notice a feeling of tightness in your chest or abdomen, or shallow breathing.
Get curious and notice if you have more awareness around unpleasant sensations than you do neutral or pleasant sensations.
If you are primarily noticing unpleasant sensations, see if you can find a neutral spot in your body that you don’t feel any physical sensations. (For me this is typically my thighs)
Tune into that.
Once you start to tune into the neutral sensations more, if you want to stretch yourself, see if you can start tuning into pleasant sensations more and turn the volume up on them.
This is a practice that takes time. We can train our minds to notice neutral and pleasant sensations that are present if we have been stuck in fight/flight/freeze and trained to only notice the unpleasant sensations.
4. Practice Coupling
Coupling is the act of allowing our physical expressions to match our felt sensations and emotions.
For example, if I feel the sensation of joy, if I am coupled, I allow myself naturally to smile and express my joy bodily.
If I feel sadness, I allow myself to cry, emote, and express my sadness.
To be uncoupled looks like: feeling joy, but not smiling, or feeling sadness but not allowing ourselves to cry even though we want to.
Many of us have been uncoupled for a very long time because we have wanted to be perceived a certain way that was advantageous to us at the time.
When you feel a physical sensation or emotion, ask yourself what your body wants to do in response. See if you can honor it, even a little bit more than you used to.
This gives your body and mind the message that it is safe for you to be fully expressed.
5. Cultivate Joy
See if you can begin to think of joy as something that you can intentionally cultivate no matter your life season.
What things bring you joy? How can you begin to intentionally allow more of those things in your life?
Perhaps that may look like buying a bouquet of wildflowers and having them on your table because when you see them, they bring you joy.
Perhaps it looks like putting on a song that makes you feel happy and allowing your body to move to the music.
Or maybe it looks like doing something just because you feel like it but serves no “productive” purpose.
When you have been in fight/flight/freeze response joy can actually feel extremely activating and triggering. Start slow with what feels manageable as you build your capacity for the good.
Nothing worked for me until I learned to work both with my body and mind in my healing. This is why a bottom-up and top-down approach that uses both somatics and cognitive based tools are so important in my approach with my clients. If you find this is resonating after doing a lot of inner work yourself, this may be a missing piece for you.
I’d love to hear from you: do you have difficulty seeing and experiencing the positive things in your life or remaining in joy? Do you want to build more capacity for the good in your life?
Comment below and let me know! I’d love to offer you some tips and help in any way that I can.
XX,
Kim
