Often in life, we get caught in circumstances that leave us full of negativity or worry. Have you ever been trapped in hopelessness, a spiral of concerns, or a flurry of negative thoughts? If so, this blog is for you.
I’m a very practical person — I tend to evaluate even extreme situations through a practical lens. And yet, I’ve experienced how situations and emotions can still overpower us, pulling us into a dark place where everything looks bad, thoughts turn negative, and we start seeing ourselves as victims. So, intuitively, I developed a way to keep myself out of that space, and it has served me well. I only recently discovered that a practice like this has a name: a mental diet.
A mental diet is the practice of not entertaining unpleasant thoughts. Emmet Fox’s The 7-Day Mental Diet has helped people across the globe, with a step-by-step guide to going on one. In this blog, I want to share my way of practising it — and invite you to experiment with either mine or Emmet Fox’s.
Why your thoughts need a diet
If you’ve been struggling to manifest the life you want, it’s likely you haven’t yet developed steady control over your daily thought patterns. Everyone has thoughts that appear out of nowhere, and some of them are nasty and damaging — pulling you away from your goals. When those negative thoughts run unchecked, they affect your overall wellbeing.
Someone who practises a mental diet builds the ability to replace an inner negative thought — a bad idea, a bad possibility — with its opposite. In my own practice, the mantra was simple: ignore and do not entertain the negative or opposing thought, and create a superior voice that speaks the positive one instead.
Think of it this way. If someone ignored you again and again, and kept telling you that you were bad, how would you feel? Would you keep going back to that person, or stop? I don’t like being ignored or dominated, so my instinct is to stop going. We’re human, of course — it’s not possible to control our thoughts so completely that we never think anything negative. But we can reduce it to the point where it becomes insignificant, with no power in front of our dominating, propelling positive thoughts.
My mental diet action plan
With that practical approach, here’s the plan I built:
- I recorded my thoughts. I consciously observed and logged my thoughts at least three times a day in an Excel sheet — about 5–8 minutes each time. After a while, I began categorizing them as positive or negative, noting their possible triggers and their effect on me.
- I sorted the negatives into ‘useful’ and ‘not useful.’ Sometimes a negative thought serves a positive purpose — some push us to act, some tell us to be cautious. So I added a further category for whether a negative thought was actually useful.
- I noticed my patterns. After a couple of months, I became far more aware of how I think and what drives it — and whether that thinking was actually serving me. Imagine constantly bombarding a child with negativity: what does that create for the child? If my mind is that child and I’m the one doing the bombarding, what am I creating for myself? I learned to go easier on myself — to say “it’s OK,” “I am enough,” “it’s not the end of the world.”
- I used self-awareness to choose. Self-awareness has real power; it brings new insight. With it, I realized I get to pick my thoughts. They appear from nowhere, but I can choose to keep them or discard them. Pausing, reflecting on what’s going on in my mind, and turning the negative into positive through self-talk genuinely helped me overpower unproductive thinking.
- I traced the thoughts to their source. Journaling helped me see that these thoughts came either from past experiences or from worry about the future. So the solution came easily: focus on the present moment. Practise mindfulness.
A mental diet, like any diet, takes discipline and attention — and it’s best done in short bursts to jumpstart a new way of thinking. Avoiding rumination about the past and anxiety about the future is part of it. Concentration is a key tool too: it gives you the inner strength to focus on the thoughts of your choice and disregard the unwanted ones. This won’t be straightforward, and you may fail before you succeed — but if you persevere, you’ll master it.
Three mental diet mantras
1. Mental control. The more we feed negative thoughts to our brain, the more likely they are to recur — thanks to neuroplasticity (the brain’s ability to build and restructure nerve-cell connections in response to learning, experience, or damage). Our brain networks connect ideas that trigger specific emotions, so every time we let a negative thought repeat, it grows stronger. That’s why it’s critical to spot the patterns that lead to bad moods, and to have tactics ready for overwhelming thoughts as they arrive — exercise, breathing exercises, or replacing negative patterns with healthier ones like keeping a routine, seeing friends, or joining a team activity. This is really the heart of how to stop negative thoughts before they take hold.
2. Positive affirmations. These are statements you repeat — often almost automatically — to plant a notion in your subconscious: something that motivates you, reminds you of your strengths, and gives you the confidence to reach your goals. Positive affirmations work quietly but persistently. And what you affirm, the universe is listening for and ready to offer you.
3. Meditation. Take time to meditate. It teaches you to focus on the present moment, one breath at a time — a way of simply observing what you’re feeling in each moment, whether it’s pleasant, unpleasant, painful, or joyous.
Making it a way of life
Over the last four years of doing this, I’ve grown far more comfortable experimenting with new ideas, made some critical decisions, and filled my life with more positivity, fun, and happiness. I’d love for you to try either my self-discovered method or Emmet Fox’s step-by-step tutorial.
Keep at it until you’ve repeated your good thoughts enough times that they become your dominant thinking. Like any diet, it takes devotion and discipline at first, but it gets easier. The aim is to catch a negative thought and instantly replace it with a new affirmation. It’s fine to cry and express your feelings — just get back on track afterwards. An emotional reaction won’t derail you as long as you return to your mental diet and your positive thoughts continue to outnumber the negative ones.
The key is repetition. At first, constantly monitoring and altering your thoughts will feel like work — but after a while, you’ll find the positive thoughts have impressed themselves on your subconscious. When you think of what you want, it’s the new thoughts that surface, not the old ones. The whole goal of a mental diet is to replace the negative habitual beliefs you’ve carried for years with good ones that align with your desires. And it should become a way of life — something you keep practising even after you’ve manifested what you set out to. Learning how to overcome negative thinking this way can reduce mental noise and bring you inner serenity, focus, and mastery.
My next mental diet, by the way, is to practise being non-judgemental — training myself not to judge, consciously or subconsciously, any person or situation. Same technique, and I’ll share what I discover along the way.
I’ll stay curious to know whether my journey has, in any way, inspired you to take action against your own negative thoughts.
I specialize in Career, Life, and Executive Coaching, and I’d be happy to coach you on how to change your thinking and rewire your personal and professional life toward happiness and fulfilment.
