Reframe Your Thoughts: How To Challenge Negative Beliefs

Every day, we tend to tell ourselves things about our abilities, our relationships with others, and the world around us. Some of those things may be good. Others may be negative. What happens when we start to believe those negative thoughts? Negative core beliefs can be deeply rooted and hard to spot, but they can have real-life effects on our mental health and decision-making. Learning to identify these beliefs, question them, and reshape them to be more helpful may be the first step toward breaking free from them. A licensed therapist can be your guide as you move through this journey.

What are negative core beliefs?

Negative core beliefs can be defined as negative beliefs a person holds about themselves, the world, or others. They tend to be broad generalizations that are usually not accurate. They are often subconscious, meaning that someone may not even be aware of them. 

Beliefs like these often form during childhood in response to outside circumstances. Early life experiences, relationships with family, cultural norms, and mental health can all influence the thought patterns people take with them into adulthood. 

The cost of negative thinking

On the surface, thinking pessimistic thoughts about yourself may not seem like a major problem. It can be common to think this kind of negative self-talk is “just being realistic” or “not setting expectations too high.” However, negative thought patterns can have real consequences for your mental health, physical health, and emotional well-being. 

One of the more obvious side effects of negative core beliefs may be that they can shape your decision-making. 

For example, if you’ve developed a deeply-held belief that you will never be professionally successful, you may subconsciously make choices that hurt your chances of success. You might be less likely to take on a challenging assignment at work or start a business because you’ve already convinced yourself that success isn’t for you—even when you could very well be successful at those things if you took the chance. 

Beyond shaping our behaviors, negative thought patterns and beliefs may have other effects, including mental health concerns, such as the following:

• Stress
• Depression
• Anxiety disorders
• Low self-esteem 
• Trouble coping with challenges
• Perfectionism
• Isolation or withdrawal from social situations
• Challenges with body image
• Emotional distress

Furthermore, many of the above consequences can have physical side effects. For example, chronic stress may contribute to high blood pressure, while depression, anxiety, and social withdrawal may have symptoms ranging from insomnia to physical pain. 

How to reframe your negative beliefs

With all of this in mind, it may be easy to see the importance of changing negative core beliefs. But how can you shift such deeply rooted ways of thinking? The answer often lies in challenging your own thoughts through the process detailed below. 

Step 1: Identify the negative core belief

Reflecting on your beliefs about yourself tends to be a good place to start this journey. Spend some time observing the things you tell yourself daily, keeping an eye out for thoughts that trigger a strong emotion. Journaling and meditation may help you build awareness of your thoughts and reactions. 

It may also be useful to reflect on things you’ve experienced that may have shaped your opinions of yourself and others. Consider your relationships, background, and major events from your childhood. What sorts of ideas did you develop as a result? 

Step 2: Question and challenge the belief

Once you’ve identified some of your negative core beliefs, you can start working on challenging them. It can help to focus on one belief at a time. 

For this example, let’s use the core belief of “I’m a failure.” You might start by asking yourself what evidence you have to support that belief, and then questioning it. 

What makes you feel like a failure? Is it your performance at work or school? Why does this automatically make you a failure? If someone else did badly on a work or school project, would you consider them a failure, too? If not, why would you treat yourself that way? Focus on poking holes in the assumptions and arguments you make to justify this belief. 

Another technique you can use here is looking for evidence that disproves the belief. For example, if you believe you’re a failure because of something that happened at work, you might try listing all the times you succeeded at your job. If you were a failure, would you have done well all those other times? By taking a more critical view of the negative belief, you may notice that it’s not as logical or airtight as you originally thought. 

Step 3: Replace the belief with a more helpful one

As you challenge negative beliefs, you may also find it helpful to replace them with more positive thoughts. These don’t have to be too extreme. Instead, try to aim for new beliefs that are both helpful and realistic. For example, instead of telling yourself, “I’m a failure,” you might tell yourself something like:

• “I’ve succeeded before, and I will succeed again.”
• “My mistakes are opportunities to learn and improve.”
• “Each time I fail, I’m getting closer to success.”
• “I am more than my mistakes.”

When creating your replacement belief, it may help to repeat the process of looking for supporting evidence. Reflect on events from your life that demonstrate this new belief and use them to back it up if you catch yourself doubting it in the future. 

Step 4: Incorporate the new belief into your daily life

Once you’ve developed a more constructive belief to replace the old one, you can start using it in your everyday life. This can take practice, so try to be patient with yourself, especially in situations that might once have triggered the old negative thought. Practice reaffirming your new belief in situations like these, and you may find it gets easier the more you do it. 

This process of identifying and reframing negative thought patterns is a technique that’s often used in cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT), which can be an effective treatment for mental illnesses like anxiety and depression. While you can practice this technique on your own, it may be more effective to receive professional CBT or its close relative, cognitive therapy, in a clinical setting. 

Benefits of online therapy

If you’re managing low self-esteem, anxiety, depression, or other challenges related to negative thoughts, it may not always be easy to leave the house for therapy appointments. Online therapy may be a more convenient alternative, empowering you to talk to a therapist from wherever is easiest for you.

Effectiveness of online therapy

Online CBT can be effective at treating many mental health concerns that can be linked to negative thinking patterns. In a 2017 review, researchers looked at data from 373 existing studies of online therapy. They found that internet-based CBT could be an effective treatment for depression, anxiety, panic disorder, phobias, and more.