If negative thoughts feel overwhelming, here’s a simple, hands-on way to move through them using just paper, pen, and scissors, shared by Arty Folks.
This exercise helps you get swirling thoughts out of your head and onto paper where you can interact with them in new ways and find a fresh perspective:
Image and ideas: Arty Folks
How to neutralise negativity
1.
Find the centre of a piece of paper and start writing down your automatic thoughts. Don’t worry about grammar, making sense, or writing for anyone else, just let the thoughts flow from the centre outwards in a continuous spiral out to the edges.
2.
Once you’ve stopped writing, read through your spiral and notice the words that stand out as having a strong positive or negative feeling attached to them.
3.
Carefully cut out these individual positive and negative words. You’ll end up with a pile of small word fragments and your spiral with holes in it.
4.
Take the negative words you cut out and, one by one, physically flip over each piece of paper so the blank side faces upwards. Place these blank pieces back roughly where they came from within your spiral pattern; this acknowledges the space the thought took up, but visually conceales the negativity.
5.
Now collect all the positive word fragments you cut out and, on a new sheet, arrange these positive words into new formations. See what new shapes, patterns, or connections emerge. You could group them into clusters, create images like the flowers in the example photo, or form lines of encouraging words. This step is about actively building something new from the positive elements.
6.
Take a moment to look at both parts: the spiral with its neutralised spaces, and the new creation made from the positive fragments. Notice how it feels to see your thoughts laid out in this way.
There’s no right or wrong outcome, just focus on the process – the writing, the snipping, the flipping, the arranging. Sometimes, working with our hands and engaging creatively can be enough to help see things differently and focus more on the positives.
