Learning to protect your positive vibes and avoid the drag down is essential to positive thinking and living a positive life.

What are vibes?

Relax. There’s nothing kooky or new-agey about it. Your vibe is your general energy, your mood, how you think and feel in any given moment, and how you react to the people and circumstances around you.

Your vibe or your energy (interchangeable terms for this topic) can vary greatly. For example, your energy can instantly shoot from peaceful and calm to full-out anxiety and stress in mere seconds. Usually due to an interaction with someone or something – but can also be affected purely by a thought.

For those of us determined to reduce negative thoughts, cultivate a positive mind and live a positive life, it’s extra challenging if we are ultra-sensitive to the influences around us that can dramatically affect our energy.

Especially those influences that can hit us like a flyswatter and immediately and reliably produce the smack of a drag down.

So how do you protect your positive vibes and learn to reduce negative thoughts? Here are three ways to consider:

1. Know your triggers

One way to protect yourself from the negativity drag down is to recognize when and why it happens to you.

It was only in the last year that I discovered the extent to which my energy was being depleted dramatically by others around me. I always thought it was just me being naturally too moody.

Through a journey of personal growth, I discovered that the energy drain, the moods and my outlook were not so much sourced internally but were a result of being highly empathic to those around me. A sponge soaking up any and all negative vibes and energy.

So when, for example, I was in a great mood and had a positive mindset, feeling invincible and super-confident about a project or task I was working on and my husband walked into the room like a Tasmanian devil – cursing, angry, raging, huffing, puffing and spewing complaints (about whatever) – it immediately drained my positive energy and left me feeling agitated, anxious and disturbed. For a long time.

For many of us, it’s not easy to get back into a creative, positive, good vibes mindset after negative energy comes spinning by.

Even if the negativity tornado leaves as fast as it comes in.

Sound familiar?

If you’re one of the sensitive ones, learn to recognize when this is happening.

“Self awareness is the key to self mastery.” Gretchen Rubin, author, The Happiness Project

It’s so much easier to shake it off and get positive vibes flowing again more quickly when you can clearly see it for it is. It’s not yours to absorb.

It’s simply someone else’s energy junk causing friction against yours.

Get to know your triggers. See it happening. Call it out (silently if you wish). And release it.

2. Put up your mojo shield

Being able to see when others’ negative energy affects you and calling it out allows you to put up a virtual mojo shield to avoid or better deflect the drag down on your positive vibes.

I know people who have mastered this art of negative energy deflection. No, they don’t wear a superhero cape, but I like that mental imagery!

Tips I’ve gathered are that when you come up against the friction or the energy drain, visualize that you’re turning a key located on your forehead or your chest that is virtually locking down and protecting your energy. (Some people physically turn an imaginary key! Don’t laugh until you try it!)

This is a great visual trick to share with highly sensitive kids and young adults as well.

Mojo shield up. Energy on lock down. Nothing can get in. Nothing can permeate. Your thoughts stay positive.

And just because you are mindfully shielding yourself from the negative energy, it doesn’t mean you can’t be kind, compassionate and helpful to the source of the energy drain (usually another person).

But you don’t have to allow yourself absorb that energy and internalize the anger, hurt or anxiety as your own.

This mental exercise can genuinely help you set healthy boundaries between your vibes and those you come across that disturb your inner peace and positivity. Even if only to make you stop and notice when it’s happening!

Learning to emotionally shield yourself makes it much easier to let the negativity go in a reasonable period of time, rather than holding onto it all day, to the point of not even realizing hours later why you are in such a funk in the first place.

3. Heal your pain points (triggers)

We never stop learning about ourselves. And learning to trust our instincts, intuition and gut (all one and the same) is another way to protect positive vibes and reduce negative thoughts that have crept in.

Knowing and understanding yourself and what your energy drag down triggers are is critical to healing and ultimately to living a more positive life.

Yes, we are going to feel the feels. It’s unavoidable.

Hard and painful events are a part of everyone’s life. Sadly, some people get extra helpings of that pain in their lifetime.

But it’s our choice to live the rest of our days suffering and drowning in negative thinking, or to pull ourselves up and rise in gratitude to heal our pain.

A positive mind is a choice.

Your choice. Regardless of your challenges.

“There are flowers everywhere for those who want to see them.” – Henry Matisse, artist

Pain and anxiety frequently stem from fear. Fear is at the gnarly underbelly of nearly every negative thought and emotion we feel.

It’s your work to do to understand your underlying fears and corresponding energy triggers. The ones that come from within – from past pains and hurts – and the ones that are external from people and events you come across each day. (This is where my interest in Reiki comes in, but that’s a topic for another day!)

“Most folks are about as happy as they make their minds up to be.” – Abraham Lincoln

Give yourself a break – it’s not possible to feel positive and have happy productive thoughts every minute of every day.

Life dishes us a full spectrum of experiences, not all of them include rainbows and unicorns.

If we are determined to live fully present in the most positive life and positive mindset possible, (with whatever cards we are dealt and with energy drains we can’t avoid) it’s up to us individually to protect our positive vibes and learn to reduce the negative effects of drag down.

Get to know your triggers, learn to put up your mojo shield, and work on healing those pain points.

Cheers to the evolution of you – gnarly underbelly and all – and to learning to protect your positive vibes and reduce negative thoughts and energy!
– Marlene

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