I was at a seminar several years back, and they wanted to show us how much negative thinking affects us. Each of us were told to hold our arms out from our side and then have someone try to push our arm down while we resisted.

Most of us put up a good fight, but then we were told to have that person push down our arms while were thinking negative thoughts about ourselves. It could be anything from rehearsing past failures to thinking about how stupid we were. We all immediately noticed how much physically weaker we were when we thought negatively about ourselves.

And, although our thoughts don’t hold an actual physical weight, scientists say that negative thoughts ‘weigh’ on your brain in the same way that repeated movements tire your muscles. Negativity and worry have ‘energy costs’ that can tire out our neurons, that are the physical carriers of our thoughts. As a result, we feel a ‘heaviness’ because of the emotional drain on our brain and its neurons.

Negative thinking and worry not only affects us physically, but emotionally as well.

The Bible talks very clearly about keeping our thoughts present and within the boundaries of each day. We must not allow our thoughts to enter the next day for each day has its own troubles:

“Therefore do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own.”

Matthew 6:34

When you worry ahead, you are often anticipating the worst-case scenario that could happen, but does it make it any easier to handle? More often than not our worst fears never occur.

But as we do this, it weakens us and opens our minds up to all sorts of other fears and worry.

On top of this, fear is being generated by the media all the time, and leaving us with an uneasiness of what the future holds.

And because of this, I am  learning to ‘weigh’ my thoughts to determine whether they are fear based or not. Are my thoughts taking me into tomorrow, the next day or the week after that?

We need to take Jesus’s advice and choose to shift our thinking from tomorrow to the present. When we do this it lightens our load (our thoughts and emotions). 

We need to start weighing our thoughts and commit to stopping those based on worry and fear.

“May the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace as you trust in him, so that you may overflow with hope by the power of the Holy Spirit.”

Romans 15:13