How to Change Your Mindset Without Forcing Yourself to Think Positive

My mother believed in positive thinking long before it was on every screen. When I was a student, she wrote positive messages for me and kept them above my desk for years. She encouraged me to keep saying that I can do it and that I want to, and before exams she reminded me to watch my words: not “I'll surely fail today”, but “today I'll surely pass”. On our shelves there were books on emotional intelligence and positive thinking. I'll be honest: sometimes it was a bit annoying.

Today I am grateful to her; without her, I wouldn't be who I am. But a sentence on the wall is only the beginning. A mindset doesn't change when you place a positive thought on top of an old belief. It changes when you see the belief itself and choose, again and again, a different response.

In my book Courage on the Journey of Happiness, one challenge, the spiritual quest, is about exactly this: questioning what we were taught to believe instead of following patterns simply because they are familiar.

What is a mindset?

A mindset is the set of beliefs through which you interpret what happens: about yourself, other people, money, work, love and what is possible for you. Psychologist Carol Dweck used the word more narrowly, for beliefs about whether abilities are fixed or can grow, and her term growth mindset became famous. In everyday language, your mindset is your habitual way of seeing. Most of it was learned early, at home, at school and in the culture around you. That is good news: what was learned can be relearned.

Signs your old mindset is running your life

You might recognise yourself in a few of these:

• you react to the same situations in the same way, and only later wonder why
• you catch yourself saying “that's just how I am” or “people like me don't…”
• your first thought about anything new is what could go wrong
• you follow rules about work, money or family that you never actually chose
• you have tried positive thinking, and it felt like lying to yourself

Why is changing your mindset so hard?

I remember asking my grandmother why she did certain things in church the way she did. She had no real answer: it was simply the way things were done, and she was a little annoyed by all my “stupid” questions. Most of our mindset works like that. We repeat what we learned without asking whether it is still ours, and a familiar way of thinking feels safe even when it makes us unhappy.

Then there is the trap of forced positivity: trying to change a deep habit with a slogan. So if it has been hard, there is nothing wrong with you. And if your thoughts are persistently dark, or start to affect your sleep, work or relationships, please talk to a doctor or a qualified mental health professional; an article can't replace that.

The fabric of your life is in your hands

In the book I use an image that helps me more than any theory. Everything we were given at birth, our upbringing, culture and origin, the patterns our parents followed, is the foundation on which we weave the fabric of our lives. We didn't choose the first threads. But the fabric is in our hands. We can change certain threads, use completely different colours, and create a picture very different from the one we started with. It is a task that lasts as long as we live.

That is what a real mindset shift means: not tearing up the fabric or pretending the dark threads aren't there, but choosing the next thread consciously. If some threads from the past feel heavy, I have written about how to let go of the past. In the introduction to my book I wrote:

You have it the way you make it and the way you see it.

Not because you are to blame for what happens to you, but because happiness depends less on what is going on and more on the way you accept it. That part is yours to work on.

What happiness research says about changing your mindset

As an economist who has spent many years studying happiness, I find it reassuring that this idea is both old and well studied. Almost two thousand years ago, Epictetus wrote that people are disturbed not by things, but by the notions they form about them¹. Psychologists call one form of this reappraisal: changing how you interpret a situation so that it changes how you feel. James Gross and Oliver John found that people who habitually reappraise feel more positive emotion, relate better to others and report higher well-being, unlike those who habitually suppress their feelings². Across 306 experimental comparisons, Thomas Webb and colleagues found that changing how you think about a situation had a small-to-medium effect on emotions³.

And growth mindset? Dweck's idea is hopeful, but the evidence is more modest than the posters suggest. Two meta-analyses by Victoria Sisk, Brooke Macnamara and colleagues, covering more than 365,000 and 57,000 students, found that the link between mindset and school achievement, and the effect of mindset programmes, were weak overall, with possible benefits for students from poorer backgrounds or at academic risk⁴. In a national experiment with more than 12,000 American ninth graders, led by David Yeager with Dweck as co-author, an online programme of under an hour raised lower-achieving students' grades by about a tenth of a grade point, mainly in schools where classmates' attitudes supported the message⁵. A new belief helps, but a little at a time, and when it has room to grow.

Two more findings explain why forced positivity often fails. Joanne Wood and her colleagues found that people with low self-esteem who repeated “I'm a lovable person” felt worse, not better⁶. And Brett Ford, Iris Mauss and colleagues found that people who tend to accept their emotions and thoughts without judging them felt less negative emotion during daily stress and reported better psychological health six months later⁷.

How to change your mindset: seven gentle steps

A mindset doesn't change through one big insight. It changes the way it was formed: in small moments, repeated until the new way feels like yours.

1. Catch one sentence. Pick one thought that keeps returning, such as “I'm not good with money” or “It's too late for me”, and write it down exactly as it sounds in your head.
2. Ask where you learned it. From home, school, a former partner, a boss? Not to blame anyone, but to see that the belief has a history, which means it is not a fact.
3. Check whether it is still true. What evidence do you have today? Would you say this to a friend who believed it about herself?
4. Accept the feeling, question the story. Don't fight the thought or cover it with a sentence you don't believe. Let the feeling be there, then look for another honest way of seeing the situation. Not “everything is wonderful”, but “this is hard, and I can take it one step at a time”.
5. Turn your autopilot into a cue. Let one thing you do daily without thinking, such as making coffee, remind you to ask: what am I telling myself right now?
6. Act before you believe it. Do one small thing the person with the new mindset would do, and let the experience teach you. If you keep stopping yourself just before you start, read my article on self-sabotage.
7. Repeat, and be patient. When Phillippa Lally and her colleagues followed people building a new daily habit, the time it took to become automatic ranged from 18 to 254 days, and missing one day didn't spoil the process⁸. If you slip back, simply begin again.

How to change your mindset to positive without pretending

A positive mindset is not one where you only think happy thoughts. It is one where you see clearly and still choose hope: less “everything will be perfect”, more “I can learn from this”. In practice, it can mean naming one thing that went well before you sleep, asking what else might happen when you predict disaster, and spending less time with news, feeds and people that pull you down. Whether happiness itself is a choice is a question I explored in Is happiness a choice?

Some patterns run deeper: limiting beliefs about what you deserve, emotional triggers, habits of thought passed down through generations, mistakes you can't forgive yourself for. Each deserves its own attention, but the method stays the same: notice, question, choose, repeat.

Changing a way of thinking you have lived with for decades takes practice and, ideally, people walking the same path. That is why my programme Permission for Life moves step by step, and one of its three parts is called Free. Once you notice your thoughts, the next step is noticing where you are: living in the present moment. The fabric is in your hands.