A good part of our automatic thinking is negative. Discontent comes naturally to us. Kids are discontented with their parents, parents are discontented with their teenagers, we are all discontented with our weight, and the prevalence of aesthetic surgery points to our discontent with the way we look. It is as if the brain is wired for discontent.  With mindfulness we can become aware of this tendency. I remember distinctly the first time I became aware of the habit of negative thinking. I was at a staff meeting in work. All of a sudden, I noticed that I had a negative mental comment about everyone who spoke. Either he was incompetent, or he kept saying the same useless things, or he did not really understand the problem…Then a light bulb went on: Maybe the problems were in my mind rather than out there. Maybe I had a problem accepting things as they are, and people as they are.

Jospeh Emet, Buddha’s Book of Sleep