Music, exercise, and hobbies are all great ways to boost your mood and improve your outlook on life, but what if you’ve tried it all and nothing seems to work? You want to feel happy but don’t know how to shake the blues. Patterns of depression and anxiety can be so tough to get rid of because they affect your thoughts on a fundamental level; if you’re feeling low enough, even the areas of your life that once brought you joy can seem empty.

Once you pick up a bad thought, it can stick like a bur to the soles of your feet; wherever you go you feel a small pang reminding you it’s still there. A negative thought has a lot of transformative power: “I didn’t deserve it” can cast a shadow over a promotion at work; “I don’t have anything interesting to say” can make stress the third wheel on a first date; “What I did was stupid” can be toxic baggage you carry for a long time.

So when negative thoughts become an endless cycle, it’s time to kick them off.

Write Down Your Negative Thoughts

Have you ever felt so overwhelmed with negative thoughts that you had a hard time pinpointing what exactly was upsetting you? If a bad thought is allowed to stick with you, it can grow and take over how you see the world. Writing your thoughts down can help you move on in a few ways. First, you just might discover the root of your discontent—spelling out what you’re feeling can lend you a sense of clarity and context.

Recent research suggests that the second benefit of the pen-and-paper approach is connected to what you do after you’ve written your thoughts down. If you tear the paper up and throw the bad thought in the trash, you’re much more likely to discard the thought from your mind as well. On the other hand, keeping the piece of paper and protecting your bad thought in a pocket or purse increases the likelihood that you’ll use the thought during your next decision-making process.

Not-so-positive thoughts are bound to happen sometimes, but when it comes to your long-term happiness, how you receive and react to those thoughts is what matters. If you’re worried about how often you find yourself on a negative line of thought, you can spend some time disputing bad thinking. “I always fail” becomes a lot less powerful when you intentionally think of times when you succeeded at something.

In the same way that writing down a negative thought can make it real enough to throw away, writing down the positives in your life helps make your happiness more concrete. Sometimes negative thoughts are like a road with no outlet; noticing a pattern of good things in your life can create a fork in the road leading in a better direction. Sharing the good things you’ve written down with others can also have positive effects on your happiness.

Whether you tend to think mostly positive or negative thoughts really does matter when it comes to long-term happiness. Overgeneralizing, thinking in extremes like “always” and “never,” and jumping to early conclusions are often the biggest vehicles for bad thoughts that get you down and keep you there. When something goes wrong in life, thinking positively can help you problem-solve and move forward more quickly than dwelling only on the negatives. Thinking upbeat or downbeat thoughts also affects your expectations, and the data shows that happier expectations often translate into happier results.