This is one of "22 virus definitions" (thought-mistakes that cause ineffectiveness and unnecessary negative emotions).

JUST BECAUSE you can ask a question doesn’t mean it has an answer. What’s north of the North Pole? What’s the best chess move to make? Those are essentially meaningless questions, even though they are well-formed grammatically.

The same is true of questions like, "What are they thinking about me?" or "Why aren't people buying my product?" These questions are not answerable from inside your head, so they will go round and round, upsetting you and getting you nowhere. Those two questions can only be answered by asking someone else.

"Why am I so committed to failure?" That may or may not be answerable, but I'll tell you this: You'll never know if you got the "right" answer. A much more productive thing to do with why questions of that sort are to instead ask HOW. Read more about that here.

Be very careful with the questions you ask yourself. Questions have a powerful way of generating trains of thought, so the questions you ask make a big difference.

When you feel discouraged by a setback, keep your eye out for unanswerable questions and replace them with questions you can answer, such as, "What will I do today to move my goal forward?"

This article is part of the series, Antivirus For Your Mind.

Articles and Interviews
Learn about sustaining motivation, improving relationships, relieving depression, improving your health, reducing anxiety, becoming more optimistic, enjoying a better mood more often, earning more money, expanding your creativity, making better decisions, resolving conflicts, and much more.

Subscribe to MoodRaiser and get articles delivered to your email inbox free. Learn simple methods for lifting your general feeling of well-being right away, and improving your mood over time: Enter your email address: Delivered by FeedBurner

Table of Contents
...of Adam Khan's book Self-Help Stuff That Works. From the table of contents, you can click on any chapter and read it here online.

About the Book
Here's a description of Self-Help Stuff That Works and links on the book and the author.

Self-Help College Course
Anyone in the country can study the book Self-Help Stuff That Works and earn college credit.

Self-Help Menu
Want to learn to enjoy your relationships with people more? Do better at work? Feel good more often? Have a better attitude? Use the self-help menu.

Search For Anything On YMW
You can type in any topic you choose and instantly find all the material on this site on that topic. You can also browse topics on this page.

Immediate Relief
Are you having a difficulty with some aspect of your life lately? Learn something that will help. This will only take a few minutes.

Bite-Size
Check out some easily digestible nibbles of self-help stuff that works.

We post on FaceBook and Twitter a few times a week, focused mostly on helping you feel good more often. Click the icons below to join: