I think the trick with thoughts and emotions is to treat them like cars driving past your home. You can hear them and recognize that they are there but you don’t have to run outside and study every one of them. Just acknowledge that you heard it, it sounded like “this” and forget it, get back to doing stuff.
I often have negative thoughts. What if everyone at work only pretends to like me because they are being nice/professional. The scary thing is there are people at work that I pretend to like more than I do because I am being nice/professional, and I often think, “She believes we’re good friends. If she knew my real feelings she’d be really hurt!” Then I feel like a bad person. 
But luckily I teach preschoolers and they love me and can’t fake it.
I consider myself fairly well adjusted (a bit of a worrier/overthinker at times, perhaps), but I do find that negative thoughts often try to intrude.
I wrestle with them until one of us submits. I usually win. There actually doesn’t seem to be much more to it than that, for me.
I’d like to add a 4:
4. Forced themselves to fake it long enough that at one point they were extremely surprised when they found themselves doing it without a conscious effort to start the process. Or, “faked it till they got it”.
Kinki, I have that exact same phenomenon going on in my head - a continuous loop of negative events that just make me angry again with no resolution.
Can I ask what meds worked for you?
Apologies to the OP, I’d like to answer Verizontal’s question.
Vertizontal, I tried Prozac, Wellbutrin, Zoloft and a host of others before landing on Effexor XR 225mg/day. This past summer I felt it stopped working (I started noticing symptoms similar to the onset of depression for me: sleeping a lot, letting things go, staying in a lot) so tapered off to go try a new one. I got off it w/o difficulty, THEN realized that while I had become kinda apathetic, Effexor had still been keeping the worst of my symptoms at bay. I tried a few other meds, but nothing helped. I’m back on it now. Still apathetic, but without a doubt in better shape than without it.
Another biggie I have w/o meds is this hair-trigger temper. My mother had it, too. I don’t hurt myself or anyone else, but take it out on physical objects. Most gratifyingly, it disappears altogether on the meds.
Verizontal, you or anyone else is very welcome to PM me, or start a thread on this to talk further. Best of luck to you.
Sorry for the hijack!
hmmm. all the answers have been rather introspective.
am i the only person who has to, from time to time, suppress urges of kicking the neighbor dog for being too yippy, or the the douchebag teenager who tried to “strong shoulder” me the other day as i was getting off the metro?