"Control your thoughts!"- Mission Impossible for an overthinker.
There is a lot of controversial thinking about thoughts.
People spend a great deal of time thinking about thinking, thinking about thoughts. We think that we are somehow responsible for generating thoughts or controlling them.
Are you struggling with overthinking?
Do you spend quite a bit of time in your head with your thoughts?
If yes, you are just like the majority of us who think thoughts every second of the day. So human of us!
All this thinking comes with a cost, and many of us get tired of this pondering and relating thoughts. We want to know.
How do you control your thoughts?
I am overthinking and ruminating, how do I stop it?
How can I stop overthinking and analysing everything? How can I stop caring and just enjoy the time?
I am drained by negative thoughts and can’t cope.
I can’t fall asleep at night how can I stop my racing mind?
In a desperate need to help ourselves with our "thinking problem," we go looking for solutions.
And Alas, there are many on offer.
Mainstream suggestions you can come across are:
meditation,
thinking positively,
breathing- try not to think,
control your thoughts,
relax your mind,
write a journal,
acknowledge your thoughts and let them go
imagine thoughts as clouds and let them float away, don't forget to thank each for their contribution
observe a flow of thoughts and just before each thought there is a blank place, go there ( ARHG! even typing it is exhausting, imagine trying this technique, and oh yes, I did try it!)
All of the above suggestions have their value, no doubt. I encourage our thoughtful readers to test them and find the best solutions for themselves.
For me, however, none of these worked, and trying them was like trying to empty a bottomless bucket. No matter how much I tried to empty it, there seemed to be more to come.
I also found that I needed a lot of time and mental agility to keep myself on the task of NOT thinking thoughts and emptying my mind of thoughts.
You see I have an overactive mind that loves to produces hundreds of thousands of thoughts, and it can become quite tiresome.
So I honestly tried many suggestions to stop thoughts, but it was way too much work with too few results. I still had plenty of thoughts.
If excessive thinking is an issue you struggle with, and you find many suggested methods difficult to follow, it’s helpful to understand what a thought actually is and why we are thinking.
In my futile attempt to get myself rid of the burden of overthinking, I wondered about thinking.
"What is a thought and why does it exist? Does thinking exist to cause me trouble? To keep me awake at night? To get me that job interview? To help me deal with work and life? Why can’t I simply stop thinking after an event, or a workday?"
Today, I give you TWO important truths about thoughts and thinking, please, put them on your wall. This truth can set you free.
The truth about thoughts. Ready?
1- ALL thoughts are naturally occurring phenomena that you have no control over.
2- ALL thoughts have NO meaning.
Please, realise this.
Thinking is a naturally occurring phenomenon, just like the wind, a plant growing, waves of the ocean, or cloud formation, like your breathing, like your heartbeat.
Thought is just an expression or manifestation of this natural phenomenon. There is nothing else to this.
"Hold on", you say, "it can’t be it, thoughts mean something and a heartbeat doesn’t mean anything."
"How can you compare the two? How can you compare clouds and thoughts? Thoughts and a heartbeat?
The idea that thoughts mean something keeps many people in this thought prison. This is exactly why you keep chasing thoughts, thought after thought because you are looking for meaning. Where there is NONE.
I would even argue with you that a heartbeat or physiological electrical impulses that occur in the heart have far more meaning and usefulness than a thought. For one, your very survival depends on it. Yet, you give your heartbeat NO thought (pun intended).
What makes us give so much importance to constantly arising thoughts?
Why do we give meaning to something that is meaningless by its nature?
As a naturally occurring phenomenon, thoughts are meaningless and have no importance.
You give them meaning and YOU make them important. The only variable is YOU.
You chase after every thought, ornamenting it into significance, then you doubt or fear these thoughts, decorating this in feelings, and emotions. Instead of letting it pass through you or around you (because we can also pick up others' thoughts around us) you grab it, hold onto it, get hypnotized by it, and give it life beyond the life it’s intended to have.
When doing this, you are making yourself a great disservice, and in a way, manufacturing the chains that hold you in a thought prison even tougher.
When you make something that is NOT important, important, something that is NOT meaningful, meaningful, you tell your brain to focus on it and NOT in a useful way.
The way the brain can focus on a thought is by utilising its own negativity bias. It only cares about your survival and its default thinking would be primarily negative. It's important for the brain to look out for danger, even if danger is a thought that you are holding onto. The brain doesn’t differentiate between imaginary and real. It only listens to you.
Then it puts you into a tunnel, a bit of a jail. To keep you in this tunnel and on the train rack, it will look for similar thought patterns with just one purpose, to ensure your survival. It thinks this is important, this can potentially present danger to our survival and, it's better t keep hypervigilance.
I give you a simple example of this train track that you are forced on when you give importance to your thoughts.
Say, through your life experience, you are used to people disrespecting you and maybe even shouting at you. And you created a thought which became an adaptation that can go like this "if I am quiet or submissive, if I am nice to people, I can avoid the pain that comes with this treatment."
Your brain will be preoccupied with this thought of survival and protecting you, so it will look for exactly those people so it can protect you from them. Isn’t it the opposite of what you want? - You want to not SEE these people, but you can’t get away from them because they are always highlighted in the environment as important to notice. Your energy goes where your attention goes. You stay on the train tracks.
Your brain is like a child; if you give it a toy and say this toy is important, guard it with your life, and then it becomes feral.
Or if you give your brain a toy and don’t care what happens with the toy, or even if it gets lost, it will be more playful and relaxed.
The idea today is this.
Stop giving too much meaning to your thoughts.
In their majority (99%), thoughts are meaningless, useless, and not necessary.
The majority of thoughts are negative, as the brain is evolutionary conditioned to look for negativity for survival purposes. You can’t change it, just accept it and work around it.
I would love to hear from you.
What do you normally think about?
When do you notice overthinking?
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