One of the most helpful things I ever learned was that my mind and everyone else’s minds are crazy, some people call it the monkey mind but I just like to call it crazy brain. Realising this was so comforting, as was knowing I wasn’t alone. All of us, every single one of us has a crazy, insane mind. The funny thing is, we all pretend we haven’t.
Most people have approximately 50,000 thoughts a day and research suggests over 90% of these are the same ones over and over again. However, more concerningly, for most of us, the vast majority of these thoughts are negative.
The brain is just trying to help
Stressful thoughts are often repetitive mostly because our mind is trying to help us. As you most likely know our brains are still rather primative. For most of our ancestors especially the cave man type, being on high alert meant staying safe from being hurt…or worse being eaten (think saber tooth tigers). The mind is wired to aleft us to things that might hurt us. The thing is, these days the mind perceives stressful and anxiety provoking thoughts as dangerous to us too, hence repeating them over and over, which is really not very helpful at all!
What we resist persists
The problem with this is not only that our brains are crazy, it’s our resistance to our thoughts. We commonly try to make them go away, change them or override them with positive thoughts and affirmations. All of these strategies have short term results and usually the same thoughts return making us feel even worse and then judging ourselves for thinking in such a way.
So, what can we do about this?
1. Awareness
It’s so easy to get caught up in our thoughts and feel bad about what we believe they are telling us. The first step in breaking this cycle is being aware that we are thinking. A good prompt to notice you’re caught up in overthinking or unhelpful thought is feeling bad emotionally. This is often when our thoughts are pushing our buttons. Once you’re aware your thinking is unhelpful, you can observe your thoughts and label them. I like to say to myself ‘there’s thinking/judging/worrying about ____________ (fill in the blank)’ and then label the following thought and the one after that. This tends to break the cycle of getting hooked into a constant stream of thoughts.
2. Allowance
This is my favourite part of the process. Once I have identified that my thoughts are making me feel bad, I like to shrug my shoulders and say to myself ‘whatever’ or ‘it’s just a thought, I don’t have to buy into this’. This way I’m not resisting my unpleasant thoughts or trying to make them go away, I’m acknowledging them, allowing them to be as they are but choosing not to buy in.
