This is how you can control your overthinking mind.
The continuous bombarding of thoughts has the potential to harm your peace of mind.
Just after waking up, you seem to have a blurred vision of all the things which are still circulating in your subconscious mind. A glimpse of vision having no relation with the reality you live in seems to cloud your mind with confusion and shock.
This is a state of fading subconsciousness while the conscious mind takes over to carry out the mundane functions.
No matter what kind of dreams you have or what relation they have with reality(as argued by some researchers), we are all thrilled by what we see when we are asleep.
The mental activity during our sleep is a lot different than what we carry out while we are awake.
As Mathew Walker, professor of neuroscience and psychology at the University of California Berkeley says, during our sleep, we all become fragrantly psychotic due to what goes on in our minds. We hallucinate by seeing things that are not real, have delusions, are disoriented, have fluctuating emotions, and are forgetful of what we experienced.
These are mental activities that have the potential to harm our well-being if they happen to us while we are awake.
Some, if not all people suffer from a very pressing problem called overthinking which is nothing but similar hyperactivity of our mind.
All of us have encountered the phrase ‘you are overthinking about it’ during a critical situation in our lives.
But how do you stop this stream of thoughts originating from a place you know nothing about and neither the way to stop them from coming?
Why is it that at times our thoughts calm by themselves without much of an effort?
Let's get a brief background about the working of our mind as has been explained by Ekhart Tonne in his book The Power of Now.
The mind is similar to any other organ of our body. We use it to carry out different functions in our life. The mind has a function of evaluating the situation we encounter and analyzing them for our better survival.
In this process of evaluating and analyzing, the mind creates thousands of thoughts to comprehend reality.
When our life goes smoothly with all our basic needs of food, shelter, emotions being fulfilled, the continuous chatter of the mind subsides as there is a surety of survival.
But the moment any of the areas of our life enters a state of uncertainty and doubt, the mind starts working to better evaluate the situation and hence creates a lot of thoughts in the process.
This stream of thoughts makes us incapable to function in a focused way and hampers our ability to concentrate on the most important things of our life.
What we need to understand are the reasons the mind goes into a state of continuous chatter in the first place.
From a recent experience of feeling hopeless and completely deranged, I have realized a few factors which have a causal explanation for what goes inside our mind during times of distress.
Allow me share some of the things which hampered my state of mind to such an extent that I lost all the hope of achieving something meaning in my life.
- Inability to cope with failure:
No matter how many quotes you read about the benefits of failure, the moment it hits you, it takes away all your momentum and puts you in a state of limbo.
My inability to clear an examination pushed me so deep into a state of confusion and helplessness that my mind was able to overpower my sense of self and clouded my thinking ability.
In order to get back to my senses, I had to make myself believe that there are endless possibilities out there and I need to persist in my actions in order to reach a place of satisfaction.
2. An unhealthy body makes the mind unhealthy:
No matter how much we boost our egos into believing that our physical health has nothing to do with our mental abilities, its deteriorating effects are visible in times of distress.
During this period, I was suffering from Tonsillitis which is basically an infection of our tonsils reducing the body's ability to fight germs.
Although the problem is not much severe, the overthinking steered me to dangerous diagnoses and pathologies.
3. Lack of emotional support:
No matter how much “independent” we want to be in life, we must never forget the fact that humans are social creatures. We crave emotional bonds and being vulnerable comforts us when we are unable to take our lives head-on.
My boasted ego never allowed me to open up in front of the people to whom I matter, which left me all alone to deal with my problems.
I used to believe that sharing my problems with others will only spoil their mood and put me in an uncomfortable position for the rest of my life.
But the idea of sharing your problems is not to get any solution out of the other person. Rather sharing allows you the comfort of another human being that has the power to make you realize that you too, after all, are a human.
It's an act of putting the problem out in the open so that the mind doesn’t have exclusive power over your thinking.
4. Problems are the mind created fire blazing dragons:
For most of this deranged state of mind, we imagine only the worst is possible. Our mind has till that point exaggerated the problem to such an extent that we see ourselves as a little caged bird in the middle of a blazing forest.
We forget the power of our will and the strength in our wings and could only witness the wrath created by this dragon.
What we need to understand is the more thought we give to our problems, the more strength they gain and the more influence they have on our thinking process.
The best way is to forget everything that is wrong in the world and in your life in order to be more present in the moment.
Writing or any other creative art form has the ability to distract your mind from the incessant reminder of your problems.
5. Over expecting from yourself and burdening with everything at once:
We all tend to judge our abilities way beyond what we are truly capable of. This doesn’t cause much of an issue during normal times but the moment the mind overpowers our thinking processes, our inability to carry out even simpler tasks like cooking breakfast adds to the regret of being non-functional.
We need to understand that momentum takes time and we must have gradual progress rather than a swift jerk. This allows us to deal with the situation one step at a time and to cope with our own emotional haphazardness.
6. The overpowering emotions of fear, regret, guilt, and sorrow:
I don't want you to feel any of these emotions ever in your life but that will only be possible if you are aware of their origin and how they affect your life.
All of these negative emotions(fear, guilt, regret, sorrow, etc) have their origin in our own thought processes. The moment you allow the mind to take over as an assessor of your past, it will bombard painful and regretful thoughts towards you generating these emotions. Similarly, if you allow your mind to contemplate the future, you will encounter thoughts of worry, uncertainty, and fear.
The only way to remain resistant to these negative emotions is by practicing the art of being Present. The more present you are, the more your mind will be engaged in the task at hand and the sources of origin of such negative thoughts will remain dormant.
I guess you have already understood the origin of such thoughts in our minds. It is nothing but past experiences based on which the mind evaluates the present moment and throws all sorts of negative possibilities at us generating emotions of fear, guilt, and worry.
7. Comparing your situation with others:
As Theodore Roosevelt said, “Comparison is the thief of joy”, it literally is. The feeling of not being worth is quadrupled when we compare ourselves with others.
No matter how successful your friend or colleague is, their situation is never going to help you live a better life. The origin of such comparisons is actually the things I mentioned above. All of these negative habits force us into a state of helplessness such that we resort to comparing our lives with others.
These are only a few of the reasons I have shared with you that put our minds into a spiral of overthinking. I will add more as I discover them along the journey.
Just like any other organ of our body, we have the ability to control the functioning of our mind to a certain extent.
If we are willing to enjoy this journey called life, we can embrace the abilities of our mind to work in our favor, not against it.
No matter how much we try to prepare ourselves, we are bound to fall into a gorge of pain that is deeply embedded in life itself.
But we must remember what Napoleon Hill said,
“Most great people have attained their greatest success just one step beyond their greatest failure.”
Always have the hope that things will fall back into pieces to create something unexpected and turn your life much more beautiful than before.
I hope you enjoy reading my work and my words are helpful for you to live a happy and fulfilling life.
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