Just like the body needs physical exercise to operate fully and be at its best, your mind needs exercise and control over its operation.
Just like you can’t eat any junk food and expect to be healthy, your mind needs to be careful on the things it spends time on thinking, evaluating, scheming, etc
Your mind is meant to have thoughts and that’s what a mind does. It continuously produces a number of thoughts, including scary thoughts. The mind is always juggling between various thoughts and conversations that happened in the past or might happen in the future or completely hypothetical.
One thing that we often forget no matter how many times a thought plays out in your mind is that there is no logical conclusion as you can’t predict what the other person might say or you can’t predict what the end result will be.
I believe there are two techniques that can help you have control over the mind and your thoughts — being centered and being present.
Being centered is key in handling numerous thoughts. Meditation greatly helps in this regard. When you are having a bad thought, take a deep breath, focus your mind on the breath. As you do inhale and exhale, feel the air going in and coming out of your body. Feel the warmth in your belly, your hands and your legs. Direct air into the mind, into the hands, and the legs. Do it a couple of times and you will realize that the mind had exited the thought you were having and become centered.
Being present is another technique that helps in managing your thoughts. You cannot change the past and you cannot predict the future. By being occupied in numerous thoughts you tend to not focus on what is happening in the present and the moment that you are currently involved in. When the mind brings you thoughts about your past or about a future state, acknowledge the thought, tell the mind thanks for bringing it to my attention but it is not useful at this time and gently reject the thought.
For example, if you are having a thought that “you will fail poorly in this task you are doing”. Acknowledge it saying thanks mind for the thought and I understand the consequence of failure. I will just go ahead and give my best anyway.
Remind yourself it’s important to be fully present in the current moment which you have full control over.
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