I don’t know about you but sometimes I feel my mind is in control of me rather than the other way round. Despite knowing that I shouldn’t be dwelling on the negative things that are going on in my life, I still do. Refusing to think about those ‘bad’ things is a great idea but I’ve always found it very difficult to achieve. Even when I have a powerful, inspiring, exciting goal to focus on, my mind still wanders back to the negative stuff.
Coming from a Sports Psychology background I know how important it is to maintain my focus on what I want, rather than what I don’t want. Every motivational speaker on the planet will tell you that if you focus on the things you don’t want then you’re more likely to achieve them! There are on-line programmes you can buy, courses you can follow, events you can attend, that all tell you this simple piece of information. But no matter how much I’ve practiced I just cannot seem to stay completely focused on my goals, my mind will eventually draw me back to my problems.
It’s only recently that I’ve found out that this is true for everyone. Nobody is able to stay focused on their goal and stop their mind from thinking about their problems. Every human being on the planet suffers in this way because it’s the nature of the human mind to do that. I thought it was my fault. I thought it was a lack of self discipline, a weakness in my thinking, bad programming of my own internal computer etc. But the truth is, despite what some people will tell you, no-one will ever be able to eliminate this negative thinking.
Unfortunately when we focus on the ‘crap’ in our lives it puts us in a negative mood, it limits our abilities and it creates stress for us to deal with, none of which help us achieve what we really want. Have you woken up in the middle of the night thinking about a problem you’ve got? That’s your mind controlling you. Have you had a song go round and round your head for a few hours and you are unable to get rid of it? That’s your mind controlling you. Have you had an argument with someone and then been unable to get it out of your head for a couple of days? That’s your mind controlling you.
So is there a solution to this problem? Is there a way in which we can control our mind? Well YES and NO! The solution isn’t to try and control the mind. The solution is to disassociate from it, to observe it, to listen to it but stop believing everything it tells us!
The human mind is an amazing tool that we’ve been given, but for most of us it’s taken over and, no matter what we do, we can’t shut it up. It’s job is to solve problems and guess what it does if it doesn’t have a problem to solve? Yes – it creates one! We’ll never be able to shut it up because it doesn’t have an ‘off button’. Even if you drink a bottle of vodka that will only shut it up temporarily. And when you wake up your mind will start all over again, only this time it has even more problems to deal with than before!
The only thing that I’ve ever found that helps to quieten the mind (notice I didn’t say turn it off) is meditation. With a regular practice of meditation you learn to divorce yourself from the incessant ramblings of the mind and you start to take those negative thoughts less seriously. What this creates is a wonderful sense of peace and a lowering of the stress levels that we experience.
Learning to meditate won’t solve your problems! But the truth is that most of the things we worry and stress about never actually happen, so worrying about them is a complete waste of time anyway. The challenge for most of us is not the problems in our life, the challenge is the huge amount of time we waste worrying about them. What meditation enables you to do is stop spending all that time dwelling on your problems!
No doubt you’ll have heard the word mindfulness recently. The media seems to have got hold of this concept and created all sorts of rubbish around it but in essence mindfulness is a type of meditation practice and meditation has been around for more than three thousand years! This practice helps us to move away from our continual thinking and get back some level of control over our mind. If you’d like to find out more about this then click here and download my free e-book on the subject.
Let me finish with this:
In all my years of studying how the human mind works, meditation is the most powerful technique I’ve ever used to help with my own thinking. Every other psychological practice I’ve studied, used and taught becomes insignificant compared to the benefits I’ve derived by learning to meditate.