How to take charge of your thinking

So far this month I’ve talked a lot about thinking. How we think the things we do and some of the reasons we have those thoughts. Beliefs and assumptions that can create our reality. Now I want to look at what we can do about over-thinking and ‘toxic’ thinking. By toxic, I mean anything that doesn’t serve us, that we wouldn’t choose to have in our heads. There is a nice, familiar term that includes all that unwanted and uncontrolled thinking: worry.

Think about a dog worrying at a bone, or someone who is nervous worrying at a tangled mass of twine or fingering a string of beads. Hold that image and you know what it feels like: compulsive, mindless, distracting. When we are thinking like that, it hurts, but we can’t stop. Or at least, we believe we can’t stop, and believing something is as good as it being true.

I’ve spent more than a year now learning about gaining freedom from worry, from unwanted and unhealthy thoughts, and I am delighted to tell you that we can stop uncontrolled, damaging thinking. We don’t have to worry. I’m not a scientist, therapist or psychologist and I can’t tell you the technical hows and whys. But I can tell you about my own experience and reveal simple ways to reduce worry and thereby increase joy in our lives.

If you have ever said, as I did many times, ‘I can’t stop thinking about it,’ ‘well you have to worry don’t you?’ or ‘I can’t help worrying all the time,’ I am here to tell you that I understand those beliefs but that’s all they are – beliefs. It is possible to challenge those beliefs, as we have done on various subjects in the previous couple of weeks, and decide to do things differently. If you want to know more about the compulsive nature of ‘unconscious’ thought, and our ability to free ourselves from it, read The Power of Now, or the more accessible Practising the Power of Now, by Eckhart Tolle, or the even easier Thunk! by Sandy Newbigging.

So, once we have digested the surprising truth that we don’t have to be ruled by our thinking, and in fact we can take control of it so that it doesn’t hurt us, what do we do next? My experience has taught me that living worry-free requires us to change our entire lifestyle. It’s a holistic approach. The good news is that the changes themselves don’t have to be big. They can be tiny tweaks, done one at a time, so that the changes are imperceptible at first, but put them all together and your whole experience of life can change.

The big picture is contained in a book which I am still in the middle of writing, but here are the basic principles. We need to surround ourselves with the right people and we need to practise ‘extreme self-care.’ If this phrase is new to you, check out Cheryl Richardson’s The Art of Extreme Self Care which I recommend frequently. We need to understand the difference between acceptance and action, and make sure we do them both at the right times. Much easier than it sounds! Practising gratitude enthusiastically, and on a regular basis, helps enormously. We need to learn – very simple – ways to take control of what we are thinking about. If we are compulsive worriers, the chances are that in the past our thinking has controlled us! We need to focus more and more on the present moment, and to find ways to meditate that we are comfortable with. Those of us who have grown up thinking too much usually tend to spend most of our time in our heads, and this needs to change. It is immensely freeing to learn to live in your whole body, to accept feelings, good and bad, and as a result to stop feeling trapped in your head. There are lots of great ways to achieve this, including, happily, remembering how to play and incorporating laughter and smiling into every day.

That doesn’t sound too bad does it? If you are reading this, I guess that you probably do quite a lot of this, if not all of it, already. But if you are ever troubled by worry, more tweaking may be needed. I’d love to know this: what would you like to know more about from that list in the last paragraph? I have such an abundance of learning to share that it is a challenge to fit it all into one book, but I am impatient and I’d really like to share some of it sooner. I am passionate about living a worry-free lifestyle, and passing on what I have learned ensures that I keep remembering all the things that help, and actually doing them! So please tell me what you’d like to know more about and I’ll use some of my remaining posts this month to pass on some tips.

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