42. Finding The Off Switch For Unwanted Thoughts

In this episode learn what to do with your unwanted thoughts. Coach Mimi discusses why thoughts come up and what to do with them using a helpful ticker-tape analogy.  Put these simple steps into place and you'll be able to decrease the negative effect of all those thoughts you don't want to be thinking.  

For more help from Coach Mimi visit the website: thegoodguycorner.com

Transcript

Hi Guys.  Coach Mimi here in your corner to give you some help tips and tools for dealing with your life.  So many times we’re making life even harder than it already is and that’s what my tools help with.  How to minimize suffering.  Life is hard enough.  Let’s not make it even harder.

One of the ways I see this a lot is when guys are fighting with their thoughts.  They don’t like what they’re thinking and then they beat themselves up for it and and up hating themselves.  That doesn’t help anyone.  So let’s get some greater understanding about this. OK?

First of all we want to recognize that the thoughts in your mind come for all kinds of reasons.  It could be something you heard from someone else, even from your childhood.  If you were ever told, “You always mess up.” or “You never follow through.”  Or you were told things much more harsh than that, it makes sense that those sentences come back into your mind, uninvited.  

Another reason thoughts come is because they’re practiced and just become a habit.  I like to think of that like a well-warn path in our brain.  Thoughts we’ve had repeatedly create a well-warn path and are easy to come again.

Thoughts also resurface because they’ve served us somehow in the past.  They may have lead to a reward of some kind so then our brain thinks those thoughts are important. Thoughts that create desire definitely fall into this category.  Thoughts like, “I want that” or “I deserve this.”  Those kinds of thoughts lead to taking action that has at least a momentary pleasure, sometimes a very big pleasure so it makes sense we would think them again. 

Or maybe they’re thoughts that served us by protecting us from something dangerous or uncomfortable. Things like, “I’m not good enough.”  “I’d better not do that.” or “I can’t, that would never work for me.”

So those are some of the understandable reasons why thoughts show up.  And then there are the thoughts that seem to come out of the blue or thoughts that we really hate and wish that we would never think them again.  Those are really the ones I want to say more about.

There are many thoughts that really don’t have an explanation for why they’re showing up.  They just come in to your brain uninvited and there they are. Lots of time people are also thinking that they must believe these thoughts to some degree or they wouldn’t be here and I just don’t believe this is true at all.  Just because a thought shows up does not mean you believe it. And it definitely doesn’t mean you’re a bad person for thinking it.

I have a favorite analogy that I like to use for this.  You know how, when you’re watching sports or news on the television, that down at the bottom of the screen there’s that ticker-tape of more written stories that just scrolls across the bottom? You’ve seen that, right?  It just scrolls along at a steady pace whether you want it there or not and you get to choose if you’re going to read it or not.  It’s not good or bad that it’s there, unless you think it is, and it’s just going to continue.  It will probably repeat itself eventually, right?.  

So, take that image from the bottom of the screen up to your brain.  This is how I like to see thoughts.  Your thoughts are sentences that just scroll along. And lots of them repeat themselves.  And, they aren’t good or bad.  They’re just there.  Right?  Got that image in your mind?

Now, one of two things usually happen when our thoughts are going by.  We either grab on to them to believe them or we grab on to them to fight with them.   And it’s this second one that I really want to focus on because as people start to become more aware of their thinking they start seeing all these thoughts that they don’t like and they start to really fight with them.  “I shouldn’t think that.”  “That’s a terrible thing to think.”  “I must be a horrible person if I think that.” “Something is really wrong with me.”

So again, we want to go back to what I said at the beginning that thoughts come for all kinds of reasons.  Many of which we don’t understand at all.  And just because a thought shows up in your mind doesn’t mean anything in particular about you.  Truly.  It doesn’t.  It’s simply a sentence that showed up.  Maybe we can identify a reason, maybe we can’t, it doesn’t matter.  Just like the TV ticker tape, it’s just there.

Most of us unconsciously wish that there was some kind of an off-switch to the thoughts we don’t like. Wouldn’t that be great if we could just switch them off? But this gets back to fighting with them.  When we’re needing them to turn off we’re actually giving them power and they stay longer.  So unfortunately there’s not an off switch.  But there is a kind of a volume dial, so to speak.  When we believe the thoughts or when we fight with them to not be there, we’re turning the volume up.  We’re giving them power.  See that? With both of those options we turn up the volume.  However…and here’s the great news…there is a third option, we can just notice them.  We can just notice that they’re there, “Oh there’s that thought again, ok, I see it, brains are interesting.  It’s not bad or good that it’s here.  It’s just simply showing up in my mind.  I don’t have to believe it and I don’t have to fight with it.  It’s just a sentence crossing my brain.” 

When you can do that, and remember, it’s a new skill, it’s going to take some practice, but when you can simply observe that a thought is there without believing it or fighting with it then that volume dial is going to turn down. It’s not going to be so loud, it’s not going to have so much power.  Now be careful here because if we’re needing the volume to go down then we’re back to fighting with it again and that’s going to give it more power and turn up the volume again.  

So when you don’t like what you’re thinking, remember this ticker tape analogy.  See your thoughts as just sentences scrolling across your brain.  Remember that there’s no particular meaning tied to those sentences. they don’t mean anything about you. Remember that you don’t have to believe them or fight with them.  Just let them scroll on by and the volume will start to turn down.

Alright guys, that’s what I have for you today and I’ll be here next time In The Good Guy Corner.