Why Do We Need to Control Our Thoughts
Overthinking and over-worrying have become a common problem because we don’t know how to control our thoughts. Negative thoughts, constantly running unchecked in the background of our mind, contribute to the creation of negative experiences. Since thoughts are inseparable from feelings, they are also responsible for the decrease in our overall well-being and even for the creation of health-related issues.
When we talk about the need to control our thoughts, we usually mean controlling negative and intrusive thoughts. Intellectual thoughts and fantasies can usually be controlled simply by becoming aware of them and switching our attention to something else.
But the thoughts that produce intense negative emotional reactions need much greater attention because their influence is much more significant.
My Own Experience
I remember that when I was young, I took every thought that came to my mind way too seriously. Then I learned that we have the power to choose our thoughts and even to change them. This helped me start managing my inner world.
But when I discovered that “thoughts are things” and are involved in creating the reality in which we live, I started to make a very serious effort to control my thoughts.
The problem was that no matter how I tried, I couldn’t get rid of the habit of constant thinking. But an even bigger problem was the inability to stop certain “intrusive” thoughts. By “intrusive,” I mean thoughts that suddenly come to mind and create inner turmoil.
This inner turmoil can be produced by one or many intense negative emotions. No matter how much willpower you use, those thoughts keep coming back. But then I realized that the problem is not so much in the thoughts themselves but in the emotions that come with them. Thoughts act as a trigger for emotions, and that’s why our main goal is to learn How To Control Emotions.
How Thoughts Trigger the Emotional Response
Have you noticed that thoughts are inseparable from emotions? Of course, some thoughts don’t affect us in a very noticeable way, but our thoughts are always reflected in the way we feel.
After many years of intensive inner work, I came to the realization that emotions are the product of our subconscious beliefs. In fact, most subconscious beliefs are not even our own; we either inherited them from relatives or picked them up from our environment in early childhood.
When a certain subconscious belief is activated, we experience an emotion and the thoughts related to that subconscious belief. We can notice that when we become emotional, our thoughts become very chaotic.
This is because when a thought triggers an emotion, that emotion also triggers other related thoughts. And those thoughts can trigger other emotions as well. As a result, we experience inner chaos with different thoughts and emotional reactions.
Why It Is Hard to Get Rid of the Thoughts
Our emotions have different charges. The greater the charge, the stronger the emotion, and the harder it is to get rid of it—and consequently, the harder it is to eliminate the thoughts connected to it. When the emotion is too strong, we become completely controlled by the thoughts related to it.
And the longer we think a particular thought, the stronger it becomes—to the point that it can even become a subconscious belief. Therefore, it is important to address each negative thought as soon as it arises and not allow it to become stronger through the power of our attention and feelings.
We listen so carefully to our thoughts because we believe they contain the answers we need. However, most of our thoughts are useless, simply because they are echoes of past experiences—and not necessarily our own. We have many repetitive thoughts that serve us nothing but reinforce our negative states.
How Can We Control Our Thoughts:
First Step
The first step we need to take to control our thoughts is to understand that thoughts do not always reflect the truth. Most importantly—and I write more about this in my book—negative thoughts are the reflection of a wrong understanding.
By acknowledging this simple truth, we become able to distance ourselves from our negative thoughts and view them more critically. It is our belief in these thoughts that makes them so irresistible to us.
Second Step
The next step is to understand how thoughts are produced. Negative thoughts come to our mind because a negative subconscious belief became activated by a certain situation. They are from the past and it is important not to project them into the future by believing them and reinforcing with our attention.
Thoughts come to our mind usually by association. A completely innocent and unimportant thing that you haven’t even noticed, can trigger some very disturbing negative beliefs because in your subconscious mind those two things somehow became associated.
The subconsciousness doesn’t have a power of discernment and record everything that we experience. And the associations that it creates can be very different from the associations that our conscious mind has. We have an enormous number of beliefs stored in our subconsciousness. Most of them are dormant and we have no idea about their existence until they become triggered by some events.
It means that idle thinking is very much an “automatic” process, and we greatly overestimate its value to us. We need to stop taking those thoughts seriously. Instead, we should regard them as useless, and potentially harmful. This understanding helps us to stop engaging with negative thoughts.
Third Step
The final step in controlling our thoughts is replacing the negative beliefs that create them. When we replace the negative beliefs that produce these negative thoughts, our inner dialogue changes completely, and the negative emotions they generate also cease.
Learning how to replace negative beliefs is a skill that we all need to develop, and I describe how to do this in my book.
Our goal is to direct our thoughts mindfully and use them only when needed, spending the rest of the time in peace and quiet, enjoying the blissful nature of our Real Self.
