27 Jul Manage Your Thoughts with Mindfulness

Your mind is a thinking factory and no matter how much you try, some or the other thoughts will always be produced in your mind. The funny part is, most of these thoughts will come out of nowhere. These unwanted thoughts can take away the peace of your mind and cause stress and anxiety. Wondering how? Below is the answer.

• These random thoughts are often so strong and replay so many times in people’s mind that they misunderstand them as reality. This should not be the case because as we start believing in our thoughts we become biased. Also, this distorts our reality and as a result we start considering our thoughts to be true without any physical evidence. This in turn can cause anxiety and stress.
• When you start believing your thoughts to be true, you start making judgments about people, situations or things based on these thoughts. Making judgments on these subjective assumptions again leads to reality distortion which ultimately leads to anxiety and stress.
• When people start believing that all their thoughts carry equal weight they directly jump to conclusions without giving much thought. As a result, they get stressed. People should learn to discriminate between relevant and irrelevant thoughts before drawing any conclusion.

While these thoughts can do a lot to you, you can do nothing to stop these random thoughts. Do you think this way? If yes is your answer then you are wrong. You can control your thoughts which is very necessary to avoid stress. How can you do that? Well, mindfulness is the solution.

What is meant by Mindfulness?

It can be defined as a simple form of mediation in which the person has to focus on his or her breath. In other words, mindfulness also means being aware about thoughts, bodily sensations as well as surrounding environment.   

Mindfulness and Thoughts

Are you troubled with the formation of irrelevant mental objects every now and then, then mindfulness is the solution for you. With this form of meditation, you will be able to pay attention to those irrelevant and random mental objects or thoughts without actually judging them. Thus, it helps you avoid unwanted stress and contributes in your mental well-being.

Let’s dig a little deeper. Being mindful means being aware of your present moment. When you think of just present and not past or future, you tend to enjoy the world around you in a much better way. You tend to enjoy things which you have been taking for granted so long. Also when you focus on the present, you understand yourself better.

Mindfulness is also a great technique that allows you to have awareness about thoughts and feelings that you are experiencing. Also, it helps you realise that getting entangled in stream of thoughts and feelings in certain ways would not do any good to you and hence you must stay back. Hence, you will begin to observe their pattern. As a result, you will be able to prevent your stream of thoughts and feelings to control you.

How to be Mindful?

You can be mindful just with practice. You do not have to travel all the way to mountains or in a retreat in order to practice mindfulness. You can carry out this technique anywhere. All you need to do is to focus all your attention on your present. That’s it. You can do that much, rite?

If you ever find it difficult to find enough time to practice this technique, read this short story. Mahatma Gandhi was once asked by one of his followers about his schedule. His answer was he makes it a point to spare at least one hour per day for meditation. His perplexed follower replied that there is no way he can put aside one hour each day as he has such a busy schedule. To this, Mahatma Gandhi replied that when he is too busy to put aside one hour for meditation, he keeps aside two hours.

This story teaches us just one thing that it is very important to spend your precious time on meditation each day because this activity is worth it. Also, the busier you are, the more important it becomes in order to keep your mind clear of any unwanted thoughts.