Stop Thinking and take control of your life Part 2

Continuing our look at how to understand the link between your thoughts and your emotions, Part 2 of this blog examines the link between stress and anxiety and holding on to thoughts. Too often our thoughts are focussed on when they offer nothing but a distortion of reality and fertile ground for depression:

Fuelling the fire

You wouldn’t put salt in your wound if you knew it was going to sting like crazy.

As you begin to understand the dynamic between your thinking and the way you feel, you will be able to ease off your thinking, in much the same way that you can ease off your cars’ accelerator when you are stuck in the mud.

Before you understand that trying harder to get out of the mud doesn’t work, you are tempted to put your foot to the floor. After you understand the relationship between the weight of your foot and sinking deeper in the mud, you ease off a little bit. If you’ve ever been stuck in the mud in your car, even though you know that putting your foot to the floor will make matters worse, it’s still tempting to try to force your way out. Understanding the relationship between your thoughts and your feelings, you are able to resist the urge. Resist the urge to think your way out of your depression and you will find it lift far faster than you might expect.

The accumulation factor

The accumulation factor is a way to explain why you don’t always feel good after a positive thought. It suggests that you accumulate negativity in your mind throughout the day, and throughout your lifetime. Our brains literally configure themselves based on experience. Thinking negatively throughout your life will eventually lead to an overload that “breaks the camel’s back”.

It’s not any one thought that does you in, it’s the accumulation that builds up over time. Set a goal for yourself of eliminating as close to 100 percent of your daily negativity as possible. The closer you get to reaching this goal, the less impact each individual negative thought will have on your emotional well-being. We can literally change our brains by consistently thinking positively. In this way, it can be useful to always ask yourself: “What am I thinking now.”

Is unhappiness in the genes?

Although there may be psychological factors that compound an unhappy or depressed state, or that make a person predisposed to unhappiness or depression, without thought there is no fuel to throw on the fire. There is nothing to feed the predisposition.

Whenever you have a thought, and believe that thought to be true, you will feel a corresponding emotional response to that thought.

It’s not your life, your circumstances, your genes, or your true nature that is creating your unhappiness-it’s your thinking. Unhappiness is the feeling that accompanies negative thinking about your life. There is nothing to hold your negative feelings in place other than your thinking.

At the core of your being is something you were born with- your “healthy psychological functioning”. Many schools of Psychotherapy identify this innate human urge to be well and improve ourselves. It is not learned, it’s inherent, always present when you are not engaged in your thinking mind. We may refer to it as wisdom or common sense. This is the part of you that sees beyond unhappiness; it isn’t disturbed when the circumstances in your life are less than perfect. It is the feeling you have when everything seems OK, when life seems simple, and you have a sense of perspective.

Once you understand that healthy functioning is a part of you, you can allow yourself to notice it’s presence in your life.

Assisi Therapy in Salisbury, near to Old Sarum offers you a safe place to work through your problems without fear of judgement or direction. The use of Psychotherapy, Hypnotherapy and Counselling in a setting that is private and discrete, means that we can tailor your Therapy to suit you.