Seems redundant, but familiar, right?
Presenting at these #SameHere🤙 Sit-Downs on college campuses, we’re learning a lot during the Q&A’s about what’s going through the minds of many. At the last three that @theofleury14 came with us to, this was amongst the most common questions: How do I get my mind to stop thinking on overdrive?
Why is this so common? All these mental health complications – whether severe or just surface level, anywhere on the continuum – they make us THINK about why we’re THINKING a certain way. Why? Because when we aren’t thinking in the clearest & most positive way…whether they’re categorized as anxious thoughts, obsessive thoughts, intrusive thoughts, depressive thoughts, traumatic memories, cognitive fog, etc., they feel uncomfortable to us.
When we have uncomfortable thoughts, we THINK about WHY we are THINKING that way. It’s only natural we’d get like that. It’s human nature. If we get heartburn, we wonder what we ate or drank. So if we have any of the above thoughts, we wonder why.
The problem is, when we think about WHY we are thinking that way, the negative/uncomfortable thoughts only get worse. We’re on the hamster wheel & we can’t get off.
But then how DO we get off? As difficult as it sounds – & I only learned this by doing yrs of the opposite – we get off by NOT thinking/worrying about WHY we’re thinking that way. Nothing feeds anxious/obsessive/depressive/
Hard to do, & maybe repeat for many: but picture some of those uncomfortable thoughts as living in a cloud above you. They’re “shading your sun,” yes, but just like real clouds, the thoughts eventually move. They are NOT a part of you. They are NOT what you are made of. Help yourself get off the wheel by going against the human nature that gets us on the wheel in the first place. Break the cycle by breaking the thoughts about the thoughts.
