Notice What You Like

2024 Author: Harry Day | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 15:43

In my work, I focus on teaching mindfulness to clients. The ability to be aware of your thoughts and the right to choose your thoughts is a step of paramount importance for a person who wants to get out of the prison of his own thinking.

There is an understanding among psychotherapists of different directions that for the most part, the thoughts that we think are all the same thoughts and their variations that we began to think before the age of 10. In the interval from 7 to 9 years, we begin to conceptualize the experience: during this period we mastered our native language, the influence of our native culture was incorporated and the attitudes of our parents were absorbed. And now we are already thinking thoughts.

On average, in adulthood, we do not think any new thoughts. Most of the mental attitudes and their variations play out in our mind from day to day.

Most of the thoughts we think are tied to disturbing scenarios. Anxiety, meaningless and merciless, but nevertheless so clearly present, is due to the fact that our mind is trying to shield us from painful experiences in the future. Hence the concentration on the negative: “forewarned is forearmed,” the restless mind prompts.

Our mind is tuned to anticipate potential difficulties and to rationalize the unwanted - thanks to him for that! However, if a person is ripe to make the transition to conscious being and take responsibility for his life into his own hands, a reconfiguration of the thought process will be required.

Suppressing negative thinking doesn't work because suppressed thoughts don't go anywhere. Thought suppression is a cruel self-gaslighting: we convince ourselves that we think one thing, even though internally we know that we really do not think so. Suppressed thoughts just become unconscious, and as soon as the patrolling consciousness is distracted (as, for example, in a dream), all these thoughts will again come to the surface: this time with tripled force, urging you to pay attention to them and resolve painful scenarios. to which these thoughts, like balls, lead.

I encourage clients and readers to view thinking of any kind and direction as a game. Thoughts are verbal and fragmentary-visual expressions that have bodily correspondences, which we call emotions. The ability to choose our thoughts is inherent in each of us. The difference between a happy person and an unhappy person is that a happy person is aware of this ability and uses it.

Neither negative thinking nor positive thinking fully reflects reality. Reality, or reality, no matter how you think: the way of thinking affects the life of each individual person and his individual happiness. Through the state of individual happiness, a person reaches the highest states of creativity and bliss. It can even be said that at the highest stages of development, these two states become inseparable and feed each other. However, in order to make the transition from exhausting, energy-draining thinking to positive, enriching thinking, it is necessary to see and realize that we have the same right to think happy thoughts as worry thoughts that make us unhappy.

Psychotherapists know that it is not reality that shapes our thoughts, but our thoughts that shape reality. As soon as we concentrate on a certain image or idea, the mind immediately begins to snatch from the environment paths that lead to this image or idea. This is why it is difficult to stop worrying: thoughts of worry attract even more thoughts of worry.

Replacing thinking can be seen as replacing an outdated operating system with a new one that is convenient, functional, and highly productive.

"Notice What I Like" is a great new firmware to get you started with your thoughts.

Here's a new challenge for each reader of this article: Wherever you are, start noticing events, moods, things, and feelings that you enjoy. Reduce to this task the entire thought process in the moments between work tasks that require specific, conscious concentration.

Notice what you like about the environment. For example, when I got the idea for this article, I was directly involved in this practice: I walked along the autumn alley and consciously noticed what I like: the rustling of foliage under my feet, my favorite cool +16, cloudy weather, hot walnut latte, characteristic autumn freshness. Soon I will be able to put on my favorite suede raincoat, and in a few months my favorite New Year's holidays are waiting for me!

The thoughtful reader will ask: is not such thinking a departure from reality? By analogy with restless thoughts - of course it does. The point is, worry is as much of a disconnect from reality as this new way of thinking. We may feel that worry helps us to live, because in this way we prevent unwanted events. However, let me help you see that events tend to happen whether we care about them or not. Anxiety aimed at reducing anxiety and creating preparedness only builds up more excitement and removes vital energy from positions where it is needed to create joy.

For most of us, the transition to this way of thinking requires a conscious switch of ourselves to this new process, and awareness is a characteristic of a developed person.

In addition, the transition to a new way of thinking will entail new forces and new energy, which, in fact, is not new at all - but old, returned to its place, freed from the need to grind the same restless thoughts.

The described technique will serve as a wonderful transition to a new perception of reality. Doing it will help you feel like the master of your life.

Lilia Cardenas, integral psychologist