Yesterday evening my mind was pretty busy and my thinking was going very fast. For a while I fell into the trap of trying to get in there and sort it out.
'What’s going on there? Where does all the thinking come from? Could I change it into ‚nicer‘ thinking? Maybe I could stop it all together or at least slow it down?' … You get the gist.
Then I realized I was messing with the system.
Engaging in more thinking to try and stop the thinking does only one thing: It adds more thinking. And it creates the illusion of being ’stuck’ in the exact kind of thinking I’m trying to stop.
Imagine cars running on a highway (the cars being your thoughts).
Let’s say you don’t like their speed or shape or color, so you put on your police uniform and get on the highway and stop every single car, to question it’s purpose and destination and try to convince it to go somewhere else.
What you’ll get is a big fat traffic jam!
The magical thing about our thought system is that it’s a self-regulating system. It takes energy to be stressed or anxious or insecure. When we misunderstand what is happening and think something needs to be done about it, we stir it up even more.
The moment we understand how it works and simply leave it alone, it starts calming down all on its own. The moment I realized what was happening I could literally watch the thinking fading away in the background, becoming more transient and leaving room for new thinking to show up.
It seems to me there is always less to do than we think there is ...
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