What direction are your thoughts taking you most often this week?
Is what is going in to your cup good, kind, inspiring, positive? This is where we left off last time – the idea that what spills out of us is a mark of what is inside of us in the first place. This applies to our thought life too.
As I was musing recently,
Our brains like to conserve energy, and if our default way of thinking is worry, anxiety, negativity, being hard on ourselves, this will be what is dominant in our minds.”
What we put in comes out.
I do a lot of work on mindset and the power of our mind to affect our belief about ourselves, our actions and our behaviour. Our minds think most about what we expose them to the most. It therefore follows that if what we think about most of the time is negative, dark, depressing, heavy, that is what will dominate our view of our world.
This applies to what we believe about ourselves, as well as to how much of our mental energy is taken up with worry.
I came across this quote a while back, shared by a friend. It is from Arthur Somers Roche (1883-1935) an American author and playwright, who said this:
Worry is a thin stream of fear trickling through the mind. If encouraged, it cuts a channel into which all other thoughts are drained.”
As we muse on what we fill our minds with and what leaks out of us, this quote is a great example of one of our secret super powers:
Choice.
Because we get to choose what we fill our minds with. If we fill our minds with ranting and negativity on Twitter (or your social media platform of choice), that is our choice. No one makes us do that. Equally, if we spend hours scrolling through news channels, that is our choice of how to use that time. But in making those choices, we are influencing our view of the world and of ourselves.
There is nothing wrong with social media or keeping up with the news. The point here is understanding for ourselves the impact of the time we choose to spend filling our minds with that information.
The same applies to worry.
If we choose to go round in circles worrying about that which is outwith our control, those thoughts will carve out a channel of worry in our minds that will drain us of most other things.
Of course there will always be difficult and challenging things that we are dealing with. There is much in life that is beyond our control. But if we choose to spend a lot of time thinking about and worrying over that which is NOT in our control, we achieve very little and rob ourselves of being present to what IS happening around us that is good.
What direction are your thoughts taking you?
This is where the direction our thoughts are going in comes in.
Are our thoughts taking us down that deep canyon of worry that has been carved out in our minds? Our are our thoughts taking us more in the direction of a calmer rational acceptance of what is within our control?
This is easier to talk about than to do of course.
But the first step is always about noticing.
What direction are your thoughts taking you? And how often during the course of the day those thoughts are trickling into that thin stream in your mind that grows into a big channel?
This week, notice and become aware. And we will explore further what we do with that information in my next musings.