When thoughts won´t let you go
• You are constantly having thoughts that you can´t get away from.
• You are always worried about the same topics.
• Your head goes round and round.
• You try to solve problems in your head.
• Sometimes you have the feeling that your life only takes place in your head.
• You are rarely in the here and now.
• You often find yourself not remembering what you were doing a few minutes ago, you were just away for a moment.
• As soon as one problem is solved, the next thought starts.
• You have trouble falling asleep because you can´t relax in the evening.
• You wake up at night and can´t go back to sleep because the thought loops start again.
A person has around 60,000 thoughts per day, which are at the beginning neutral.
As the philosopher Epictetus said, “It is not the things themselves that worry us, but our ideas and opinions about them”.
The moment we classify thoughts as dangerous and negative, the difficulties begin.
The more we think about them, the more present they become. Stopping an unpleasant thought works as well as not thinking about a pink elephant.
For some people, thoughts become so stressful that they spend a large part of the day thinking about them and trying to put their head in order. This has a huge impact on the quality of life and distances them massively from the here and now.
But how can we find peace in all this confusion?
Not through more thoughts or focusing on them, but through the body.
The more people concentrate on their body and feel it, the less they can be in their thoughts. You can´t do both at the same time.
As a child, we felt our body much better and did so instinctively, without doing anything for it: we jumped for joy, skipped, perhaps danced, beamed, when we were angry we raved, shouted, etc. We were able to feel our body much better.
Over time, we have increasingly forgotten all of this because we have received reactions from those around us such as “that´s not appropriate”, “don´t shout like that”, “a good girl doesn´t behave like that”. We adapted in order to survive because we needed love so badly back then.
The good news is that you can learn to feel again, even in adulthood. The earlier, the better. It takes time, but it can be done. And it´s so worth it, because then real life no longer takes place in your head.