Read & Listen: To Build a Home – The Cinematic Orchestra
As I am sure you all have heard before, our thoughts become us. What we think about regularly tends to shape our reality for the worse or for the better. According to an article published by Psychology Today, “What we control, and where we start to create our reality, is in how we perceive/interpret/think about the events in our life that generate our feelings about those events, and how we subsequently respond with our behavior.” In other words, the correlations we draw in our minds tend to shape our thoughts and behaviors towards objects, people, and events.
Now you may be thinking, ok that’s cool, but sometimes I can’t control how I react to something. I have no power over the correlations my brain chooses to make.
But actually, you do.
Your brain is hardwired to make neurological pathways as you replicate a behavior or thought pattern. Where do you think intrusive thoughts come from? We give them power by fueling it with our fear. There’s a common theme; WE hold the power. Think of it this way, your brain is like a child. It sees something shiny and in turn, is drawn to that shiny thing. Let’s say the shiny thing is a habitual fear response. But now, it is our turn to be like no, look at this glittery thing; it’s even cooler. The child is then drawn to the glittery object. This scenario I just laid out for you is something we can replicate in our brains. The new glittery objects are positive thoughts and ways of thinking. The more you teach your brain to go from negative to positive thoughts, your brain begins to replicate that. The brain is like a muscle in this way. You have the power to turn your negative thoughts into positive ones, but all it takes is practice.
And now you’re thinking, OK clearly, you have never been in a negative thought spiral. Your brain keeps feeding you negativity and you keep fueling it with fear and before you know what happened, you’re in a full-blown anxiety attack. You were in a moment of weakness or in a scenario where your brain has formed anxious thinking correlations.
I get it, I really do.
There are several techniques to try that may help in these moments. According to Rumble Trainer and Not My Best podcast host, Julia Stern, “Be hyper-aware of how your environment is contributing to your spiral.” Get up, move around, change what you’re looking at. Our brain goes off of the senses, what we see, hear, touch, smell, and taste. We can regain control by changing the input. Our brain is smart, but we are smarter. The thing is you are not your thoughts, as odd as that may sound. The brain is like a vast ocean of past associations, feelings, and thoughts.
As humans, we are constantly changing, adapting. Remember how I said turning negative thoughts into positive thoughts just takes practice? You can rewire your brain. You can trick the child that is your brain into going after the glittery thing consistently. The more you repeat a pattern, the more a neurological pathway is formed. This is me telling you that you don’t have to live in the past. You can change the way your brain responds to its environment.
Are you still with me? I know, there is A LOT of information. If you are with me, you might be wondering how one would do this seemingly impossible act. Well, I’ll tell you.
To do this, we must become an expert at recognizing our negative thoughts and shifting them into positive ones. We must be aware of thoughts, like clouds passing in the sky, and how they affect us. Remind yourself you are the observer of the clouds and not the other way around. A dark and stormy cloud may grab your attention more than a white-puffy one, but like all clouds, it too shall pass.
Let’s say you can’t help it and hyper-fixate on that dark and gloomy cloud. You may even walk underneath it as it passes, following it across the sky, letting it guide your thoughts on it’s path of darkness. Before you know it, you are surrounded by its rain, and lightning rings in your ears all around you. Fear strikes your heart, and you plug your ears and sit down on the grass beneath you. You remove your hands from your ears and place them in the grass. It is soft. Not prickly or threatening. Interesting. You open your eyes and see the rain falling around you. In the distance, you see a bird flying. You watch the bird until it lands safely in a nearby tree. A bird, though it might have no other choice, flying in these conditions. You pick yourself up off the ground. You hear the thunder, but it doesn’t bother you as much anymore. Suddenly, two birds shoot up out of the tree, chasing each other; playing. You find yourself laughing. How silly, yet profound. You find yourself running to them. The rain soaks your clothes and lightning strikes mere miles away, but you don’t care. As you reach the tree, you begin dancing to their song. Suddenly, the rain stops. You glance up and squint at the light. You feel the sun beaming on your skin. You spread out your arms to soak up every ounce of its warmth.
Once again, I remind you, that you are NOT your thoughts. You observe them like clouds in the sky. You are the watcher, nothing more and nothing less. A seemingly harmless thought can spiral into a threatening one and cause us to sink to our knees, begging for the storm to pass. Our power comes in when we rise from the ground, realize our surroundings, and transform our dark stormy thoughts into warm positive ones. It may take a minute; the transformation does not happen instantaneously. But after the switch, we see our power.
Yes, YOU just did that.
You picked yourself up out of the depths where it seemed like there was no end to the darkness. You are a limitless being. There was such a small chance of you even being alive on this earth and yet here you are. Surpassing all the storms that come your way. And just because you survived a storm doesn’t mean it wasn’t scary. It doesn’t decrease its worth. If anything, it increases your capability.
Taking this new way of thinking into our daily thinking leaves us with a sense of a higher being. We are above the things that seek to destroy us. That can be big and scary, but you will get past it just like you do everything else. You are capable of anything.
Life has a way of beating us down and telling us we are only as strong as our failures. When actually, you are stronger than your worst fears and failures. A measure of a person’s character is not how many times they fall, but how many times they pick themselves back up.
It’s easy to have the victim mindset of “Everything happens to me and there’s nothing I can do about it.” Life has beaten you down and you succumb to it. What you fail to see is that all that pain, sadness, and suffering wasn’t for nothing. It was making you stronger. Picking yourself back up on your own is teaching you (and your brain) that you are a strong individual. Your brain is a muscle, it has a memory so you must teach it to be strong. If you succumb to your struggles, your brain will want to replicate that behavior. You choose to rise above them, and your brain will replicate that as well.
The world could be your b**ch. You just have to believe it.
Believe that everything that has happened in your life leads up to this moment was on purpose. You are writing your hero origin story. You are the main character and are here for a reason. We are all the heroes of our own story; we just have to be aware and step into the light.
Change the narrative. Take back your power.