Learning how to manage your mind can become an invaluable tool to feel better, stress less, accomplish your goals, and create new results in your life.
Your mind is full of thoughts every day, and you have tens of thousands of thoughts every day. Some will be helpful to you, and some will not.
You can direct your brain to think thoughts that serve you instead of just accepting each thought that comes to your brain. The way to do this is to manage your mind.
Facts and Thoughts You Have
There are facts in the world, and then there are stories you tell yourself about the facts.
Those stories are thoughts.
Thoughts create your feelings.
When you take a fact, ten people can have ten wildly different thoughts about the same fact.
This is how you know that a fact is neutral.
Since your thoughts create your feelings, your thoughts are vital to creating an enjoyable life. How you feel dictates your experience of life, and since your thoughts are your perception of life, you want to make sure that you choose helpful thoughts.
Thoughts also cause stress, anxiety, overwhelm, and other negative feelings.
Resources:
- 3 Ways to Feel Less Overwhelmed at Work (free download)
- Burnout vs. Overwhelm (blog post)
- Asking Better Questions (blog post)
Your feelings are not caused by the things going on around you. They are caused by the thoughts that you think.
This is important because how you feel impacts your actions and, therefore, the results you create.
What actions do you take if you think I don’t have enough time to do this, and it makes you feel overwhelmed?
Do you sit down, organize, plan, and get to work? NO.
You probably spin in your head about how much you must do, complain, feel bad, and continue feeling overwhelmed without getting any momentum or moving forward.
The result that you create is that you don’t have enough time to complete all your tasks.
But it is not because of the number of tasks you have. It is because of your thinking.
This is awareness and is the first step to managing your mind.
How to Manage Your Mind
Managing your mind is becoming aware of what you are thinking, separating facts from the stories you tell yourself, seeing the impact of those thoughts in your life, questioning and understanding your thoughts, and then creating and believing new thoughts to produce new and different results.
1. Become aware of your thinking. Write down all the thoughts going through your head in a stream-of-consciousness style. Even bringing awareness to your thoughts can help you create different results and feel better.
2. Go back through and identify what is a fact and what is a thought. Most of what you write is probably thoughts with minimal fact.
3. Pick one thought and determine its impact on your life.
Think the thought and then ask yourself how that thought makes you feel.
Now ask yourself, what actions do you take when you feel that way?
Then ask yourself what result those actions create for you in your life?
4. Now question the thought you picked out.
Why do you think your brain offered you this thought?
How is this thought serving you?
Do you want to keep this thought or do you want to let it go?
5. Now, think of a result that you want to create in your life.
What actions would you need to take to create that result?
What feeling would you need to be feeling to fuel you to take those actions?
What story would you need to tell yourself to get yourself into that feeling?
This is the thought that you need to start practicing and believing to create the new result in your life.
A Final Note
This is the process of managing your mind. It is being aware of what is going on in your mind, seeing how those thoughts impact your life, evaluating your thoughts, and then creating and practicing new thoughts to get you different results.
Managing your mind is how you solve your problems. It is how you stop feeling overwhelmed, stressed, or worried. It is how you change your feelings to create new results instead of repeating what you have already made.