By Jo Casey We all experience niggling thoughts from time to time. Negative memories, worries, and obsessions – while all perfectly normal – can be a real pain at times, draining you of precious brain energy and leaving you exhausted and stressed out. Here are some simple strategies to eradicate them: 1. Observation At the heart of mindfulness meditation is the practice of loving detachment from our thoughts. Mindfulness allows you to observe your thoughts as though they’re sticks floating by in a stream, or clouds in a sky. You watch them but don’t engage. With some practice, you’ll begin to realize your thoughts are transient; they come and go and you have a choice whether to act on them or not. 2. Walk Out The human brain has a super efficient way of marking the end of activities so that it can move on to the next task. It separates things using a something called a ‘event model’. You may have experienced this phenomenon before. Ever had the frustrating experience of entering a room and realising you’ve no recollection of what you came in for? That’s because your brain has used the passing though a doorway as a cue to create an event model. But you can use this to your advantage. You can deliberately set up an event model when you spot the niggling thought – by stopping what you’re doing, walking through the doorway, and going into another room. 3. Cancel Do you dwell on memories from the past where you’ve messed up or felt embarrassed? One way of really banishing the bad thought is to focus on another (happier) memory in its place. Researchers have found that consciously remembering a positive event creates frenetic activity in the parts of the brain needed to retrieve memories and along the pathways to consciousness. This means that the new memory will be taking up precious bandwidth that would be otherwise used by the unwanted memory– thus reducing it reducing your ability to recall it. 4. Sweat Exercise has huge benefits for stress reduction and increasing feelings of well-being. However, when you’re ruminating on something, solitary activities like running, cycling or swimming can make it worse (too much time to think). Instead, try some group activities or something that takes up a lot of brain space and concentration, such as learning a new sport. 5. Be Boring When we get a thought stuck in our head, it can be troubling and confusing as we rehash and replay the event of worry over and over. One way to stop this is by using a technique called Cognitive Diffusion. The technique comes from clinical psychology and involves repeating the unwanted thought or phrase over and over, for at least a minute. After a while you’ll notice that it loses some of its meaning and becomes a collection of sounds. This can be a really powerful technique to remove some of the negative ‘heat’ you associate with the word or phrase. 6. Concentrate You’re especially vulnerable to negative thinking when you’re doing something that’s practically second nature to you. When you’re lost in an activity that doesn’t require a lot of concentration, the conscious brain powers down and leaves the automatic pilot (the basal ganglia, or habit centre of the brain), to take over. This is when those sneaky negative thoughts can gain hold. An antidote to this is switching to an activity that requires your conscious brain to kick back in. Changing to a more challenging activity that requires your full attention. can overcome the negative or obsessive thinking. It’s important to do this as soon as you notice the unwanted thought creeping in. Especially if you’ve a tendency to dwell on things. The longer you spend obsessing, the stronger the habit of doing so will be. We all get intrusive and negative thoughts from time to time. But practicing these simple strategies send them packing and give you your peace of mind back.
Posted on: Sat, 13 Jul 2013 13:11:59 +0000