Could Mindfulness help you? Do you find that, when you become anxious, stressed, or low, you notice how busy your brain is and you tend to ruminate about things? Does your thinking rapidly become negative in response to small downward shifts in your moods?
When you are anxious, stressed or your mood goes down, do you find yourselves trying to analyse everything/overthinking all? How does it work?
Mindfulness-based practice helps us to see more clearly the patterns of our mind; and to learn how to recognise when our brain is agitated or mood is beginning to go down. It helps break the link between an overly busy brain, negative mood and the negative thinking that might normally have escalated into feeling worse. We can develop the capacity to mindfully disengage from distressing mood, and negative thoughts: we can learn to stay in touch with the present moment, without having to ruminate about the past, or worry about the future.
Thoughts Are Not Facts
Our thoughts can have very powerful effects on how we feel and what we do. Often those thoughts are triggered and run off quite automatically. By becoming aware, over and over again, of the thoughts and images passing through the mind and letting go of them as we return our attention to the breath and the moment, it is possible to get some distance and perspective on them.
This can allow us to see that there may be other ways to think about situations, freeing us from the old thought patterns that automatically pop into mind. Most importantly, we may eventually come to realise that:
all thoughts are only mental events (including the thoughts that say they are not),
that thoughts are not facts,
that we are not our thoughts
Thoughts and images can often provide us with an indication of what is going on deeper in the mind; we can get hold of them, so that we can look them over from a number of different perspectives, and by becoming very familiar with our own habitual automatic, unhelpful thinking patterns, we can more easily become aware of (and change) the processes that may lead us into difficult moods.
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