How to calm a busy mind
Is your head filled with thoughts all the time? Do you sometimes feel you have several people in your head, talking at you at the same time – worrying, reminding you of things to do, comparing you to other people, daydreaming and lots of other things? If you do, don’t worry – you’re just being human. But here’s a simple way to regain some control and calm your mind.
Our capacity for reflective thought is an incredible asset to human beings, but it can also be a source of great misery. We can waste such a lot of our time (I know I have) getting immersed in thoughts that serve no real purpose except making us unhappy, anxious or distracted from getting on with life.
So, you may find it useful at times to be able to take control and manage your thoughts – in other words, to be able to choose to ignore them sometimes, or to just deal with the ones that are relevant to you. Below is a simple approach to help you do this.
You don’t have to engage with your thoughts
First, let’s be clear about what thoughts are. They are electrical and chemical impulses in your brain. You do not have listen to them and you certainly don’t have to drown in them.
So, you can choose which ones (if any) you want to listen to, and which ones you can just ignore. By learning to do this, we enable ourselves to spend more time being present and open to life, as well as calming ourselves and possibly controlling our outlook on life more effectively. Of course, we can choose to spend more time with our thoughts if we wish, but learning to manage our minds gives us that choice.
Our process comes in 2 steps:
Step 1 – Fishing for useful thoughts
My suggested approach to managing your mind is to only engage with the thoughts that will actually be useful to you. This is as simple as asking, when a thought pops up, ‘Is this thought actually useful to me right now?’. If it is, engage with it. If it isn’t, just let it go.
You can see it as a bit like fishing. A common analogy is that thoughts are like a river flowing through our minds. We can take this analogy further to say you can actually just ‘fish for thoughts’ instead of jumping into the river each time and being swamped by your thoughts – unless you want to!
Instead, you can stand on the bank and watch the thoughts flow past you, and you can choose to select the ones that you do want to engage with from there.
Step 2 – Categorising your thoughts
The question is, how can we pull ourselves out of the river of thoughts that is constantly moving through our heads in daily life, and get ourselves up on to the river bank? And from there, how do we identify the thoughts that are actually useful to us?
Mindfulness techniques like meditation work for many people, but I have another method you could try.
You can start by categorising your thoughts under different themes as they enter your head. For example, some might relate to ‘The future’, others might be ‘Things to do’, some might focus on ‘People’, others might involve you using your ‘Imagination’ etc. This helps you to identify individual thoughts more easily as they arise.
For example, while I am writing this, a thought has just come into my head about what to have for lunch. I’ve now categorised that as an ‘Action’ thought and have ignored it as I don’t need to think about that at this moment. Another thought has come into my head about my mum. I categorise that as a ‘People’ thought, and again, don’t need to engage with it as I’m working.
This all may sound very simple, but once you start putting this categorisation process into practice, it not only helps you to identify each thought more easily, but also enables you to recognise that the thing popping into your head is just another thought, and not something that needs to overwhelm you. You can then choose whether to ignore it or to ‘pull it out of the river’ (to think about it, worry about it, act on it – or respond to it in some other way) – it’s your choice.
The important thing to realise is that it is possible – and often enjoyable – to be without thoughts, even though it may feel a bit odd and unfamiliar to be in this calm state.
Why do we struggle to calm our thoughts?
The process above is a simple one, and can really help us in managing our thoughts. Having more control over our inner lives can be a massive benefit to our well-being.
It can however be harder than we think to do this, and this is for many reasons. One reason worth noting is that there may be external pressures encouraging us to keep our minds busy.
One of the great benefits of managing your thoughts like this, and of mindfulness generally, is being able to have a calmer mind. One theme that often arises in my coaching sessions is that clients just want to experience life in a state of calm. This is a state that many people are seeking, but struggling to find.
Perhaps many of us in the modern Western world have been brought up with the idea that having a head full of thoughts all the time is good – in the same way that being busy is an admirable state to be in. Both might suggest that we are fulfilling the capitalist goal of being productive, active individuals. On the other side of the coin is the idea that being calm or seeking this as a goal for one’s experience of life is something to be frowned upon as lazy, or a luxury.
These assumptions are nonsense of course. We can choose our own experience of life, and for some of us, a calmer life may be what we want. Managing our thoughts can help us move towards this calmer way of living, and give us more control over how we experience it.
Do give it a try and let me know how you get on!
