Decoding the Thought Factory: Understanding Our Mind's Creations
Our minds are thought generating machines and come up with thousands of thoughts a day. We can experience thoughts in different ways:
some people experience thoughts as an inner dialogue that has an opinion, and comments to them about everything as they go about their daily business - a bit like having their own personal narrator following them around documenting their lives;
other people experience thoughts as pictures - sometimes the images can be troubling or scary, especially if they pop into our minds seemingly from nowhere.
Unmasking the Reality of Thoughts
Our minds can tell us that the thoughts we have are reality, but at the end of the day they are something created by our minds and it is important to learn to see thoughts for what they are - just words or pictures conjured up by our brains.
A thought only has a meaning if we choose to give it that meaning!
Taking Charge: Recognizing Unhelpful Thinking Patterns
We all experience difficult periods in our lives because it's part and parcel of the human condition. It is impossible to live a life without ever experiencing pain and discomfort on some level, whether that's physical or emotional pain.
Unfortunately, as a way of coping with the distressing situations that we find ourselves in we can slip into thinking patterns that turn out, in the long run, to be unhelpful to us. These patterns are so common that they have been categorised and given names.
Exploring Unhelpful Thinking Patterns
This is the first part in a series which will introduce you to the different patterns to help you start noticing them - because once you can notice them you can start to respond to them in different ways, which hopefully will help you experience challenging situations from a different, and perhaps more helpful, perspective.
In my next post I'll be introducing you to the "self critic"...not that introductions are probably needed as I suspect you may well already be very familiar with your own...
Check out the other posts in this series here:
