Finding Meaning Through Negative Patterns Of Thinking
There are times when my mind gets out of control. My mind tackles problems I am having in my life by thinking about them over and over again. This constantly occurs and it takes months or years for my mind to stop engaging in self destructive habitual rumination. The classical definition of insanity is doing the same thing and expecting different results, my Default Mode Network did not get this memo.
Sometimes I will replay events in my head. Other times I start engaging in catastrophic thinking were everything I would never want to happen ends up happening. At some point or another my mind has engaged in all of the classical unhelpful thinking styles.
Sometimes I get lucky and I can directly challenge these thoughts or use mindfulness to break the cycle. When these negative cycles occur they feel very real. Even though I may logically know that these thoughts are purely illusions of my mind I still act on them because they are constantly antagonizing me. This is basically the background music of my life.
To a certain extent I think that every one deals with negative cognitive patterns. I am not really sure if everyone deals with them to the extent that I do because I have never bothered to ask anyone. It is embarrassing to share this but I think that it will at least help some one at some point.
I used to be afraid and angry at these patterns of thinking. I knew that they were false destructive illusions yet I kept having them. I am a very logical thinking person and I find it extremely frustrating to be unable to understand why many of our minds are structured in this way.
The fear and anger I felt towards my negative styles of thinking and myself for having had those thoughts was not helping relieve my suffering, it was only making things worse. Resisting your own thoughts is like reaching for a glass of water when you are drowning. My anger and fear were fuel for these bad habits. On some days it really did feel unbearable to live inside of my own head.
Recently I put my negative thinking to good use simply by changing my perspective on it. Rather than viewing my thoughts as a burden that drags me down I began looking at them as an obstacle to be overcome on the journey to making myself a better person. Simply by deciding that negative thoughts were a chilling rather then a burden abled me to construct the worst part of myself into something very useful.
Resistance makes us stronger. We go to the gym and weights provide resistance which allows us to grow our muscles and bones. Negative thinking patterns are just the weights of life, they help us become mentally stronger by making things trickier for us. We can either choose to succumb to our negative patterns and let them control our direction in life or we can hold the line as we allow our thoughts to wash over our experience while we continue to move in the direction which we truly want to be going in.
Am I going to be distracted by my sweat during yoga or am I going to mindfully concentrate on the release of my muscles? Am I going to constantly ruminate about the girl I liked a year and a half ago who ghosted me after 8 months of (pseudo)friendship or am I going to set a 5:45 personal record on my mile run? Am I going to dwell on the fact that I hardly went out at all in college (and somehow managed to not get laid) in order to earn my Molecular Biology degree yet still ended up working a minimum wage job or am I going to teach myself how to code and start my own app development company?
Every day I’ve chosen the latter and its working out pretty f***ing well. No matter how bad your thoughts get you can still be proud that you’re getting sh** done despite the storm inside of your mind. You’re thoughts can not hurt you they are creations of your mind, they are only thoughts. Even though my own thoughts can cause excruciating pain I have and never will let them determine where I am going in life.
On paper the choice seems easy but when your mind is constantly pouring you with these bombardments of negativity it is very easy to break down and forget were you actually want to go in life.
Overcoming our own cognitive biases and negative thought patterns is hard and it should be, without this daily struggle life might just be meaningless.
Suffering is intrinsic to consciousness, we might as well deal with it and create our own meaning from it. A simple change in prospective of how we view our negative thoughts can change them from being a liability to a tool for self overcoming.
