The Truth About Stressful Thinking

No matter what your circumstances, or how difficult your life situation, you are not a victim, and nothing can stop you from having happiness, nothing external can control you if you don’t let it. That’s a bold statement, but it’s true. It’s all about your reaction to life!

If you ever feel like a victim in your life, then you have given your power away, but it’s never too late to take it back! You have one amazing asset that you can use to take your power back, to empower yourself to be happy, joyful, and at peace most of the time. That amazing asset is your Mind.

Whenever I do research on stress, which I do often to stay current in my field, I always run into articles that describe what the medical symptoms of stress are. Outside of the usual high blood pressure, heart difficulties, and cancer, which are some of the obvious physical effects that are either brought on by or made worse by stress, there is always one “symptom” that puzzles me.

The “symptom” I’m speaking of is the symptom of “stressful thinking!" Now that may seem logical at first to you, but that’s before you realize that we can indeed change our thought patterns and create new habits of thinking, and that the thoughts we think are truly ours to command when we know how.

And the reason you suffer emotional turmoil is not so much because of what another person has said or done, but due to what you say over and over in your own mind about what they did or said.

When we are upset about something like that, we literally obsess over it; we find it impossible to stop thinking about it. We remember what that person has said or done, over and over again, and we think things like “that was so rude, so inconsiderate,” or “they must not care about me at all to have said or done that,” “if that’s what they said or did, what they really think of me must be twice as horrible!”

Surely you remember more than one situation in your life, when you had similar thoughts about someone. Sometimes we work ourselves up to the point of being angry and resentful at the way we’ve been treated, or even for imagined wrongs, if we think someone hasn’t treated us just the way we like.

We project into the future and say to ourselves “when I get them alone, I’m going to give them a piece of mind,” or “I’m going to just ignore them,” or maybe “I’m going to punch him in the nose!” So we project our feelings onto that person…often we do this subconsciously, so the tricky part can be catching ourselves doing it.

If you ever felt so hurt or angry at someone that you wanted to give them a piece of your mind, or even wanted to punch them in the nose, you may have at that point realized that you weren’t going to really do what you are planning to do or say.

You also remember wishing that you could, and playing out scenarios in your mind, I’ll bet. If you think back to a situation like that, you probably remember trying to think of something else that you could really do to make them suffer as much as you are suffering.

You imagine that you cannot trust that person ever again, and begin to think of upcoming planned events that will have to be changed or canceled.

You may even grieve over the loss of that person in your life, though there’s be a good chance that you’ve misunderstood, and later that person may straighten it all out, or you may find out it wasn’t true, or they may sincerely apologize.

But since you don’t know what is to come, your mind goes on autopilot, conceiving of many miserable situations, often at lightning speed in which only the worst of outcomes are possible. And it goes on and on.

If you believe everything you think, you will suffer indeed. And the energy we expend fretting on and on about such things is energy we could use in more helpful ways in our lives.

So next time you feel wronged by someone, next time you feel slighted, take a deep breath, and let it go for a moment. Focus on something else, something positive and uplifting.

Later, when you look at the issue again, you may find it’s settled itself. Or not. But in either case, you’ll save yourself a lot of energy that you can use for something productive. And in many cases, things do work themselves out without our stressful thinking.