Have you ever felt like drowning from your daily life’s stress and anxiety? This can change only if you change first! The best thing is, that in order to make this happen, you don’t need to follow any special techniques or exercises. When you understand in depth how your mind works, then you’ll realize how you perceive your own life. Imagine that you have a car, but you don’t know how to drive it. If you start pushing the gas pedal and brake at the same time, the machine will break down. As you don’t know how the car works, you may guess that the car has mechanical issues. When you learn how to drive though, you can drive with your car efficiently everywhere.
Get out of the vicious cycle
When you don’t know how your mind functions, you use it in the wrong way. This has as a consequence, incrimination of your stress or your lifestyle. By doing this, you get into the vicious cycle, where your thoughts generate stress. You start overanalyzing, misinterpreting facts and get stressed. Instead of having your mind “running” with 50km/h, you start increasing the speed to 150km/h. The result? You get stressed and become anxious. The fault is not on your difficult job, neither your relationship nor your finances. By pushing yourself with your mind, in reality, you just sabotage it. When you reach the 150km/h, your IQ falls vertically, you lose your whole energy and everything around you becomes a blur. When you let your mind “run” smoothly, your IQ increases, you have space for new ideas, more energy, and become way more efficient.
Change the way you see things
Get some distance from what is happening, calm your mind down and try to see your life in a new way.
→ Don’t take your thoughts seriously. Especially when in a low mood, your thoughts start creating bad feelings and guide you in the wrong way. Question your thoughts: Just because you are thinking them, does not make them automatically true.
→ Your mind starts working more efficiently when you are calm and happy. Instead of pushing yourself to find solutions on your problems, try to see things with clarity and calmness. The solutions will come to you immediately!
→ There isn’t anyone in the world that does not have good days-moods and bad days-moods. The problem is when you start reacting to everyone around you and blaming your lifestyle. When you are feeling low, try not to take your thoughts seriously. If you don’t take these thoughts seriously, will just pass from your mind- without creating any problems in your life, and the relationships with the people around you.
→ If you want to find solutions to your problems: stop thinking and the solution will come. Have you ever noticed that your best ideas come to you when you are actually not thinking about your problem? In the shower, driving, taking a walk? Albert Einstein has said that “we cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them”.
→ Start observing the “Inside-out nature” of your mind. Reflect and realize if the situation that you are in is creating your stress or your mind is going faster than normal?
→ If you think about it, you have absolutely no control about what’s happening in your life. You have control over what you choose to think. So instead of being a victim of your thinking and your life, you can start using it in your advantage.
Recent research in neuroscience has proved, that what we are thinking and feeling has no connection with what is happening around us. Consequently, while we all believe that stress is provoked by external conditions, the reality is that the former means that our mind doesn’t work well. As I mentioned on the experiential seminar in Public, Syntagma in February, when you take the stress out of the equation, you feel free, with more energy, creativity, strength, and toughness. The result? You start loving life again. Have you ever thought that life might be simpler than you think?
*** This article has been featured on SHAPE Magazine Greece, April Issue
