How Do You Silence Doubts, Fears, and Other Negatives In Your Head?
Mindfulness, of course, is the key to finding and/or creating silence.
I read a lot.
Every morning, I spend about an hour reading. A chapter or two of fiction, and a chapter or two of nonfiction.
Most of my nonfiction reading is along the same lines I blog about. Mindfulness, self-awareness, self-encouragement, psychology, and like topics. I read this to increase my knowledge base and find new ways to live this life on my terms. And live it as fully as possible.
This is not a perfect, always-on, always-successful process. It’s a practice – and sometimes it doesn’t quite work as desired.
What’s that mean? It means that I must constantly work on my conscious awareness – and mindfulness, as such. That means things like limiting my time on social media, avoiding news media, and steering as far from political advertising as possible – while still keeping tabs on the world at large.
Spend about 60 seconds on any given social media platform and you’ll be exposed to bad, sad, frustrating, infuriating, and otherwise unfortunate news. If you’re anything like me – and you have the dual struggle with guilt about your privilege with also working to live life on your terms – doubts, fears, and other negatives come up in your head.
The only way that I know to silence them is via mindfulness.
Mindfulness processes
Mindfulness, in this context, is conscious awareness of yourself. Specifically, awareness of your thoughts, feelings, actions, and intentions.
With that conscious awareness, you make active – rather than passive – choices and decisions about your life.
There are, of course, a few things about this process to keep in mind. But there’s one that’s the most important:
Remember that it’s ongoing. Mindfulness is not one-and-done. You need to constantly check in with yourself to be in your conscious mind rather than your ego or subconscious.
Self-check-in is all about asking questions of yourself such as,
- What am I thinking?
- What am I feeling?
- How am I feeling?
- What’s my intent?
- Why am I doing what I’m doing?
And the like.
Each of these questions, when asked directly in the here and now, makes you mindful. Because their answers exist only in your conscious mind, and thus in the now.
Of course, there are questions like these that are different. But any question of this sort – asked in the present – opens you to your conscious awareness, and from there lets you confront the doubts, fears, and other negatives.
But there’s a very important truth to acknowledge here.
The silence is seldom permanent
Yes, I acknowledge that this sucks. But it’s still the truth, like it or not. The silence is seldom permanent.
Why? Because we live in a fear-based society that constantly provides us with reasons to doubt and be afraid. Both active and passive messages to this end bombard us regularly.
Then, we confuse healthy skepticism with unhealthy.
What’s the difference? Healthy skepticism is pausing to consider before accepting. Unhealthy skepticism is pausing to consider, demanding proof from both reliable and unreliable sources, then accepting – but only with great wariness. The increasing demands of unhealthy skepticism have increased doubt, fear, and other negatives in our society exponentially.
But with healthy skepticism – doubts, fears, and other negatives can serve us.
How does that work? The only way to grow, evolve, and change is by breaking out of our comfort zones. What that means is that we must confront doubt, fear, and negatives to actively be uncomfortable to grow, change, and evolve.
A little doubt, some fear, and other negatives are utterly, totally, and completely natural. And we need them, frankly. They’re part of what spurs us to make active choices and decisions to change.
We sometimes need those negatives to build positives from. For example – when something makes you angry, rather than be thrown off or otherwise distracted by that, you use it to make a change or do something new.
When our doubts, fears, and other negatives are just there – not necessarily tied to a current happening – those are the ones we need to silence. Particularly because they tend to be based on our ego and/or subconscious mind.
Silence what’s not helping you
How can you tell if the doubts, fears, and other negatives aren’t helping you?
Mindfulness, of course. Specifically, mindfulness of what you’re feeling.
When you know what you’re feeling – here and now – you can tell if it’s a slight feeling or an overwhelming feeling.
And you can also tell if what you’re feeling is in the moment – or based on something subconscious or from your ego.
To clarify – your subconscious mind is where your beliefs, values, and habits live. Hence, matters can get in there – without your conscious awareness – that then interact with your beliefs, values, and habits. Before you know it, doubts – less in the now and more general – override your desired outcome.
And those are the ones to silence most often.
The ego is both how you project yourself to the world without and reflect back inwardly. It exists at a point between your conscious and subconscious minds.
The ego loves to be comfortable. And since it’s detached from your conscious awareness, it can be the source of doubts, fears, and other negatives. Most are attached to ideas like how will this impact others and/or those I care about? and such.
When you’re mindful, you gain insight into whether the doubts, fears, and other negatives in your head are of any use to you – or are in the way of your progress. Either way, you can use mindfulness to silence them and move on.
You’re empowered to choose a life path you desire. Likewise, when doubts, fears, and other negatives in your head are overwhelming your path, you can use mindfulness to silence them. It just takes action and a little work.
Do you use mindfulness to silence the undesirable negatives in your head?
This is the five-hundred and sixty-fifth exploration of my Pathwalking philosophy. These weekly essays are my ideas for – and experiences with – using mindfulness and positivity to walk along a chosen path of life to consciously create reality.
I share this journey as part of my desire to make a difference in this world and empower as many people as I can with conscious reality creation.
Thank you for joining me. Feel free to re-post and share this.
The first year of Pathwalking, including expanded ideas, is available here. Check out Amazon for my published fiction and nonfiction works.
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