You are not your thoughts. There I said it, and hopefully with that I have unburdened you from a lifetime of unnecessary shame, guilt, embarrassment, anger, fear, anxiety, trepidation and heartache. Alright, that’s a bit of a claim but really what I have hoped to have done is raise your awareness that your thoughts don’t hold you hostage and do not represent you as a person.
Our brains are thought generating machines. We have thousands of them every day, most of which are recurring and often tell us the same story in our mind day-in and day-out. I’m here to pass on that you are not your thoughts but that you are the awareness that sits behind your thoughts.
Think of it like this you are planet earth and the weather that sits above the earth is your thoughts, ever changing from calm to destructive. In between the ground and the troposphere is a gap, that gap is your awareness. Your awareness is that other voice in your mind, which isn’t as loud but as ever-present. It’s that gentle rumble that you notice after you’ve scolded your child, exploded at a stranger for cutting you off in a round-about, or the whispered internal nagging you have when you should be doing the pressing task that you have been distracting yourself from doing all day.
Learning to develop an understanding that they aren’t actually you, is the ultimate relief.
For most of my life I’ve believed my everything which has come into my head and it has been to my personal detriment. It’s like a constant domestic in your own mind battling ideas and imagined circumstances all day long. My only reprieve was sleep. It was a psychological-double life I lived and it was mentally exhausting. It was like being held ransom to my brain. As Matt Haig puts it in his book “How to Stay Alive” it was like feeling paralysed and electrocuted at the same time.
Learning that ‘You are not your thoughts’ has quite literally saved my life.
Our brains, bless em, they have some serious outdated programming. I’m talking some early 2000s apple mac book, rainbow pinwheel shit. Unfortunately for us, their last software update was about 150,000 years ago. We are running on effectively a wet sponge, fuelled by electricity. You can’t expect equipment like that to work at an optimal level all the time.
So how do we cultivate the space between a thought and our awareness of the thought? This can be tricky but it’s very achievable, all it takes is awareness, of your awareness.
Confused? Look same.
No, but seriously if you have the ability to recognise the other voice, the murmur in your mind that’s beyond your thoughts which witnesses your behaviour you’ve already started.
It’s from there we start to consciously deep breath, right down into our diaphragm, activating our parasympathetic nervous system, otherwise known as your “rest and digest” system. This allows the body to regulate and mimic the physiological conditions of safety which in turn, allows us to create space between our thoughts and our awareness. From here you can choose to believe the thought, find it useful, challenge it or acknowledge it and move on. The choice truly is yours.
I’ve found in my experience it’s allowed me to become a more compassionate person, not only to myself but to others who I thought may have wronged me in some way, or thoughts I have about myself which aren’t always the nicest. It takes a lot of effort but the effort is worth the reward for a more peaceful and understanding mind.
I put the challenge to you. Next time you have a thought that makes you feel negatively about yourself in some way or shapes the way you view a situation to take a moment, take in 6 deep breathes and challenge the thought. In time I’m confident this will have incredibly positive effects.
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See you in the gym soon to talk fitness, recovery and nutrition!
– Coach Nick