We spend a lot of time and energy trying to avoid what we don’t want, but why do we end up doing the exact opposite?This is a problem we usually face. The solution may be to change our perspective and focus.
There are many situations that we want to master in our lives: work, studies, sentimental relationships, social relationships, etc. We must have a certain illusion of control, which accompanies the feeling that everything is in order. We carry out an audit of all possible dangers, believing that in this way we can intervene to protect ourselves from its possible consequences.
- The reality is very different.
- These dangers that we think about and for which we prepare are a recreation of our mind that generates anxiety for anticipating what can happen.
- We end up getting lost in the possibilities of anything that could happen.
- Preventing us from enjoying and appreciating what we are going through now.
One way or another, with our thoughts, we determine our behavior, our habits and, ultimately, our destiny, so it is very important to respond to what we are focusing on, without realizing it we can easily anchor ourselves in suffering by ruminating negative thoughts, especially those that are circularly linked.
A good strategy to identify ours? Think about the trend?Is observing these thoughts to surprise us in any way on the spot?In the midst of a self-destructive intellectual process. In this way we will understand the problem that we continue to make and want to avoid, and we may wonder what the point is to keep thinking about it so much.
Questioning one’s own thoughts is essential to change them in our favor, it is also important not to believe everything you think, leaving open the possibility that there are other perspectives that we cannot currently see.
Our mind is prepared to understand certain kinds of information through language, depending on what our brain understands we may have one experience or another, so we can communicate with ourselves in a harmful way without realizing it.
Our brain associates thoughts with images and ‘NO’ is not integrated into these images. If you want to take the test, can you say I won’t think of a pink elephant?And you’ll see how you end up thinking about that pink elephant. This phenomenon that occurs in our minds is known in psychology as the “theory of ironic processes” (Wegner, 1994).
Wegner’s theory tells us that attempts to control internal experiments tend to fail because we don’t understand how they work and get the opposite of what we wanted, that’s how we generate the opposite of what we wanted to control.
When we are worried and hurt by something, repeating it over and over again that we do not want to think about it will only intensify the fact that we continue to think more about it, so does we give this advice to others.
One strategy not to fall into this common error by which we attract what we want to avoid is to change our perspective, change the reference point and guide our thoughts consciously, choosing ourselves (not inertia) where we will release them. recurring thoughts on an unpleasant subject, we can use the following strategies:
Trying to control what we want to avoid in our lives will only lead us to think more about it, it’s like a self-fulfilling prophecy: we’ll end up appealing to it. He thinks that trying to suppress thought is not only the solution, but also increasingly promotes the appearance of the problem. The smartest strategy is to pay attention to and focus on what we want, rather than focusing on what we want to avoid.