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How to deal with troubling thoughts | Psyche Guides
Disturbing Thoughts
We all have thoughts going on in our heads all the time, stories, reimagining of the past, beliefs and ideas. Many of these thoughts are not in our direct control and can show up in our consciousness in an intrusive manner, without any effort or intention from our side.
These unwanted intrusive thoughts, which are without our consent, can be beneficial, mundane, disposable, or even disturbing and scary.
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Mindfulness And Simple Knowing
Mindfulness is the act of being aware of our present experience in real-time.
Normally people start processing inside their minds what they experience, creating perceptions. At its core, mi...
One Medicine Many Cures
Mindfulness can be practised to:
- Manage pain, anxiety, stress, or mood swings.
- Provide the body and mind an oasis of calm in between a hectic lifestyle
- Reduce suffering, distress and trauma caused by pain and depression, along with the negative emotions that come with life-threatening diseases.
The Space Inside Us
Mindfulness opens up a space inside our minds that helps us respond to outside situations with ease, instead of just reacting impulsively.
We become aware and are able to detect our default setting, which is our ‘driven-doing mind’, and catch hold of it before any impulsive reaction is acted upon. It also helps us arrest our cycle of negative thoughts.
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Key Ideas
Psychological skepticism
Psychological skepticism means being neutral toward the contents of your mind.
Most of us are overly trusting of our own minds. But information is not always the truth. Jus...
Your mind is just guessing
Emotions, thoughts, and memories may give us useful information, but they are also likely to be unhelpful, inaccurate, or misleading.
For example, when you hear a rattling noise while out hiking, your fear may make you proceed more cautiously. However, fear of your coworkers who think you're dumb keeps you from participating in important meetings.
The information your mind sends you in the form of emotions, thoughts, memories, desires, etc., relates to simply guesses, which means it's unwise to put blind faith in it.
Embracing psychological skepticism
Remind yourself that just because you have a thought doesn't make it true. Just because you feel an emotion doesn't make it significant.
When we deal with our thoughts, emotions, and painful memories, we should consider embracing psychological skepticism - the middle road between ignoring the content of your mind or taking it as gospel.
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Suffering from the fear of heights
People that have acrophobia have an irrational fear of heights. Many symptoms of acrophobia are shared with other anxiety disorders, such as shaking, sweating, a racing heart, diff...
Challenge your beliefs about heights
People with height phobias think something bad will happen when they are up high. But you are safer than you think and your feared outcome about heights won't really happen.
Ask yourself:
- What do you believe will happen when you expose yourself to your fear?
- How likely do you think it is that this would happen?
- What would be the outcome of it happening? (you might believe a tall building will collapse.)
Once you've answered the questions, start small with the thing you fear and see that the worst doesn't actually happen, or that it is not as bad as you feared.
The cause of acrophobia
- A traumatic or frightening event, such as falling off a ladder could cause a fear of heights because the distressing experience gets paired with heights in the person's memories.
- However, many people can't link their fear to a particular experience.
- Some people that fear heights did not have repeated safe exposure to heights.
- Finally, people with height phobia show subtle differences in their ability to maintain their balance, partly because they have more difficulty integrating perceptual information from their visual system.