How to Control Your Thoughts and Enjoy Inner Peace

Q: Why do I keep getting the same painful thought?

Because you gave it the strongest reaction, and your subconscious does not sort by pleasant, only by important. It is the same mechanism that makes you see your new coat on everybody once you have bought one.

Q: Should I push bad thoughts away?

No, and this is where I went wrong twice. Pushing them away inflates them. They come back all at once at the worst possible moment, usually on a kitchen floor with your head on your knees.

Q: Is meditation about having no thoughts?

No. It is about enjoying the gaps between them, and noticing that a thought arriving does not oblige you to follow it anywhere.

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overthinking · mindfulness · acceptance

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Hey, welcome to episode 8 of this podcast.

Today I'm talking to you about how to control your thoughts. We all have those unwanted thoughts that just

make us feel awful. Or those thoughts of desires that we're trying to push away because we're trying to focus

on our work. You know, very distracting. So whichever way, for whatever reason you're trying to get rid of those

thoughts or control those thoughts, whether you're going through a tough time, you're going to want to listen to this

episode.

So, welcome to Stillness in the Storms. I'm Steven Webb and I'm your host.

And I give you, I help you to have a little bit of inner peace when you have it least

and you need it most.

And one of those times when you could do the inner peace is when your thoughts are just overpowering. And

you have too many of them and they're constant.

And I remember when I hit my bottom at 40 years old.

Really tough time. I ended up one day, I text who I was seeing at a time and I said,

why didn't you reply to me like you used to?

And she replied straight away saying, I don't know what I want anymore. Well, I knew what that was immediately.

You know, I'd I'd been finished with enough times in my life by this age that I knew at that

point it was over. I

didn't want it to be over I We spoke to each other shortly after. She said she would pick up

her things by the end of the day and that was it. And for the first 10 days or so,

I felt nothing. It was like every all my feelings had left my body and I was just like a

zombie. I would get out of bed, my carers would come in and how's your day and how's it going?

I'll be like, I'm okay. But there was nothing left. I was like, it's like as if my whole... Personality.

My whole identity had just vanished. I

had no I had no drive to do anything with my life at that point. Then after about 10 days,

things

started to come back and... My

mind would not shut up. My mind had all the questions. Who were they seeing? What they're doing Why did

they do it? How dare they do it to me? I bought them an Indian one day. I was the

best boyfriend in the world. I was perfect. How can they do it? How could they be so mean? They

must be seeing someone. It must have been their friends talking to them. You know oh the constant thoughts were

just... They were painful. And they weren't just... Questions. They were they were just

thoughts of what they what she was getting up to, what she was doing and everything like that. And I

was making up all these stories in my mind so it wasn't just the question and then stop. It was

a question and then I would answer the question in my mind and then I would have more questions oh

It was just too much. I would have a whole story of that they were seeing somebody

that they They were really happy. They were doing all the things that we wanted to do together.

And for weeks, I just wanted to get a good night's sleep. I wanted to control my

thoughts and just I wanted a little bit of peace. I no longer wanted to think about them constantly.

And not only that, when things like that go wrong, other things go wrong in your life. So it spirals.

So the thoughts just build up until you almost feel like there's not a gap between your thoughts at all.

And I can't remember what university it was, but they come up with that we do between 40 and 50

thoughts per minute.

That's a lot of thinking. That's like 40 50 000 thoughts a day. It's like crazy.

Any wonder we just want that little bit peace and quiet? Sound good just Just a few minutes, please.

But I had to find a way to silence those thoughts at that time. And I found a way through

alcohol and sleep. At first, I was drinking just like a little bit of Southern Comfort just to go sleep.

And I would sleep for a couple of hours and the thoughts would come back. And of course, because I'm

paralysed, I can't move. So I cannot go to the drinks cabinet and get it myself. I was having to

ask carers. Which was a real blessing at the time because when I was asking them for then two drinks,

then three drinks. And I wasn't really sharing with them why I was drinking. And I wasn't really a drinker.

I was a social drinker and I would get drunk only when I would go out with my friends or

things like that. But over these two or three weeks I started to drink more and more just to be

able to go sleep. Unfortunately, it was having the opposite effect because waking up in the middle of the night,

I couldn't call a carer down and go, oh, can you pull me up another drink please? They would see

there was a problem. And I'm sure they could see there's a problem anyway, but I thought I was hiding

it well. Well,

after about two weeks I two three weeks, I said, you know, enough's enough I gotta do something about this.

So I started reading a book, which was quite unusual for me because I never read books in my life.

I thought I was I was diagnosed with dyslexia when I was about six or seven, and I just give

up reading. I just blagged my way through school. I would talk to my friends in the queue

about the book we were supposed to read the night before. What did you think of the book? What did

you think of the ending and all that? And they would give me enough that I could just blag it

through the lesson.

And it wasn't the fact that I couldn't read. I could read headlines and I could read the odd line.

But I I really couldn't read a page and then know what the page said. So I started reading books

and I the first book I read was As a Man Thinker. It was free on my ipad. And what

a gift that was. But it was 40 pages and it took me like two months. And what I was

doing is I was pushing away my thoughts by focusing so much on the book that... While I was really

concentrating on what the book was saying, I couldn't have another thought because you cannot have two thoughts at once.

You know, you try it. You try desiring one thing and hating something else. You

know, pick a food you don't like and pick something you really desire unless you put them on the plate

together. But even then, you cannot focus on tasting than both It's either one or the other.

So you cannot have a positive and a negative thought.

So I was pushing out the other thoughts. Unfortunately other thoughts build up and build up like a balloon.

They're building up, building up until they burst and go everywhere. But I didn't know that at the time I

just It just happens and I was like then overwhelmed. And the other time that I did that with

my thoughts was just after I broke my neck and

After a couple of weeks intensive care, when really it was just a fight for survival. Every

moment was a breath. Every like day was just to get through. Then when I come out of the real

danger zone,

I spent nearly 12 months in a hospital with six months of it on bed rest. And the first six

months, I

had a tracheotomy in my throat so I couldn't really talk. So during that time, I was really

kind of locked in really with my thoughts. And having just been paralysed,

severely paralysed, and the chances are you're going to be like it for the rest of your life. At just

turned 19, it

really was a

difficult time for what's going to happen how What's my life going to be like? So I avoided those thoughts.

I avoided the negative side. I would get my friends that used to come and spend some time there, I

would get them to plug in the Sega Mega Drive and I would get them to play the game and

we'd watch Tv and I'd do a lot of music. So I would really focus on just entertaining myself in

bed. I

I watched so many episodes of... Because at that time we only had so many channels as well. We did

not have sky so it was like a little portable Tv. And we had the mirror above my bed so

I could look in the mirror to watch the Tv. And that's basically what I did. I just kept myself

very busy avoiding them.

Unfortunately, like my first story about my rock bottom, avoiding them is not the answer because they blow

up like a balloon and they overwhelm us. And they they just take us down

until we just Until we end up on the kitchen floor of a head between our knees, crying with,

can't deal with these thoughts anymore. Just someone silence these thoughts.

So how do we control our thoughts? How do we silence these thoughts? Well, you

can't silence the thoughts I'm Silencing the thoughts would be like asking your heart not to beat. Your

mind and your brain is designed to think it's It's evolved to make up. Stories

in order to prevent you from injury or death. It's for survival, this memory of

where you've been. We've survived so long because we remember what end of the forest not to go into. Or

we remember what animals hurt us and what don't. And that's where the stories evolved into something more than what

it used to be. And

now we have so much to think about. And in this day and age with mobiles, the internet, notifications,

it's

just absolutely endless with all the attention that we've been asked to focus.

You know you literally cannot go through a day without all

of these things taking your concentration, taking away from what you should be doing.

You know, to put the phone onto silent and to just take some time out and read a book is

like,

but it's wow because it's so unusual nowadays.

We sit down to meditate. What happens when you sit down to meditate? Your brain goes into overtime thinking constantly.

So we give up after 30 seconds think I can't meditate. That's it. There's no way I can do it.

My brain thinks more. Well, it doesn't. It's just we become aware of it. Your brain is thinking constantly.

So even when you're driving the car, your mind's thinking it has to do all these different things um You

might feel at ease if you're driving the car and you've got some tunes going and you're at the window

down and you're beating your head to the tunes. You might think you're having peace of mind, you're a bit

quiet. Well, the reality is that you're that focus and you're concentrating on... The driving of the

car your subconscious mind is doing. And your conscious mind is listening to the music and recreating the wonderful sounds

that are coming out of the speakers. In my case, it's not quite recreating those sounds, but it's good enough

for me. I enjoy hair. But yeah. So how do we, in

quotes, control our thoughts? Well, we can't. So what do we do instead well we

end up The only way we can really do anything about them is to be able to allow them to

come and go and not to follow them.

Now then, hear me out on this one. Your thoughts are going to come anyway. If I asked you now

to think of your next thought, try

it now. Think of your next thought. What is it going to be?

Well, you can't. You don't know what your next thought's going to be. Even if you try to influence it,

you don't know. So your thoughts are going to arise anyway. The best thing you can do is to

become friends with your subconscious mind and guide it to the kind of thoughts that you want. So what you're

doing is you're training your subconscious mind

by telling it every time it has a thought to put it into it yeah that's a good thought or

that's a thought that I less desire. The problem is every time a thought comes up, the one that you

give most weight to or most emotion to Your subconscious mind thinks it's the thought that you want more

of. So if you're thinking of more debt or you're thinking of your ex or you're thinking of

a desire for a person you suddenly met and you really, really want that person. And the more that comes

up and the more feeling you put behind it, the subconscious mind goes, oh, I got this right. And it

keeps bombarding you with it you ever had something on your mind you just cannot get away from and it

just keeps coming up, coming up? It's like the a colour. Like I've just ordered a new van

and I didn't know the titanium black existed until I ordered the titanium black. And now suddenly I see

that colour everywhere. Well, they were everywhere before, but my subconscious mind did not know it was important to me.

Now it knows it's important. It sees it literally everywhere

um Same as a top you go and buy. You buy a jumper. And you think, that's unusual. Never seen

that before. And then within days, you notice everybody that's wearing it. And it's what your subconscious mind does. It

gives you the thoughts they think you want to know. So if you you say, well, I tend to think

negatively. Well, that's what you've trained your mind to think. That's what you train your mind to bring you.

Very similar in a way that if you've got kids and you tell them you like a certain colour sweet,

every time they get a green sweet, if that's your favourite, they will bring you that. But at first, they

bring you all different types of colours. You

know, green wine gums was my favourite as a child or even as an adult now. And whenever anybody

has got a pack of sweets, if they know me, they'll remember that and go do you want the green

ones but The subconscious mind is exactly the same thing. So what do we do about it and how do

we do something about it? Well,

every time a thought comes up,

be prepared to just allow that thought to go like a cloud. Let it appear and let it go away.

This is what we use meditation for. Meditation is not about no thoughts. It's about

enjoying the gap between the thoughts. But when a thought arises, don't put any weight onto it. Just allow it

to come and go. And what you're doing is you're training yourself. You're training your mind and you're training your

reactions. You're training your response to be, well that's a trigger. That's a thought. I

don't have to go with it. So you can be in situations like my rock bottom and go, that's an

interesting thought or that's a weird thought. And you end up playing with the thoughts instead of giving them a

lot of weight. And when you play with the thoughts, you can then choose which thoughts to play with and

continue. And

that's the way we have control over them.

You cannot control what thought comes up next, but you can influence your brain onto which ones that it wants

to bring attention to. Just like the colour top or the colour car or the type of music. You know,

you could be in a crowded area and loads and loads of names are said. But it isn't until someone

says a name of maybe an ex or your current girlfriend or someone you like or someone you really dislike

or your own. You hear your own name miles away in the middle of a conversation. Perhaps not miles, but

theoretically 10 feet or so. So

that's what it is it's You're helping your subconscious mind. You're guiding your subconscious mind and you're training it to

what you're thinking. I

promise you a couple of ways in which you can help to silence your thoughts or control your thoughts. And

one way in which we can do that is we can sit down just a moment, take a deep breath

and give our thoughts attention. When we give our thoughts attention, they tend to scatter as if they got

stage fright. And this is how you can do that. If you just sit back take a take a deep

breath and just go,

okay, I'm ready for my thoughts. Let me have them. And we just sit and wait for the thoughts to

occur. So do that now. Just go, okay, I'm ready for my thoughts. Let me have them. And then wait.

You'll have at least two or three seconds where you have no thoughts at all. Just awareness of waiting. You're

waiting. That's it. And the other thing we can do is we can do like a little short meditation.

So what we can do is we can sit down and we take like four or five deep breaths so

Breathe in and then we breathe out and go one.

And we do that four or five times. And then what you can do is you can say to yourself,

I have thoughts but I am not those thoughts. I

have feelings but I'm not those feelings.

I have sensations but I'm not those sensations. I

have thoughts but I'm not those thoughts. And

when you do that, you just disconnect from the thoughts that little bit. And that will just help you to

take control of them a little more. Or at least to stop the identifying with them. Because we often find

thoughts are our own thoughts, so how can we stop them?

It'd be like us trying to not be a human. It's nearly impossible. So

yeah, that's a couple of ways in which we can help to stop our thoughts. On my website I've got

some guided meditations that you can download totally free that will help you to have this inner peace. I cannot

guarantee silencing of the thoughts because you don't want to do that. But you want to have some kind of

control over them. And I want to give you the ability and knowledge that you do have control over your

thoughts and what thoughts come up next. So on StevenWebb.com, download The Guided Meditations. Thank you.

Have a great evening, morning or whatever you're doing today. Have a great week and I will see you next

Monday for my newest podcast, Stillness in the Storms of Life. Take care. Namaste.

How to Control Your Thoughts and Enjoy Inner Peace

In this episode

The question this answers

The heart of it

One small thing to try

Questions people ask

The transcript

One calm email.
Every Sunday.

How to Control Your Thoughts and Enjoy Inner Peace

In this episode

The question this answers

The heart of it

One small thing to try

Questions people ask

The transcript

More honest conversations

One calm email. Every Sunday.

One calm email.
Every Sunday.