Your mind is full of chatter. It’s constantly feeding your doubts and filling you up with anxiety. The gremlins in your head make you feel like you aren’t good enough and you’ll never be enough.
That’s what my mind chatter used to always tell me. That’s why I found myself under-performing most of the time because I would think, “What’s the point? I’ll never be good enough anyway.”
Maybe that’s not what your mind chatter tells you. Maybe your mind chatter says things like, “Everyone is going to think I’m great when they find out I did this. Yeah, that will show them.” That’s what my husband’s mind chatter is all about.
Either way mind chatter is a destructive waste of time. It breaks your concentration and prevents you from performing tasks to the best of your ability. It clouds your thinking and diminishes your ability to solve problems. It fills you with false ideas that limit your potential.
Now that I’ve been working on calming the chatter I’m more aware of the world around me and the simple steps I can take to improve my life. These steps may have been obvious to others, but my mind was so cluttered up that I couldn’t see the obvious clearly.
What is mind chatter anyway?
Mind chatter is the voice that is constantly running in your head. It usually brings up old insecurities and criticisms. Our minds don’t let things rest. They bring up the same old issues again and again. We also tend to hold on to the negative much more tightly than the positive. I’m a writer and I could get hundreds of excellent reviews for my book, but the review I remember most is the one negative one.
Your mind will rehash criticisms and negative experiences from your childhood and a lot of times you don’t even realize that’s what it’s doing. All of that noise in your head pulls you back into the past or imagines a future that hasn’t happened yet and prevents you from solving the problems you’re presented with today.
I’ve written about meditation before. If you haven’t read my post on meditation you can read it here. Meditation is one of the most important things I’ve done to change my life. It has helped me overcome anxiety. It has made me a much happier person.
The next most important change I’ve made in my life is being mindful. That’s kind of connected to meditation and it has helped me look at my life in a whole new way.
Being mindful …
Mindfulness has given me the clarity of thought necessary to solve problems that have negatively affected my life for a very long time. Mindfulness is what helped me realize that putting off decorating my house was silly.
In the past when I read about mindfulness I thought it involved paying attention to everything that happened in the moment. I thought that was impossible and there was no way it would work. I even tried it before and gave myself a bit of a headache. That’s because it is impossible to notice every single thing. That’s not what mindfulness really is though.
To be mindful you don’t have to pay attention to everything in the moment. You only have to pay attention to what is necessary to complete the task that you are doing in the moment. That makes more sense, right?
Mindfulness has helped me quiet my mind chatter. It’s not completely gone. I don’t think it’s possible for mind chatter to be completely gone all the of time, but when my mind is calm I am able to work better, listen to others better, and generally be a better person. [Tweet “When you show up fully present a world of possibilities opens up to you. “]
How do you stop mind chatter?
If you are already doing a meditation practice you are training your brain to pay focused attention to a task. You can carry this focused attention outside of meditation to your normal daily life.
The first step is to completely do away with multitasking. I know you’re probably thinking it helps you get more done, but in reality it doesn’t. The mind isn’t able to really multitask in this way anyway. When you’re multitasking you are just switching back and forth between two tasks, preventing your brain from ever really getting into a real flow with either.
Now that you’ve done away with multitasking, pay focused attention to the task you’re trying to complete. Notice the little details and the grand sweeping picture.
When mind chatter starts to come up pulling you into the past or some imagined future stop it. Push it out of your head. I literally think the word NEXT in my mind and send the thought out. This may sound stupidly simple, but it works.
As you start doing this you’ll notice that these thoughts keep on coming. Don’t get angry about it. Understand that it’s just the way we are wired. With practice and time these thoughts will become less and less of a distraction.
Just repeat the process again and again. Think NEXT, push the thought out of your mind, and return your attention to the task at hand.
Meditation and mindfulness are just two of the steps I took to begin to change my life. There is one more piece to the puzzle that I’ll tell you about next week, but until then I would love it if you made a commitment to start a daily meditation practice and to be mindful in your daily life. If you do I know you’ll see changes in your happiness level, productiveness, and problem solving skills.
What does your mind chatter tell you? Have you ever tried using mindfulness to get rid of it? How did it work for you?