Mindfulness training: How to calm your negative thinking

Our brain has a strong tendency to get in a negative default state.

Brain research keeps finding that this default mental state that ignores the present moment creates stress, unnecessary fear, and worries. The more time you spend focusing in the past or the future, the more your brain reinforces negativity. People who suffer from anxiety and depressive disorders tend to spend more hours in this mental state

Maybe you have been thinking about making changes in your life to improve your well-being, but you feel it is difficult. Perhaps you have intentions to begin a new healthy habit, but your inner dialogue takes over and stops you. Maybe you are tired of being stuck in your past and the future.

Like you, I had all these scenarios in my life at different times. I can relate to you with how my internal dialogue stopped me from moving forward. Looking to change my inner dialogue is what meditation is all about. When I began meditating years ago, I felt exhausted and didn’t realize that my thoughts were the most crucial factor that created my exhaustion.

Meditation opened my eyes to realize how my thoughts and mind were stuck most of the time in the default state. When I sit every day to meditate, I’m training my mind to find an alternative mode. Meditation focuses my attention on the present moment. Before meditation, my attention was all over the place.

Changing my internal dialogue was, and is still critical for me to stay mentally balanced. Reducing stress and worry is all about your inner dialogue. Anxious thoughts and fear are not created by what happens to you or by any external factor. Stress begins in your thoughts and gets fueled by your thinking.

Internal dialogue promotes deeper stages of anxiety, depression, and other unbalanced mental states. If you want to change your inner dialogue, you have consistently train your mind to do so. To focus on an alternative mode, you need to prepare your attention to focus in the present moment.

If you let your mind govern your thinking, you will continue to get stuck in always trying to solve problems that don’t exist, it will continue to focus on what is wrong, and it will persist in influencing you in giving more importance to the future. As a result, you will stay trapped in a never-ending cycle of stress.

Mind Training

After six weeks of meditation training, researchers found that the brain changes. People’s brains were examined, and they found that their brains had less activity on the default state, only with 6 weeks of meditation practice.

If you have a meditation practice, please continue it. Stay consistent and practice daily. Taking time every day to meditate is more critical than the length of your practice. If you don’t meditate every day, please begging today.

I want to give another tip that I have found very helpful in my life. This tip I use every day, and I encourage the people I work with and do my programs to do. My recommendation is to bring curiosity to what is happening in your mind.

Bring curiosity

During your day, take pauses to pay attention to your mind. Stop what you are doing and listen to your internal dialogue. Bring your focus to your mind and see where your thoughts are. Is your inner dialogue in the past? Or is your inner dialogue in the future?

This simple tip will help you increase self-awareness. The more your pay attention, the more you will notice your default state. By detecting, you will also see that the power to disrupt your negative dialogue is within you. You can redirect your thoughts to the present moment. The present is where you create mental balance.

One quote “Solitude will teach you how to navigate your inner dialogue. In the space of silence, you hear clearly, the voice of your own soul”
-Jay Dee Mah One question

What is your inner dialogue saying to you right now?