Lying Awake in Bed with Scary Thoughts – Part 1
Lying Awake in Bed with Scary Thoughts – Part 1
This blog came out of a conversation I had with a friend I hadn't spoken to in a number of years about shifting one's focus and repetitive thinking. It’s rather long, so it will be in two parts.
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Hello,
It sounds like you are lying in bed awake at night, battling repetitive thoughts and circling around and around. Or something like that.
A thought is nothing more than something we create out of nothing. They don't mean anything. They can say the most terrible things. If we believe them, we are giving them a life of their own.
It's as if we bring them into being with a magic wand and then continue to power them with our own life energy. Draining ourselves in the process. We then blame the thoughts themselves, and it looks to us like the thoughts are attacking us or have some sort of autonomy separate from us. They don't.
On their own, this type of thought isn't a problem. We think a million (or more) of this sort of thing all day long. They come and they go. Their nature is to form and dissipate on their own.
When a repetitive thought or even just a thought that doesn't feel good comes into your awareness, leave it alone. Don't engage with it. Don't "look" at it. Make it neutral. Who cares if it's there? Not you. Don't give it a moment's thought. If you do, just notice and remember, "Oh yeah, I was going to ignore that." Literally do or think something else. And keep going back to that other better feeling thing. As many times as needed. Even if it's over and over.
We shift our focus constantly. Any time you have a thought or are focused on something, and then you aren't, you've shifted your focus. For example, right now I'm looking at the computer screen, and now I'm looking at the wall. I am no longer looking at the screen. I have stopped focusing on the screen. It's so simple we don't notice.
By reacting to a thought, we keep it alive. You are literally telling your brain to give me this more often. I want more of this. So, you get more of it. We build it in our minds and we create it into something that feels more and more solid. An actual thing.
By focusing on something, anything else, you are breaking that habit and eventually, like a fire starved of fuel, it will die out.
What something else, you say? You could have a novel you like. I started reading romance novels at one point because the steamy sex scenes were all engrossing and there was no room for being afraid of thoughts. I used to have actual night terrors. I would lie awake feeling terror all night long. It felt as if there was an entity in the room with me. I had solidified my own thinking to the point of monster and demon creation. I might sleep for an hour or often zero. I could sleep once the sun came up.
When I started to see it all as thought that I was creating and that I could also not create it. It began shifting. Bit by bit. It then got addictive (the uncreating) because I now felt that I had some control and power over it. Which we do, since we create it.
What else could you focus on? Something in your room that is visual, e.g., put all your attention on your wall, your curtains, your dresser etc... Really LOOK at it. Become fascinated by the grain in the wood. Marvel at the colour gradations in the fabric. If you catch yourself staring at the curtains or the wall, but your attention is on your internal habitual thoughts, notice that fact of where your attention is and then bring yourself back to the curtain.
I will continue this in Part 2, coming next week.
Much love,
Sara Joy
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