Day 9 – Digesting thoughts

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In todays gong, Pedram asks if you have an outlet for those thoughts that needs some extra time to be analysed or taken care of. Those thoughts that makes you a bit distant even when you are with others. Because it is those thoughts that stresses you if they are not handled.

When I finally got to see a psychiatrist to help with the stress, he gave me this great explanation of what state my head/mind was in. ”Imagine your mind is a computer harddrive and once it gets full it can no longer hold any more information. Normally you will have a filter that allows you to sit across the table and have a conversation while you don't pay attention to everybody else that might be close by. You don't have that filter right now. It's like one big hole where ALL information that surrounds you comes right at you and you can not focus.”

The reason why I wanted to tell that is to show how the mind can end up if you have too much unsorted thoughts that ends up stressing you instead.

But how to approach it depends on the problem/thought you are dealing with. And people have so very different ways to handle a problem. For me, I need to take notes...lol But, it is also a good thing to get things down on paper. Science is actually showing that we loose some touch with what we are doing after everything has been digitalized. By using your own hand and writing down with a pencil or pen, you send some signals to the brain that makes you more aware of the issue you are dealing with. So here's one way that has helped me sorts things. It's a positive/negative list that breaks the problem up into dealing with weather some part of it is actually that important as you give it credit.
Grab a piece of paper and make a line across the middle. Over the line you write all the things you find positive and under the line you write all the negatives.

So now you have emptied your head for all those thoughts and now it is time to put the paper aside for a while. Depending on you problem, that can be a few hours or several days. When you feel ready to have another look you go over all the points that you wrote down once again. Do they still belong were you first placed them or do some of them need to switch places.

You know where you go around and think a side of you is a good thing and then you go for a jobinterview and it turns out it is a not so good side for that particular job? You can be sidetracked so severly by just grumbling over an issue instead of dealing with it.

I'm a sticker for details, that's why I ended up going back to school at the age of 38 to learn computer programming. And that was a great thing as long as I was working with my school partner making a program. I saw the details but he was the one who said, okay it's working great now so let's stop here, it's good enough. Otherwise I could have kept changing the programming and ruined the whole thing....lol I can't even make a Christmas decoration, I keep adding and removing and it ends up looking like ”BIIP” ;-)
See how thoughts can sidetrack you....lol

Anyways, this was just one idea of how to deal with thougths like that.

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