You spend most of your life inside your head . . . make it a nice place to be.
I shared this quote on my social media yesterday, though it’s not the first time I’ve heard it. I co-led a training last year with my boss call “What are you feeding your mind?” which echoed the same sentiment.
I have forgotten at times the measure of control I have in making my mind “a nice place to be.” Now, I do believe that we are not wholly our thoughts . . . if we latched onto to every fucked up thing that passes through our mind I think we’d be in a constant identity crisis. But we also do have control over how we respond to our thoughts and the tools to honing those skills are also within our control.
For me, this means a couple things:
- Having self-awareness and insight into my own thoughts . . . practices like meditation and writing help me
- Creating a playbook to how I address negative thought spirals or the occasional fucked up flyaway . . . remembering that the first thought I can’t control, but the second thought is my choice — is who I am . . . knowing what I need to do to take care of my body and reset
- Consciously seeking positive external inputs . . . I like happy endings in my stories and good, optimistic humans in my life
There is a lot in life that is out of our control. Bad things happen in the world, to the people we love, to us. We get sick or tired or pissed off. We have nightmares or our phone stops charging. But I keep learning that we have more control than we might think.
If I had to give a single action item for airing out your mind, I would repeat the above: your first thought you can’t control, the second thought is your choice and becomes who you are. Understanding this in the last couple of years has helped shape my self-care and rewrite my self-talk. Say the second thought out loud even, make it the truth, make it your choice, make your mind a nice place to be.
With Love,
Natalie