Incarcerating Negative Thoughts

Since, the day you were born everyone you’ve ever met and discussed your life has led you to believe negative thoughts are your worst enemy, but what we never realize is that thoughts aren’t negative or positive, they are just thoughts. To classify and put them in a box and then repel anything that questions the integrity of everything around you, doing this you will never let yourself be free. So, before starting let’s put forward some assumptions i.e. thoughts aren’t negative or positive and the relevance of the thoughts is primarily situational.

The activities of the human brain can be divided into two aspects i.e. Conscious and subconscious, the conscious activities are the ones that you can control whereas on the subconscious activities the level of control is much lower and it’s tougher to control them. Most of the thoughts are being born in the conscious part of the brain and the birth of thoughts is something that can be controlled or manipulated, it depends from person to person as to how much control they have over their thinking pattern. The reason why negative thoughts aren’t welcomed is because of the fear that they might become real, the moment we let these thoughts manifest, our brain starts believing in the possibility that it will happen. The reason for this can be the environment we’ve grown up in, since the beginning we have been told stories of people failing and these have been the tools of motivating us to perform activities that are termed appropriate through the lens of society, to motivate was to scare us at a level that we don’t even want to think about what will happen if we fail at something and as we all grew up this embedded itself so deep in our brains that we feared to even think the opposite of what we are meant to do.

Now calling back the first assumption that we made, to stop classifying thoughts and processing them as what they are. It’s impossible to determine positive or negative for a large scale of people because of the differentiation between every human being because what’s positive for one can be negative for the other and vice versa, so let’s consider it at an individual level, your thoughts are what you make of them and how you move forward with it. Now bringing in the second assumption to make this point even more clear i.e. the relevance of your thoughts is primarily situational. Keeping them together we arrive at the basic idea that thoughts aren’t negative or positive by birth they are later classified and it will differ from one person to another, keeping in mind their thought patterns, experiences, and beliefs, and even then the classification will be temporary in nature because of the assumption that the relevance of thoughts is primarily situational, so what’s negative today might not be negative after a period of 10 years due to the change in time and the person.

Now, we’ve established where we all fall and how what’s negative and positive is highly dependent on the person and the situation. It’s time to talk about incarcerating (to imprison) negative thoughts, earlier in this blog we talked about how most of the thoughts are being produced by the conscious brain and the level of control we have over them, to say that you can tap in your conscious mind and simply stop the occurrence of unfavorable thoughts is not a viable option for many, because of the level of control we all have is different. So in order to build a prison around these thoughts, we have to first understand the reason behind why these thoughts induce fear, the reason why these thoughts induce fear is the belief that they can very well become a reality. Now when we know the reason behind the fear we can create a solution that can cater to the fear and nullify it, before applying these solutions you have to stop the pursuit of trying to stop and start fighting them. If there is a presence of an unfavorable thought you can always contradict it with a favorable thought, creation of thoughts is a conscious activity and is performed throughout the day and by every person, but now it has to be done on will. Providing your brain with a favorable thought in the presence of the unfavorable will reduce the possibility of the unfavorable event happening, this can be better understood by an example- if you are supposed to take out a ball from a bag that only has one ball and it’s red then the chances that you’ll pull out a red ball is 100% but if a blue ball is added then the chances of pulling out a red ball drops to 50%. The point I’m trying to make with this solution is that if you can’t remove the red ball completely then add a blue ball to minimize the chance of the red ball coming out of the bag and then keep adding blue balls till you’re satisfied because this is something that no one ever told you, there is an unlimited supply of blue balls you just have to put them in the bag.

The second solution I will be sharing is more about manipulating rather than controlling, but it’s more effective to bring your mind at peace. We have discussed that we have the power to manipulate thoughts and unfavorable thoughts establish fear in our heads that they might become true if we let them manifest. If the fear is associated with the reality aspect of the thoughts then why not take it away by putting in a few things of our own in order to make them unrealistic. We can tap into thoughts and add or subtract few factors which will make the unfavorable thoughts unrealistic, take unrealistic aspects and use them to build a prison around the unfavorable thoughts in order to detach the realism from them. Let’s say you’re having a thought that while crossing the road a car coming from a distance will hit you and you’ll be lying helplessly, now to completely stop this thought is not possible the more you suppress it the more it will spark fear contemplating the possibility of it happening but what can be done is to trap this thought in a prison of unrealism and watch it trying to break free of that, what I mean with trapping the thought in a prison of unrealism is adding or subtracting a few elements from the equation and making it impossible to solve and even if it’s solved it will be in your favor. Moving back to the car, a car coming towards you and as it is about to hit, you face the car and stop it with your hands channeling your inner strength, the moment you add this element in the thought you’ll stop fearing because you know that this is something that can’t happen and even if it does it will only benefit you. This is somewhat similar to the riddikulus spell we saw in Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban and how with the help of this spell they take away the boggart's ability to terrorize by turning it into something humorous. To understand this even more let’s bring back the red ball example, in this situation, you have a bag with some red balls and you don’t want to pull out a red one but instead of adding blue balls in the bag to minimize the chances of the red ball coming out, you’re putting blue paint on your hand so every ball you pick will be blue in color when it’s out of the bag, why minimize the chances of the red ball when you can completely eradicate them.