How To Win The Loser's Game With Your Mind

I have a thought today. I had a thought yesterday too. In fact, I have thoughts every single moment.

The activity of the restless mind occupies our attention all the time. This moment our attention is on this thought, a few seconds later it is on another one. We spend a lot of energy and attention on these passing thoughts, most of them being unimportant and outside our conscious control.

The human mind does not stop processing — constantly thinking, obsessively thinking. Your mindset is nothing but a series of thoughts that make up your beliefs. Your thoughts and its subsequent interpretations dictate how you respond to a given situation.

If you lack control over your thoughts, it would seem like you are under the influence of an invisible power that is fighting to gain your attention. What follows is a crippling cycle of worry and anxiety that sets you on a downward spiral, plummeting into the dark zone. Pretty soon you would have blown your world into a million pieces, all within the confines of your inner mind.

This all sounds pretty familiar. Our brains are pre-wired to respond to negative thoughts and feelings more quickly. We naturally gravitate towards negative information which leads to greater attention and reinforcement, which causes them to be more frequent. How can you break free if you are stuck in your head and you can’t let go of what seems to be permanent transcripts in your brain?

Imagination is everything. It is the preview of life's coming attractions.

– Albert Einstein

Your Intrusive Negative Thoughts Do Not Dictate Your Life

Just like me, you are taught early on to focus on positive thinking. You’re told that to feel self-assured and confident, you should banish negative thoughts. Kind of like saying goodbye negative thoughts; hello positive thoughts. Simple, right? However, what’s simple is not necessarily easy.

So how are we to take control and mentally empower ourselves to change our thoughts and affect our environment?

We spend much of our time ruminating and replaying what’s not working in life. Negative thoughts are part of human functioning. We hold on to our discomfort in an attempt to figure out solutions to let it go. Our brain uses replays to force us to become fixated on the thing we’re worried about.

There is nothing complicating with wanting to have a positive life. But first, you just have to accept that those intrusive negative thoughts do not dictate your life.

Before you can become the boss of your brain, understand that you are largely at the mercy of your emotions. Thoughts trigger emotions. Emotions help you cope. If you act in response to your emotions, understanding that your worldview is influenced by the balance between your thoughts and emotions will help you towards making wise choices.

If you can focus on rainbows and unicorns all day long, it can affect how you feel regularly. The same is true with negative thoughts.

Your brain does not know the difference between the stories created by your mind in the form of thoughts, imagery, and predictions, or the reality you experience through your 5 senses.

It means that what you imagine to be happening is actually happening as far as your brain is concerned. Everything starts in the mind, through imagination. Your imagination is responsible, to a large extent, for the kind of life you are experiencing right now, and what goes on in your mind now would affect your future.

Live out of your imagination, not your history.

– Stephen R. Covey

Successful people all over the world use visualization to spawn dreams into reality realms. Visualization is just concentrated dreaming. It’s mind over matter. They are creating reality from a space inside their brains. The strategy involves focusing on the desired results instead of what is being presented to them at the moment.

Your Thoughts Are Just Mere Suggestions

When you use your imagination to build a mental picture, your subconscious mind accepts that information as something you really want. It will work towards supplying you with the energy you needed to achieve it. You will become aware of any other opportunities that could make your desire a reality. Your thoughts create a mental image of the object, situation, or people you are focusing on, and in subtle ways, affect you and your environment.

If you respond to your thoughts by worrying and expecting failure, that’s your imagination being used negatively. You allow your mind to be occupied with unwanted, undesirable, and destructive suggestions. You accept and believe them without challenge. You believe that just because your mind says something is important, then it must be important. Eventually, you get what you imagine and accept, which is failure!

Thoughts are just mere suggestions. You don’t have to worry about the fact that you’re having them, therefore; you don’t have to believe them. Because they are a result of your imagination, you have the power to flip that switch and begin to imagine something else, regardless of whether you believe it to be real right now.

The good news is, this works vice versa. If you imagine and envision progress, promotion, and successful results, you will see opportunities, which you would otherwise have missed. Your mind plays tricks on you by changing illusions of what you perceived through your thoughts into what seems like reality.

Imagination plays a very important role in our daily lives and affects our decision making. If you believe hidden dangers are lurking in the woods and you change your route to avoid them, then your fantasy has affected your experience.

Our mind can run away with us, leading us to act through suspicion or fear, but we can also use our imagination as a tool to change our lives for the better. Just like that little thought experiment about seeing yourself holding up a lemon, squeezing it, and letting a stream of tart juice splash onto your tongue will cause you to pucker and salivate. You turn on the same region of the brain that would have been turned on had you tasted the juice in real-time.

Imagination is simply redirecting our thoughts towards what we desire

There might be a little more than just mere wishful thinking on this concept of imagining something into reality. Given how intrusive thoughts affect our perceptions and emotions, this fact proved useful in helping us reconstruct our minds.

Imagination is simply redirecting our thoughts towards what we desire instead. It can provide us with rich, lifelike experiences. We call the shots. After all, it is the workings of our inner world.

If you’re willing to use your imagination to perceive situations in a different light, you can turn all sorts of problems into constructive challenges — and radically alter your experience.

The way we accept our reality is through interpretation that comes through our senses. This is true of our thoughts. If you believe a thought that says you are a failure, you will begin to respond and act in accordance with that belief.

By changing your thinking patterns, you can meaningfully change your reactions to the world. Regardless of how you feel right now, you can use your imagination to overcome difficulty and achieve success. Our whole experience of life is filtered through our minds, and we continually project our sense of meaning into our world.

This is how our imagination can manifest as reality.

Redirecting your focus will not necessarily stop your mind from offering random suggestions. No matter how many times you ignore, it will always come right back with another troubling suggestion. You don’t have control over the thoughts that pop into your head. You can’t defeat it. You can’t control or shut it up. Just get out of the field. Refuse to play the game. Re-route.

The next time your mind slaps you with a thought about why you should worry and feel anxious about something, smile, and re-focus.

If persisted long enough, you will find eventually the thoughts start to bother you less and less. It’s not that the negative thoughts will subside altogether. It’s just that your emotional reaction to those thoughts has changed. This will free you up to live the life you want without so much anxiety.

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