Be The Observer Of Your Thoughts

There’s an ongoing conversation in all of our heads. Two voices, going back and forth.

It’s important to watch how we talk to ourselves, but more important is the awareness that you’re always talking to yourself.

There’s you, the one who has always been there, observing every happening of your life and there’s this crazy roommate. He’s been with us for as long as we can remember, ranting and raving and rarely useful.

As he rides along on your way to work, he turns and starts to smile – Did you turn the oven off?

This crazy roommate is wreaking havoc on our peace of mind. The mistake a lot of us make is trying to appease a madman. We think that if we just go back and check to make sure the oven is off, then he’ll be quiet.

We’ve identified this roommate as crazy. But the dangerous thing is that we’re consulting them as we go through our day.

Be the Observer

Remove yourself from the conversation and just watch. You don’t have to be either voice in there. You can be an observer who notices the madness going back and forth.

We know we don’t have superpowers, but we try using our mind to bend the world to our reality. We wrongly believe that a certain amount of worrying or obsessively imagining an outcome is going to impact it.

The closest thing to a superpower available to us is the power to separate life into two categories – what we can control and what we can’t. The power comes from being able to let go of what we can’t and channel our energy into what we can.

You will slip and your mind will run wild. You will catch yourself making the mistake of thinking you can worry the world your way.

Watching our mind is a practice. It’s not all or nothing. Just because you can’t do it perfectly 100% of the time doesn’t mean the alternative is 0% of the time.

The more you practice, the quicker you’ll notice your mind running off. You’ll notice it trying to control the uncontrollable and you stop. Then you channel your focus away from the madness and back to what you can control. Back to the present moment. You’re able to focus on what you’re doing and you’re not lost in your thoughts.

The happy life is the one where we put all our effort into the things we can control. We don’t waste time – which is what our life is – on fooling ourselves into believing we can control the uncontrollable.

Ditch the Roommate

Think about that voice, that crazy roommate. Why do we keep taking advice from them? If they were an actual person we’d run away. Our parents and friends would be concerned about us spending time together.

If this was a real person, we’d be cognizant of how they’re impacting our environment. Real or not real, they are impacting our environment. That conversation is happening. The quality of that conversation, which is a conversation with yourself, is your environment.

You definitely wouldn’t let this person contribute to your most important life decisions. You wouldn’t trust them to tell you who to marry or what career pursuits were worthy.

This wild roommate is really the primal part of our brains. Sometimes called the monkey brain. It doesn’t fit the times. It’s still on the lookout for lions as we walk down the aisle of the supermarket. And when it doesn’t find these dangers, that it’s wired to be on alert for, it seeks out new ones.

Instead of scanning the savannah for a lion, it’s overanalyzing why someone added a period to their last text but not the one before that.

Martin Luther King Jr. described this battle as the North vs. South of our soul. “"There is something of a civil war going on within all of our lives… And there is this continual struggle within the very structure of every individual life," he said.

It’s a daily battle. But one worth fighting.

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