How to Remove Unwanted Thoughts From Your Mind

How to control your mind and thoughts

How to remove unwanted thoughts from your mind is one of the most important aspects of Life Coaching, or indeed any coaching. Instructing clients on challenging their brain when it is giving them misplaced information, is vital to them in making the necessary changes that they are looking for in their lives.

This is often very obvious in Goal Setting and when someone is trying to achieve something that is outside of their comfort zone.

Usually, as soon as you arrive at a goal that you would like to accomplish; a new job, losing weight, competing in a sporting event, whatever it may be, your brain begins to conspire against you and starts to put in place all the mental barriers as to why your goal won't be achieved and you will fail.

Learning how to eradicate these thoughts from your mind and supplanting them with new, positive thoughts is essential for any long-term success and change.

How do You Remove Thoughts From Your Mind?

These barriers or destructive thoughts are often all that is needed to dissuade us from going after our goals and remaining where we are in our current situation. They can stagnate our lives and leave us living a half-life, never fully reaching our true potential or achieving the levels that we would like to reach.

Dealing with confirmation bias.

One example is that you firmly believe that you deserve a promotion; you have been working in your current position for several years and you feel that the position above you will be a good fit.

You understand the role, you get on well with all of your work colleagues, you are committed 100% to the company, and you are well-equipped to apply for the promotion right?

Then your brain leaps into action, it begins to throw up barriers to prevent you from even applying for the position. You start to question yourself and your capabilities; What if you can't do the job?, Do you have the required experience? There are other more experienced people going up for the position, they are more likely to get it.

The hours will be much longer, you enjoy your current job …. on and on your brain goes throwing up more and more barriers until you think...

“ Well, there's no point in applying for the promotion now.”

This is where confirmation bias has stepped in and taken charge. It has placed the idea in your head that you would not be able to obtain the promotion and to enforce these thoughts it has gone around looking for all the evidence that it can find to support the belief, regardless of whether the information is based on fact, it has presented it as such and your brain has accepted it.

What you have done is take the easy option, your brain has talked you into staying put, enforcing the idea that you can't do it by presenting different reasons why you are better off staying in your current role and not trying.

Recognise Which Thoughts You Want to Alter

Not all of your thinking is going to be harmful to you. Many of the thoughts you have will be neutral in that they won’t affect any outcome of your life. Much of our time is spent in a state called the default mode network. The default mode network part of the brain is where we are not actually doing anything in particular.

Such a time could be when we are walking down a street and are thinking about what to have for our dinner in the evening. The brain is taken somewhere else for a time in this state, usually future-focused on something that you need to do. These thoughts aren’t going to cause you too much trouble. they are wandering thoughts.

What you have to do when looking to change your thoughts, is to recognise which ones you want to alter, the thoughts that are causing you real damage, the destructive, self-sabotage thoughts that aren’t serving you in any way at all. These are the thoughts that you need to remove as quickly as possible.

Look at Your Thoughts From a Different Angle

We take the easy option in life even if it leaves us feeling unfulfilled or inadequate, it just seems easier in the long run than trying to break through our thought barriers.

If however, you are aware that you are having these thoughts, and you know where they are coming from and how to eradicate them, then you can begin to start setting goals that you will be able to go on and achieve.

Our brains are designed to take the easy route, this being once something has been learned then that's it, just keep repeating this, no point in changing, it's too hard and will take up too much time and energy.

This is why when we are trying to do something, such as lose weight, for example, we give up very easily. It takes time for our brains to adapt and change to a new way of thinking and doing, it takes a lot of energy but we can do it.

We can make the changes and overhaul our brains we just need to change to a new way of thinking and doing with determination. Instead of just listening to what our brains are telling us, we need to start supplanting some new thoughts and ideas into it.

This is where the resistance will start. Let’s go back to the job promotion idea. You know that on one level you can do the job that you want to apply for and that you really do want the promotion. So why do you listen to your brain when it begins to come up with all the counterarguments against applying for the job?

Often it can be because of a lack of confidence in yourself. You start to doubt your ability and so rather than face rejection you just don't put yourself in a position where this can happen, you shy away and that way you aren't going to be turned down for the role and you won't feel bad. But by not even applying for the position you are already becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy....you don't get the promotion.

Be Intentional in Your Thinking

A way to switch your mind to believing in yourself is to start telling all the good things about yourself. For a start, you applied and got your first job so obviously someone saw commendable aspects in you initially.

You have continued to hold down your job showing that you are more than capable of what you are doing and then look at all the experience you have gained.

You are well-liked and a valued member of the company so why wouldn't they want to reward that?

With these new ideas in your mind you now just need to keep repeating them, you need to start rebooting your brain, discard all of the negative ideas that you have in there and start supplanting the positive beliefs instead.

Initially, your brain will keep switching back to the ideas that it first held but with time and effort, you will get your brain to start changing.

This will develop a renewed confidence in all that you can do and what you can achieve and this, in turn, will start to feed your brain with even more positive stories about yourself.

How Can I Free My Mind From Unwanted Thoughts?

Breaking through negative thought barriers isn't easy and no Coach would ever pretend that it is. A lot of the ideas that we have about ourselves are so deep-rooted we aren't even aware that they are there. The term we use for them is “self-limiting beliefs” and they have often been planted in our minds from childhood.

Family and peers from an early age have very often shaped and nourished what we think about ourselves in both a positive and negative way. People who were encouraged and praised as children are far more likely to have a positive self-belief system than those who were belittled and fed negative attitudes.

Ways to turn off your mind

There are numerous ways to start turning your mind off negative thinking. Different tools will work for different people but it is worth giving different tools a try to see which one works best for you.

Identify what triggers unwanted thoughts

Knowing what triggers your unwanted thoughts places you in a much stronger position when it comes to removing them and turning your mind off.

If you are unaware of why you are thinking the way that you do, then the chances of changing your harmful thinking patterns are greatly reduced. If you have a fuller understanding of why you are thinking the way that you are, and what triggers cause the negative thinking, then you can begin to make changes in your life to turn your thinking off.

Use Meditation to Control Your Thinking

This is a great tool for quieting a mind that is overactive most of the time. When we meditate, it automatically slows the mind down and also the body. Meditation places us mentally and physically in a relaxed space, switching our minds from frenetic rumination to a place of calm contemplation.

Although mediation does take practice, no one will ever sit down the first time they meditate and find a tranquil and calm space, but over time, it will happen and it will be a place to go to whenever you find your thoughts starting to take control of your mind.

Use the power of Journaling

The benefits of journaling have long been known but over the last few years, more and more people have been converted to the therapeutic effects of this simple tool.

Journaling is writing down all of the thoughts that you have inside your head as a way to clear your mind.

It can aid in developing strategies to cope, can highlight where negative thought patterns occur and how frequently, and can help you to see the progress that you are making in tuning out the negative thinking pattern and replacing it with positive thoughts.

Positive affirmations

Saying positive affirmations every day is one way to start supplanting more positive thoughts into your mind.

We learn negative behaviour over time, we are not born with these thoughts that harm us and so we have to learn new ways of thinking instead. One way is to write out a list of positive statements about yourself and repeat them out loud every morning and evening.

At first, you may feel a little stupid or embarrassed, but over time you will get used to hearing them and your brain will start to believe this new thought pattern and will replace your old, negative thoughts with new positive thoughts. The trick here is the repetition.

Make use of positive visualisation

Putting positive images into your mind is a great tool for removing negative thoughts. This is an easy task for most people because it is akin to daydreaming something most of us can spend quite a bit of time doing daily anyway.

Positive visualisation works so well because the brain treats these images as memories and begins to believe that they are true, and It is another way of training the brain to think more positively and productively.

Final Thoughts

How to remove unwanted thoughts from your mind might be something that you have been asking yourself and, trying to do for a long time without much success.

Changing these belief systems can get harder the older you get. When you have believed and acted in a certain way for many years it is very difficult to just flip a switch in your mind and start thinking and behaving differently.

Using the above techniques can be very beneficial for many people. For others, though their thought patterns can be so ingrained that they find working with these tools on their own to be too difficult and they don’t see the results that they want.

This is where working with a Life Coach can be very beneficial as they can help you work through your self-limiting beliefs and help you develop a whole new way of thinking about yourself. They can give you the encouragement, accountability and support that is needed to achieve your goals and accomplish what you want from your life.

If you would like to listen to the audio version of the blog press below.

If you would like to comment on this blog post and share please post below