4 Things Naturally Intelligent People Do To Stop Invasive Thoughts From Snowballing
You can't always control what pops into your head, but these habits stop intrusive thoughts from making things worse.
Ahmet Yuksek | Unsplash According to neuroscience, 95 percent of your life is lived as an unconscious program, which only leaves five percent to make conscious choices and decisions. Unfortunately, being unaware of this divide is part of the unconscious. This means that you have no idea that your life is an unconscious program most of the time.
If 95 percent of your consciousness is "stuck" in unconscious behavior based on the past, that means you only have 5 percent consciousness left to "deal" with the rest. That is not a lot!
It means you have to slay Goliath (95 percent) with a small stick (5 percent), and even though the odds seem small, it actually is possible. You just need to know how to apply the 5 percent consciousness that you have available and keep adding to it by applying these steps:
Here are 4 things naturally intelligent people do to stop invasive thoughts from snowballing:
1. Become aware of what's not working in their life
It always starts with awareness and what you are aware of. Obviously, you cannot be aware of what you aren't aware of, but you can become aware of it by placing your awareness on it.
Get curious about your current life situation. Ask yourself, "What part of my life is not working for me? Frustrating, challenging, something I want to get rid of?"
By focusing on that area of your life, you are becoming aware of it in a more conscious way, and the door opens. Now you need to keep it open by walking through the door and getting curious.
This awareness does not always lead to greater satisfaction. Research suggests that intelligent individuals consciously monitor their progress toward a goal and can recognize when their strategy is not working. This allows them to adjust their approach more productively than those who lack this self-directed evaluation.
2. Become aware of their negative thoughts
Perfect Wave / Shutterstock
What are you telling yourself about your life situation? How do you explain to yourself or others why this is happening to you?
Being curious works much better than making yourself wrong for it, by the way. Curiosity keeps the door open, and you want to keep walking through this door to learn about all the ways you tell yourself about yourself.
Please get out a pen and paper and write down what thoughts you are engaging in and believing about yourself, others, and the world. Write them down. You are entering into the 95 percent unconsciousness with your 5 percent curiosity and commitment to uncover this big area.
By taking these first two steps, you are engaging yourself in a new way and shining your light of consciousness on the darkness in the unconscious. This already helps you grow your 5 percent to maybe 6 percent, and diminish the 95 to 94. You just got stronger and took your next step toward freedom.
3. Become aware of their negative emotions
Keep walking through the door into the 95/94 percent unconsciousness. This is the only place where you can learn more about how you keep reliving the past and how it influences the present moment.
Truth be told, it’s in this moment that you experience your thoughts and emotions, right? Even though they are connected to your past, you experience them now.
This is how you "rollover" your past into your present moment, and you’ll do that indefinitely until you stop it. Then you can start creating a new future without the past program. Are you ready to expose more of what impacts your life 24/7?
Back to your current life situation, get curious (not judgmental) about the feelings and emotions you are experiencing when you look at your life. Anger, fear, frustration, despair?
Write them all down on the next page. Every time you feel another emotion, write it down. Just do your best. You're used to judging your emotions and never really get a chance to be curious about them or learn from them.
Please don’t judge them. That will only keep them hiding in the 95 percent and prevent you from gaining more consciousness and freedom. However, judging yourself for having these feelings is part of what you are becoming conscious of, so use that as part of your curiosity and write "judging" on your page, too.
When you succeed, you’ll now have a page with the thoughts you have about your current life and one with the feelings and emotions about it.
Just by becoming conscious of it, you already have a little more consciousness available and have transferred another 1% from the unconscious to the conscious.
You are conscious of your feelings now, right? Hence, let’s say you now have 7% consciousness and ‘only’ 93% unconscious to deal with. Still a long way to go, but you are doing it. Congratulations. Let’s go to the fourth step.
Instead of getting lost in their own thoughts, highly emotionally intelligent people are present during interactions. A recent study explained that they practice active listening, which allows them to pick up on emotional subtext and nuances that others might miss.
4. Become aware of their own actions
eldar nurkovic / Shutterstock
You're going to shine your curiosity and consciousness on your actions now. By doing that, you start pulling more energy to start changing your life. Notice your habitual behavior of how you react, respond, and act in your current life situation that you don’t like.
Are you overworking to avoid dealing with it? Overeating, drinking, or doing drugs to avoid feeling your despair? Blaming others, yourself, or the world for the way your life looks?
Be curious with a strong dose of kindness about how you struggle to be happy, feel loved, and just "make it through." Write it all down on the next page. Include all the ways you act, react, or respond to your life, and stay open to learning more about yourself and the 93% unconscious ways you live your life.
Most likely, you won’t see it all right away, but please see what you see as you take your first look into your current life and know that you are becoming aware of more of the unconscious ways you keep repeating the life you really want to change.
If you wonder what to do next, I encourage you to keep becoming aware of your thoughts, feelings, and actions, and write them down in the categories.
Then ask yourself the question: “Do I want to keep thinking, feeling, and acting like that?” Most likely, your answer is no.
That’s when the next stage begins on how to build your consciousness muscle to choose a different way every time you catch yourself thinking, feeling, or acting in a way you don’t want anymore. This will feel like the heavy lifting in the beginning while you train your new consciousness muscle to say no to the old and choose a new way.
This doesn’t happen overnight. Commitment and curiosity are good companions on this journey. It’s a long and worthy process.
Pernilla Lillarose is a self-love mystic & mentor at Divine Feminine Flow and the author of 5 Steps To Dive Into The Divine Feminine Flow.
