Your brain is a miraculous organ. It can be a powerful benefit or crushing adversary. One tool that your brain has that helps you to communicate with yourself is your inner voice.
Sometimes that voice in your head attempts to rule your life and suggests it knows best. Your inner voice can take on many forms. Your inner voice can be either supportive or critical depending on how good your relationship with self is or much self-love you have for you.
Inner Voice Turned Negative (Gone Rogue)
If the inner self voice takes on the form of inner critic, the content of its messages becomes doubtful, judgmental, negative, depressing, self-defeating, self-limiting or second guessing. The content of the inner critic originates from one's mind code. Then the negative self-talk can produce negative thought or sets of thoughts that get caught in a constant loop. Constant thought looping, or otherwise known as ruminating, can result in a thought addiction.
Definition of Rumination
Rumination is defined as passively focusing the mind’s attention on a negative belief causing an associated emotional state to surface like depression, and over negatively thinking about the causes, meanings, possible results or consequences of the content or beliefs of the mind. People who ruminate are ineffective in taking action, slow in problem-solving, and hesitate at decision making. Rumination causes fixed, inflexible, and negative thinking.
Research
Recent research studying individuals with a lifetime of mood disorders found that rumination is one of the strongest correlations to the onset of depression. Rumination or thought looping makes relapse into depression easier. Research data revealed that formation of ruminating thoughts are cognitive features associated with a vulnerability to developing, maintaining, and relapsing into a depressive disorder.
So, the more a person ponders on a negative thought or cluster of thoughts over and over again, the harder it is to release that thought … and it can have devastating results on his or her life. Ruminating can be categorized by negative, rigid beliefs a person has formed about themselves, their self-worth, and confidence. Typically, these beliefs involve conditional standards in areas of self-evaluation, perfectionism, and approval of others.
A side effect of ruminating is the creation of dysfunctional attitudes and negative perceptions of you and the world outside of you. Dysfunctional attitudes and negative perceptions are a direct reflection of the content of the mind (i.e., what you think or feel about you). Rumination is associated with the processes of the mind, that is, how you relate to the content streaming through the mind.
Quiet your inner voice through enforcing new rules
One way to quiet your mind is by daily cleaning out the clutter in your mind and choosing to not feed your inner voice content. Choose to not give that inner voice content value.
Don’t allow junk into your mind. Be mindful of what you allow inside your mind. Monitor your own words, thoughts and attention.
Don't give inappropriate content power and influence over your mind.
Don't give your inner voice energy.
Don't spend time gossiping, bad mouthing other people, judging other people, finding faults in others, or allow yourself to be consumed in negative thoughts like jealousy, guilt or fear, or constructing excuses to cover up how you actually feel. It doesn’t matter if this happens only in your mind or you verbalize it with others. Make the choice to not entertain these thoughts.
Don't spend mental time doubting, second guessing, judging, arguing, or being mean to you.
Afterthoughts
The more you monitor and pay attention to your beliefs and the content your thoughts, the more influence you will have over your thoughts. Be observant of how you manifest the content through listening to words that you speak. The main question you should ask yourself … is the content of your beliefs, words, or thoughts holding you captive, causing you to ruminate constantly and bringing you down. If your answer is yes, then you need to cleanse your inner voice.
5 Tips to Cleanse Your Inner Voice
Follow these 5 tips to inner voice cleanse and achieve inner peace:
1. Be mindful of your thought content. Take time and notice in the moment when you are having a thought. Is the thought negative, self-destructive, sabotaging or creating emotional discomfort for you?
2. Ask yourself: “Is this thought moving me toward or away from my beliefs, and is it how I want to live?”
3. If the thought is moving you away from the kind of person you want to be or how you want to believe, then clear the thought from your stream of thinking. Realize that this thought is just a thought and not an authority.
4. Recognize and uncover the underlying emotion or emotions that may be fueling your negative, unhelpful thought stream. Shift the emotion(s) by breathing through it for a few minutes until it diminishes. Choose an empowering or cleansing word to help your mind let go of the repetitive negative cycle. I like to repeat “release – release” in my mind in order to move past a negative thought loop.
5. Empower yourself by remembering that the nature of the mind is to think. It is a tool, not the ruler. Your mind should be constantly producing thoughts for you. So be creative and consciously alter your thought stream by producing positive thoughts. Focus on these positive thoughts, and inject them into your stream of consciousness every day.
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