How To Fix Your Active Mind — Guide To Overcome Mind Wandering
So you have an active mind, huh? Can’t shut it up? Trying to sleep and it just keeps on spinning? Never able to ‘shut down’ your brain? Finding yourself in random thoughts during the day for long periods of time, not being able to focus? I’ve been there.
Thinking about situations that happened before and how I could’ve reacted and then their reaction to that and then my counter-reaction to that.
And then slightly altering the situation and doing it all over again. Autistically analysing all the consequences of my actions.
It is not healthy. There are multiple options you can take to fix this.
Solutions
Most of them are unhealthy and destructive.
Substances
Sedating your brain by smoking weed or drinking alcohol works, sort of. But it’s addictive and you’re not even fixing the core issue at hand.
The very next day, the very moment you’re sober again, the brain starts. And it won’t stop unless you take that drug and numb yourself.
Before you know it, that’s the only way you get that calmness, and you’ll start to want that calmness more and more. And bam! You’re an alcoholic, or high 24/7.
Okay, maybe not that dramatic and that fast. And yes, alcohol is not only used for sedating your brain from being active.
But you get the point. It’s a temporary solution that doesn’t even fix your active mind.
Even working out doesn’t fix the issue at hand. Yes, it’s healthy and a way better option than sedating yourself.
But you’re still distracting yourself from your own mind. The moment you stop working out, bam! That mind spins again.
What’s the solution then?
Meditation
Don’t click off this article, yes I know what it sounds like.
Ugh, again a hippy promoting meditation. What’s so special about it? You just sit and do nothing while trying to think of nothing, which is impossible. I’ve tried it a couple of times, but I can’t think of nothing. Better off just going to sleep instead of pretending to sleep. Waste of time.
Those were my exact thoughts when I first heard about it. I understand you.
But you have two choices, read this article and try to learn and implement it, or get back to distracting yourself from yourself.
When was the last time you just stared at the wall?
I’m being serious.
Most people don’t even know themselves. They know a fictional character from tv better than themselves.
How messed up is that?
Spend time with yourself. Instead of distracting yourself with social media, texting, series, music, movies and people 24/7.
Let your thoughts run through your head. Observe them.
Remember you are not your thoughts, you are an observer of your thoughts.
When you’re doing this, you’re already meditating, sort of. Congratulations!
See, you didn’t even have to use any stupid app that talks in an ASMR voice to you.
And you just got to know an amazing person a little better. I’m talking about you by the way.
So you know the basic concept of meditation now. How do you do it better and stay consistent?
Start small
Don’t do 30-minute sessions during the first week. It’s the same as going to the gym. You’re not going to bench 100kg the first time you go.
What does small mean? 5 minutes? Not even.
Start with 30 seconds, which was already very hard for me when I started. I also had a TikTok/goldfish attention span so maybe that’s why.
Then start slowly building it up.
Go to 1 minute, 2min, 5min, 7min, 10min, 15min, 20min, etc
You get the point. Add time when you feel like ‘oh already over?’
Use the free app Medito. It has a very basic timer function and it keeps track of your consistency.
Mindfulness meditation
Do not, and I repeat, do not use the ASMR talking you through the meditation function.
It doesn’t help you to learn mindfulness. It won’t solve your overactive mind.
What we want to do is build our mindfulness muscle. Follow these 3 steps.
- Close your eyes
- Focus on breathing in through your nose
- And out through your mouth. Breathing out should take longer than breathing in.
Try to just focus on that. Nothing else. Your mind will most definitely wander off, but learn to detect that and then focus back on your breathing.
You will maybe at most have a couple of seconds when you’re not thinking about anything. That’s normal.
So why does this help?
This builds the muscle of detecting your mind wandering and then responding to that by focussing on whatever you’re doing.
During meditation, it’s breathing. During cooking, it’s chopping the veggies.
While writing this article it’s finding the correct words for the sentences. While sleeping it’s again the breathing but also feeling the blanket on you and how relaxed you are.
Results
You will be a much happier person, you will ‘live in the moment’ more.
You will be present during conversations, you can fully appreciate the good moments while they’re happening.
And most importantly, you can now control your active mind. When it starts wandering you can bring yourself back to the present moment.
This will inevitably stop you from living inside your head.
But it takes practice and consistency to achieve it.
You can do it.
If this was helpful in anyway clap for me :)
You can always contact me through my website if you want more info on anything. I’ll happily help :)
I send out monthly newsletters on what I’m working on and how my self-improvement journey is going. I talked about this topic there before I even considered writing this article.
