An improved relationship with the inner voice

How do you listen to your inner world?

As people find their worlds pressed in many directions, COVID19 being one of them, the inner world of seeing, describing and internally storytelling can just get louder. It can get more out of control if you aren't aware of it, or have a few tools to help understand and calm it. 

How might you develop an internal "manager function to help?” 

•  Recognize that all of these things going on in your mind are a very natural part of the brains functions, you just happen to be tuning (or not tuning) in. 
•  When things tend to get loud, it is a sign of a hormone or chemical that is a little 'extra' for any of a bazillion reasons.  
•  Breathe, movement, engagement with our other senses such as smelling flowers or crushing leaves for example, can help.
•  We can communicate physically to our body that we are safe by opening our chest, standing tall, feet hip-width apart. Our body can feel weak or under attack with the negative thoughts.
• Notice if you feel sleepy or full of energy - what is your body telling you?

Understand that your thoughts/ideas and inner dialogue are limited in three important ways.  

1. You are making sense of them by your own limited language and vocabulary.
2. They are only 'hints', not actual ‘truths.' Having a good set of tools to look at those hints, pretty much all the pain or sadness or anxious energy can be converted quickly into useful things. This can move towards feeling encouraged and safe rather than in pain and concerned. 
3.  You are standing in the middle of conflicting voices and it turns out they cannot hear one another, cannot coordinate activities, and all have extreme ADHD.

Feel relaxed a bit regarding just how messy and complicated your thoughts are and how various external stimulation affect them by knowing they are natural and everyone (despite various levels of awareness) has the same basic challenge.

Consider an example;

Look at the way sound is made. It causes waves of air to move in a particular pattern. Those waves travel across the room, losing quality and picking up ambient other sounds on the way. As the noise is made, it combines with all the other noises, the lights, sights, smells, combined with the other multitude of active processing threads running in your brain and that all comes in as various "stimulation". It is converted from external to internal.

From light and sound and imagination to electrical impulses and then a chemical cocktail. Combinations of all of those aggregate, summate, get deleted, get compressed, get converted across formats, and finally, you get all of that noise into a place it can be "thought about all together” in the brain somewhere. 

Now you start the weird journey ;). Now you try to put all of that back together in different variations until you find words or shapes. Then you try to apply meaning from another entire system of goo, electricity, chemistry and a little magic and begin to string together a story. Finally, that story is relayed to your upper conscious, the whispers you start to hear more loudly and discernibly. 

"They are talking about you", "They don't like you", "They don't love you the way you love them", "They are wasting company money", "They are stupid", on and on and on it seems we are catching wisps of the process, whispers of some of the automated conclusions, and a silly hard to read dashboard of green, yellow and red lights. 

Finally, after all of that. You tell yourself a story, about the story. That final twist and were done. Tada, one tiny piece of information processed!!!!!!! 

How accurate was I? Well. Come on. At best I have some of the actors and feelings or ideas right. I most often find they are in the wrong order or emphasis is being put on someone or something that is wonderful and serving to my brain-processor, but in the real world… 'My wife should learn from me how to do the dishes faster/better' isn't very helpful to me or my wife. Rearranged and better emphasized from the hints my brain has sent me here. 

'I should learn from my wife about dishes' 

'My wife should not learn from me' 

'I should learn how to do dishes slower' 

'I should do the dishes' 

'I can appreciate my wife' 

Like, wow, thank you brain! I love it. It is another story for another day how life was the six previous years as I held the belief, 'my wife should learn from me how to do the dishes faster' in secret from her. Bwhahhaa, I was such an amateur husband! 

With a little practice setting and reviewing goals, journaling and exploring better strategies for using language to describe your feelings and articulate your needs in the external world, you will find more and more success from your inner world! I am working on a nice interpretation of the CBT Bad Habits of the Mind I look forward to sharing next, if you cannot wait, do a quick search. The simple act of reviewing this list of 10 or so bad habits the brain can get stuck in has been shown to improve peoples ability to cope and feel good by almost 10%! Hope there was something in here for someone, awesome day to you!

-James