Those of you who have been following a while may recall that I had some therapy a while back. While I have mixed feelings about its effectiveness — primarily due to it being delivered via text chat online rather than face-to-face appointments — there are a few things that I learned, reinforced or otherwise made a point of trying to remember over the course of the period I spent undertaking the program.
Probably chief among those things was the idea of setting up some sort of mental checkpoint before allowing things to "get to me" too much. This is an important means of controlling incoming thoughts and feelings — particularly "negative" ones such as sadness and anger — so that they don't overwhelm you all at once, and it's something that I've often struggled with. Hell, I still do, to be perfectly honest, and it requires often exhausting mental effort to keep it up even bearing the strategy in mind… but it's an effort worth making.
The checkpoint asks a simple question before allowing the incoming thoughts into the depths of my brain: "does this matter?" If the answer is yes — and the incoming thought can provide a convincing reason why it matters to me, here and now — then I allow the thought through. If the answer is no, I turn it away, remaining aware that it might try to "cross the border" again at another time in the near future, perhaps in disguise.
When you make a point of being rigorous with your incoming thoughts like this, it's surprising how many of them you can turn away. There are a lot of things that don't matter. There are a lot of things that it isn't worth getting sad or angry over. Sometimes they still manage to sneak through, of course, but if you recognise those feelings and know what to look out for if they return at a later date, you can better equip yourself to send them packing the next time they come around.
I feel like life probably shouldn't be such an ongoing, constant mental battle with oneself, but unfortunately with the way we all live our lives today, it's hard to avoid — short of disconnecting entirely from the Internet and the media. Which is not really an option for most people.
Still, you can make that battle easier by closing doors that don't need to be open and restricting the potential flow of incoming thoughts and feelings. It's your life, your mind and your own sanity, and it's worth taking assertive control over now and again.
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