How to Control Your Mind?

Before you read this, remember: I don't want your takeaway to be thoughts. Thought is the start of everything in existence, but thought alone is useless. It's action that brings actual change. So take something practical from this and start applying it. You are the product of years of conditioning, and a single piece of writing like this doesn't wish to change you, nor can it. What it can do is trigger a chain of events. That chain is what changes you.

Your mind is abstract, and yet it turns into so much of what you physically do. Put it like this: if you want to drink and party and drive at 200km/h, your mind will allow all of it. The thing that steps in and says "don't drink and drive" is your intellect. It's the part of you that you've taught the difference between right and wrong.

Very few people ever train themselves to be intellectually strong. We tend to do the opposite. We throw our peace away worrying about work, and then call it intellect when we achieve something academically. But controlling your mind was never the goal. The goal is becoming intellectually strong enough that you simply know what to do and what not to.

You might think: I know overthinking is wrong, I do it anyway. That's because you don't yet know enough and negativity has a quality of triggering a chain reaction, like an atomic explosion. One wrong thought splits into another, and another, until it becomes something capable of destroying you.

If that sounds like exaggeration, it isn't. Remember the last time you were sad? You thought one sad thought, then another, then you put on sad songs, and you got sadder, and sadder, and everything good about that week and that day went down the drain, until it felt like you were the most miserable person alive. That's the power of a single negative thought. It feeds on itself. Positive thoughts don't work that way they have to be remembered and fed again and again to have any effect.

You might point to intellectual people who are miserable. But if someone has never learned to keep their own mind at peace, I don't call that intellect, no matter what they've achieved. Because here's the thing I keep coming back to: "the truth never takes your peace away. It brings more of it."

And that's the real test. Not avoiding hard truths holding them and staying at peace anyway.

A peaceful mind cannot be built on comforting lies. Lies break. And every time one breaks, it drops you right back into the spiral I just described. Real peace has to be built on what's actually true, even when the truth is heavy. So the deepest intellect isn't positive thinking. It's the ability to look at reality exactly as it is and not lose your footing.

You can't control the mind directly you can only build the intellect that interrupts it. Its first job is catching negativity before it splits and spreads. But its highest job is this: letting you face reality as it is, without needing to flinch or pretend, and staying at peace anyway.

Start there. Not by thinking about it. By catching the next thought that tries to feed on itself, and refusing it.