Brainwashing - or how to perform thoughts’ hygiene

Often in spring we think about wardrobe revision and replacing old heavy clothes with new, brighter, lighter ones. We imagine that we will immediately feel better and our emotional state will improve. And the truth is that it really happens, we get new emotions and it seems brighter... But for a very short time, because we only renew our physical image. Once we get used to it, we feel bad again, because old programs are running in our inner body and mind, like a computer.

Our thoughts tend to repeat themselves, even 95% of them are the same as yesterday and 80% of them are negative. Thinking about a closet where the same clothes have been hanging for ten years and only 20% of them you like to wear, and the others you don't feel bad about, makes you sad and you might want to make a change. It's easy to renew clothes, but what to do with thoughts? How do you update that closet?

According to Buddhist philosophy, a thought is only a thought until we give it meaning. Because after all, we do not feel and record all 60,000 thoughts that visit us during the day (only about 5% of them are conscious). But if we begin to feel it emotionally, then the seed of meaning has already been planted and is beginning to sprout, and the longer we delay, the harder it will be to uproot.

The easiest way to weed out that thoughts’ garden is to do mindfulness practices and thoughts’ hygiene. Especially since, like updating the wardrobe, it does not require large investments. In order to perform thought hygiene, you need to stop more often and listen to your thoughts - what am I thinking right now? What is the mood of my thoughts? Often, without even recording what we thought, we already feel it physically and emotionally, we react automatically, because that thought is already familiar to us somewhere deep down, the body remembers it better than our conscious mind. But if we would stop more often, catch that thought, and change our reaction to it, the next time the same thought occurred, we would feel differently.

If you start to observe your thoughts more often, even outside of meditation, and when you feel that they are going to be bad, you create a good ending for them, those bad thoughts will start to recur less often. You would get used to thinking more positively and those feelings caused by thoughts would decrease, or maybe gradually disappear altogether.

Also, create positive affirmations and repeat them. It is both easy and at the same time requires a little effort, because in order for them to work, you need not only to say them in the present tense, but also to feel them. It will be easier to do this if you include as many sensations as possible in the meaning of that affirmation, visualizing and repeating it until you really feel it through your physical body and believe it.

A negative prefix should also be avoided in affirmations, because our mind does not understand it, and it learns by repeating it, so say and repeat it to yourself as often as possible.

For example: "I feel great today" (imagine what makes you feel great, see it, smell it, feel it with your body), "I am wonderful(s)", "my health is great".

Why does it work faster in hypnotherapy? Because when a state of deep relaxation is reached, our thoughts are accessible at the subconscious level and the effect is faster. In the theta wave state, our body acts like a sponge and rewrites information much faster than trying to feel it in a conscious state. But once you get into it, it also works outside of hypnotherapy. When our body relaxes, thoughts reach the subconscious and transform thought patterns.

Change, put on new clothes not only on the outside, but also on the inside.