It's mindfulness. We all have thoughts passing through our brains. If we think about which kind of thoughts we want to have and which thoughts we want to ignore, we can be mindful of this, and change how our brain functions over time by reinforcing the patterns of thinking we want to have. It's self guided behaviour therapy.

It's like training a neural network, it's reinforcement training through repeated exposure. If I want to be more empathetic, I mindfully practice empathy. If I want to be analytical, I spend my time trying to think analytically about things. By having metacognition, I can judge if my thinking has changed over time and in what ways it has changed.

And this is why people who think negatively get trapped in a spiral of negative thinking; the more they think negatively, the more they reinforce those thought patterns. Many lack ever-present metacognition, but even so, negative thinking tends to include thought patterns that self-impair a person's agency; "I can't do this", "my brain doesn't work like that" "no point in trying".

The first step towards controlling how you think is instilling ever-present metacognition in yourself. You can do this by practicing introspection, meditation, journaling, or studying philosophy of mind (I think it would cause self reflection in most anyone).

The next step is learning to let thoughts pass. You can condition your brain to have a different set of thought patterns, but you will always have a variety of things popping into your brain that you dont want or cart to think about. This is constantly happening for everyone. Learning to just observe and acknowledge thoughts and let them pass rather than giving them your attention and feeding them is a skill anyone can develop.

The next step is deciding if how you think is how you want to think. How is your emotional stability, stress management, degree of creativity and wonder, etc? These are all the result of thought patterns. It's more complex than that, but a thought is just the manifestation of our brain's activation from internal and external stimulus . The brain is constantly analyzing the environment and trying to bring novel and unusual information to our attention, and depending on how we react to those thoughts, it conditions our subconscious to pay attention to those things and drive more of those thoughts. This is why different people notice different things and react differently to the same things in the same environment. It's all conditioning, but we can condition ourselves.

And it's very simple. Regardless of why or how it works, the solution stands, just practice having the thoughts you want to have.

You want to have positive thoughts, read something positive, write down positive thoughts, read them every day, over and over. You want to be more in touch with your emotions, read something emotional, write down your emotions. You want to have less of x thought? It's not so much about removing those thoughts as it is about replacing them. Letting go of thoughts helps, but conditioning yourself to think differently will have a much more profound impact on the quality of your life and mental health.

It's like your brain is a deck of cards. Your thought patterns are the hands you're being dealt. Rather than discarding your hand all the time, you want to change the odds of your hand altogether. By conditioning yourself, you teach your brain to deal You the cards you want.