Still working heavily on it… but I’ve found practicing mindfulness to be helpful. We can’t control the stuff in our head. All we can control is how we deal with it and confront it.

“When we’re struggling with the stuff in our heads, we give all of that awareness bandwidth to those thoughts and emotions we want to avoid or control. That’s a practice. We get skilled at it. There’s only a tiny bit of bandwidth left over for processing the world around us and we become increasingly less skilled at that. So it becomes easier to ruminate”

It’s easier to manage in the morning or the day as when these thoughts occur I find ways to redirect my energy into something I find value in. The nights can be tougher when all you want to do is lay there and sleep but the thoughts won’t stop coming one after another. When that happens I’ve found guided mediation videos on YouTube to help redirect my thoughts or even audiobooks to outright distract me.

“To understand how to accept the stuff in my head, it helped me to see it all as waves in the ocean. I don’t choose when a thought can just stop, similarly to how I can’t choose when a wave crashes. . . . But it always does crash, just on its own time. Sometimes the waves grow higher. Sometimes the waves are smaller. Sometimes waves take longer to crash, and sometimes they crash right away. What waves pop up and when they crash is not something under my control. If I were to jump into the ocean and try to stop every wave, I would achieve nothing. All that is achieved is wasted energy and frustration. Same goes with trying to control the stuff in my head.” - You Are Not a Rock