Why trying to calm our thoughts can be pretty useless…

The over-activity of our thoughts is an outcome of stress. 

When we are experiencing stress, there is too much energy in the system.

This excessive energy (a.k.a charge/ activation) goes together with a pattern of internal disorganisation and incoherence.

Energetically, the movement of excess stress in our system is upwards. 

Physiologically there is tension, constriction and contraction. This happens in the whole of the body (tightness in muscles, fascia, jaw, gut, blood vessels etc), and also in the mind. So the quality of our thinking in stress is based on this contraction, tension and disorganisation.

Because our thoughts are the channel of information that most of us have disproportionate access to, often at the expense of other channels of information (such as sensation, emotion, movement etc), we are relatively much better at noticing what's happening in the mind-channel than in other body-based channels.

This means that we easily notice and latch on to our thoughts...we name them as THE designated issue and then we go about trying to calm them. This is a very top-down approach (mind down to body) and is limited when it comes to addressing stress (which is really what we are addressing when our mind is over-active!).

It can be helpful at times. It can also be pretty useless. Like having an ashtray on a motorbike kind-of-useless. Additionally, it can generate more stress and constriction in our system because of the amount of efforting required to attempt to shift our inner experience from a top-down only perspective. 

It bears repeating: the over-activity of our thoughts is an outcome of stress.

Stress is foundationally an experience of our nervous system and body. Stress is also largely driven by unconscious processes and past associations. We experience stress firstly in our bodies (though many of us don’t feel it this way due to being over-identified with our minds and disconnected from the land of our body), and then by the time that stress has made it’s way up to the brain, we’ve made up a story. But the story itself is not the birthplace of stress, it is a mirror of it. 

So, if we want to calm our thoughts, the best thing we can do is to learn how to speak the language of our nervous systems and regulate our stress through our bodies…because then our mind naturally becomes more quiet. 

Aside from the usefulness piece here, there is the very real fact that by only staying in the mind-channel we are not getting to know ourselves. It’s impossible to know who we are, how we feel about things, what we need or desire or value when we are over-identified with our thoughts and under-connected to our body-based experience and meanings. So if you want to have an intimate experience with the divine and glorious being that YOU ARE, I highly recommend learning how to form an alliance with your nervous system.