Regaining Mental Control from Depressive Thoughts.

The Monster

We all live in our minds, we all talk to ourselves in our minds, and we all have debates, arguments, and so on in our minds, all the positive and negatives come from within our minds and Souls.

We all have what they call a “Monkey on our Backs”, meaning something that we carry around that causes us to think negative defeating thoughts and arguments, and even whole plans of failure.

Remove the Monkey, remove the pessimistic negative attitude, but its not that easy, because the Monkey likes it there. A variation of the monkey is the claim that we have an Evil Spirit regularly whispering in our ear telling us that we will always fail, and that the latest desire, want, plan, will fail because “you always fail” and that’s all there is to it.

Remember getting up, knocking over something and breaking it, or just doing something wrong that was minor but your mind blew it all out of proportion asking you “Why am I such an idiot?” or:

• Why the heck did I do something so stupid?
• What’s wrong with me?
• I must be the number 1 idiot in the world.
• I can’t stand myself, I am so dumb, I wish I would die.
and so on and so forth.

It really does seem that we have this monster within us just dying to destroy us, drive us to failure, inspire us to hate our own life, self, family, existence, and then have us commit suicide just to stop hearing how much everyone hates us and we want to stop witnessing our own failures.

Please be logical about this.
There is just no way that we are the only creature in the world like this, but we are, and the reason why is because we are the most intelligent, but what’s worst is that we have created a dysfunctional and toxic existence and that causes us to function “out of our human natural character”.
In other words we are living in and with toxic people, toxic thinking, and a cold materialistic world, thus we kick into a lifelong version of survival mode (all of us, even the wealthy, educated, titled and so on) and we are very unconfident, middle-ground or extremely over confident (cold, narcissist, manipulator types and so on), all unnatural results, or to put it in its true meaning, mentally mutants as if we were reacting from a fallout of nuclear war or poisons.

It is unnatural for an intelligent being to hate it self and constantly put itself on a negative tirade day by day without fail.
Clearly something is wrong. To make it simple lets just call it a evil being. Churchill called his depression Black Dog.

By giving your depression, anxiety, and negative self-talk an identity, a name, you can define what it is, that it is not normal, not right and shouldn’t exist, and then take positive steps to remove it from our thinking process.

Remember the Disney movies with a devil on the characters shoulder and an angel on the other?
Well, what we want is to give the Angel more power in our life than the devil.

There are always a few ways to do things. I wrote some years back about a woman who woke up in a bad mood and angered her entire family before she went to work, and at work with her anger she upset every one of the staff in her office floor. Her children went to school crying or angry. The father stormed off to work angry. And then I showed the same story in the positive version where she got up, did something wrong, a mistake, and saw it as a simple mistake not to repeat again as long as she remembered not to repeat it again. She was kind to her family and had a wonderful day at work, and all her family went their own ways happy because mother was happy.

It’s important to you encourage yourself when you can.
Each time you do something good, a simple smile on your face, or a mental “Well done!” makes a huge difference to your day, helps you feel good about yourself and encourages you to do even better.

A trick I learned was to change my negative reaction to my mistake to a positive encouragement.

There was the famous fighter pilot who’s plane was fueled by a young man who put the wrong fuel in the plane. The fighter pilot nearly died as the plane engine cut-out while he was flying the plane.
He managed to land safely, and instead of being angry with the young man, he told him that from that day on he was going to let the young man fuel his planes, because he knows that he won’t make that mistake again, and the young man, terrified, grateful, in tears made sure he never made that mistake again.

Your greatest moment, facing challenges, taking risks, are all determined if they will or will not happen in your mind, you need to realise that. Your mind, with encouragement from you or other people can become very evasive, negative, downright defeating of completely imaginary fears, your mind made it all up, but when it does make fears up it makes them seem absolute truths when they are not.

Knowing that our mind controls the situation of your day to day living we need to stop long negative self-defeating tirades in their tracks as soon as we can. Consider you have an hour to rant over nothing, get nothing done, and miss out on a golden opportunity, something the Monkey on your back would be ever so pleased about.

Stop the ranting in their tracks and that hour that was going to be wasted and that golden opportunity that was going to be missed are now able to be taken advantage of. What I do is challenge myself to see the good where my mind was raving on about defeat.

I ask myself, now what good could come from what I want or need to do?
What changes can I make right now to change my situation for the better and cause me to be happy and instead of being depressed congratulate myself because I took the risk, faced the challenge, and did what was needed to defeat the dreaded monkey.

Make yourself very conscious of what you are thinking, and as soon as you catch yourself saying negative things Stop!
realise that the Monkey is currently in control of your thinking and demand of yourself that you are in control and deliberately intentionally and forcefully take back your mind and deliberately with a smile on your face think of the positives of your situation.

If you accidentally broke something instead of self-hating and self-blaming, accept what happened, your part in it and fix the situation up as best as you can. Refuse the self-hate talk in your head when you fail or make a mistake, and healthily remind yourself that no one in the world has their act together, some just fake it to look that way, and all people make mistakes, its all good because sometimes “things happen” out of our control or accidentally, or we fail from time to time “like everyone else does”.

We need to understand that there is nothing wrong with us, we are the same as all people, and we are all suffering from this toxic unnatural commercial unhealthy world, so like the other we are doing the best we can.

A good thing to do is to “tune-Out” of the negative thinking by doing something else that heavily involves the mind so much so that what you are doing drowns out your negative thinking, making it kind of pointless for the Monkey to mentally torture you.

What I used to do and do sometimes even now is fire up Grand Prix 3 on my Personal Computer and do a few laps of fast furious intense racing and concentrating on the race so intensely the old thoughts had to go away. When I finished I was exhilarated with (often) another good win or a good race vowing to do better next time and then getting back to what i as previously doing but now in a more fired up excited happy mood, ready for risks, challenges and excitement.

Find what fires you up.
Another point is watching a movie or tutorial about what you want but have been so negative about doing or getting.
Say you want to learn to drive, then watch video’s about driving, driving laws and concentrate on what you want.

Say you want to ask a girl out, but you are too scared. Watch some loving romantic movies where the love wins in the end. Keep your mind off the words of The Monkey and let positive thoughts about love take control.

Clearing the mind when The Monkey is chatting is a wonderful thing to o and helps a lot.

I remember in 2004 having many negative dark thoughts in my mind, so I got angry, and I would clear my mind, and half a minute later the negative chatter would start, so I would start again, and again and again.

When my Great Dane was small we had no gate, so when he wandered off the yard I would run, get him by the collar and bring him back, and I would do it so often and so regular, and neve fail to bring him back that in the end I didn’t need a gate, her simply knew that he would never get away with wandering.

Do this with your mind. Refuse to bow to the Monkey and kick its but again and again, even f you have to do it every 10 minutes, do it. In the end the negatives will fade, and yes they will come back from time to time when you least expect them but by gosh the monkey will get very little air-time in your mind that your life will change much for the better.

Do you hate the Monkey having air-time in your mind? then kick his butt out of your mind. Get control. Be yoru boss. And if people around youa re saying what the Monkey has been saying, you have bad people in your life trying to defeat you as much as the Monkey does.

All the best from
James Martin Sandbrook.
16thy of Febraury, 2022.