Every situation has a silver lining – discover a mindset that heals and enlightens.
October 5, 2021 · 7 min read
“The greatest weapon against stress is our ability to choose one thought over another.” - William James
“I have no control over my thoughts, the situation just keeps getting worse”
“I’m too overwhelmed by negative thoughts, I can’t focus”
“I feel like I’m losing my mind and now I’m anxious and worried”
Are any of these thoughts familiar to you? Are you trapped inside your head and feel like it’s overtaking your life?
Losing your mind is not a very uncommon thing and can come to everyone’s life eventually. Roughly 1 out of 5 Americans experience mental illness symptoms.
However, there are some methods and tricks to rewire your mind and feel at peace once again.
10 Signs you are losing your mind
“The mind is the source of all suffering, and it is also the source of all happiness.” - Pema Chodron
- You feel like you have no control over your mind.
- You’re thinking negatively constantly.
- You feel like you’re losing your identity.
- You experience brain fog.
- You don’t know how to be happy anymore.
- You get easily frustrated or worried.
- You don’t have an explanation why it’s happening to you.
- You are reliving your past traumas.
- You are unsure, indecisive, feel lost.
- You question reality and your surroundings.
Why are you losing your mind?
You might be losing your mind due to the chaotic thoughts that manipulate and distort your perception about reality. This can be the result of depression, anxiety, or sudden mood changes.
People lose their minds due to unfortunate or shocking events that collapse their inner world. Everyone can be a victim and experience loss of their mind because of the unpredictability of the environment and even ourselves.
How do people lose their mind exactly?
When people can’t take the burden on their shoulders anymore, they burst their emotions and feelings out and their mind collapses. By all nature standards, we are humans and all of us have specific limits and boundaries of tolerance.
However, as soon as our tolerance glass starts to overfill, we explode. Sometimes, it can be hard to notice and distinguish when this glass is about to overfill because:
a) You are used to suffer;
b) You don’t know what event might happen next.
In other words, we don’t know how we will react to the next event despite our high tolerance of suffering. Everyone can lose their mind if the pain is just too unbearable.
At some point, you might even believe that your mind is broken or your mind is going crazy.
10 Ways To Stop Losing Your Mind
1. Get rid of thoughts that make you weak
If you constantly try to change yourself and not do anything about it, that will only hurt you more. The guilt will get deeper into your skin and make you suffer as a result.
Instead, accept yourself the way you are. Forgive yourself.
The fact is that if we don’t admit our mistakes, we can’t continue further into our lives with a healthy mindset. We will continually trip over the same rock and blame others or ourselves without seeing any results.
“Human happiness is a disposition of mind and not a condition of circumstance.” - John Locke
One solution or thought might not work for everyone. Don’t attach to only just one idea. If you see that it won’t work for you, move to the next one.
What I mean by that is if you find yourself, for example, not being great or interested in cooking, stop forcing yourself to become good at something that you have no interest in at all. Don’t blame yourself for not being good at something just because it is “social mandatory” to have such skills.
Getting rid of thoughts that make you weak is widely applicable not only in skills, but also in other life areas. That will also prevent being lost in your mind. Try to figure out what thoughts make you weak.
2. Check if you are not gaslighted
Gaslighting is one of the methods of manipulation that is used in toxic relationships.
It can occur in your family, friends or acquaintances circle, school, or even with co-workers at your job.
Gaslighting is based on emotional manipulation that makes you question the reality. If you have an argument with co-worker and feel very confident at the beginning and at the end you feel lost and that something is wrong with your brains, it could be a sign of gaslighting.
After such argument you might be questioning your memories, abilities, skills, past events, etc. In other words, the other person confuses you too much, uses emotional manipulation and leaves you with a loss of mind.
Be aware that gaslighting is different than having a real, solid argument that’s based on facts.
Gaslighting involves lies, distracting you from the actual important things, blaming others, gossiping about you, and similar strategies are involved.
Therefore, make sure and identify if there are existing relationships that are based on gaslighting. If that’s the case, consider throwing out this toxic relationship away. You could also have a talk with this person, but it’s unlikely that he or she will admit the fault.
3. Point out your strengths
You could be losing your mind because you’re too overwhelmed by new things, situations, concepts, etc. At the same time you could be forgetting your self-worth too.
Point out your strengths and leverage them. Ultimately, your strengths are your comfort zone and calmness fortress.
“Man can alter his life by altering his thinking.” - William James
Defining your strengths is very important to know your value, increase your self-worth and be more confident. If you don’t know what you’re good at, it can result in self-esteem issues and general dissatisfaction in life.
So, if you’re good at playing guitar, then pick it up and play your favorite piece.
If you’re good at playing video games, consider unwinding by doing that activity.
If you are good at or interested in gardening, consider planting new plants and improving the landscape.
The point is to shift your mind to something that you enjoy and brings you satisfaction. It could be a case that if you’re losing your mind, you need to unwind and release your emotions into something that you enjoy.
4. Focus on one thing
It’s very common in our lives that we are easily distracted by a lot of other activities and jobs that we have to do.
Just to take a brief example, scrolling through news, Facebook feed or any other social media feed often leaves us with a chaos in mind if you really think about that.
In our lives, we have too much going on in a very short period of time. Do you have an idea where it leads to?
It leads to a massive confusion and dissatisfaction of our own well-being. When we can’t achieve our goals, we feel like under-achievers and can even lose sanity. We can’t comprehend why we always let ourselves down and as a result we lose our mind.
How can you practice focusing on one thing?
Meditate.
Sounds like cliché, but simple things are the best things that can boost quality of your life.
The whole point of meditation is to focus on breathing. At first it can be hard as your mind wanders around and thinks about other things. But after a while you’ll be able to achieve ease of mind, be more mindful and have more joy in your life.
Don’t overwhelm yourself and practice just 5 to 10 minutes a day. You should feel peace within yourself and feel better in general.
Another way to have more focus is to write down your goals and stick to them. Remember that our minds are chaotic and we go through a lot of thoughts in a day. To keep your goals in mind more organized, you have to grasp it physically (write your goal down on a piece of paper).
This method will help you to focus better and centralize your thoughts around one idea.
5. Practice living healthier
Living a healthy lifestyle can boost your mood without even you being aware about it. For an instance, healthy eating has significant positive benefits in preventing depressive problems.
A lot of people have reported about their increased quality of life just changing a few nutrition habits and becoming more active.
“Very little is needed to make a happy life; it is all within yourself, in your way of thinking.” - Marcus Aurelius
Here are some examples what you could do for starters:
- Cut out soda and replace it with water.
- Instead of taking out fast food, make it at home from scratch.
- Do at least 20 mins of walking a day.
- Introduce more fiber into your diet.
You might be thinking that it has nothing to do with losing your mind, but it’s not true. These changes are totally enough to improve your life quality by a few times.
Quick example – notice how you feel after eating a large pizza or something else that digests very hard. You will feel sluggish, tired and without no mood.
Similarly, the food that you are eating from day to day is having a toll on your both mental and physical well-being without you noticing that. Therefore, consider embracing healthier alternative of living.
6. Get your mind off your chest
Another effective way to ease your mind is to talk with somebody you trust. It could be your family member or a friend.
As you wander in your mind and thoughts, you can’t really grasp the problem well and can lose sanity. If you don’t want to lose your mind, speaking with someone can help you sort through the problem.
You might find that in the process of speaking you’ll gain a different perspective on your thoughts. As a result, you’ll see the situation more clearly.
Not only that, but you’ll also release built-up stress and tension. After letting out your thoughts, you’ll feel a considerable relief off your mind and chest.
In case you don’t have someone to speak with, you can always seek for help and speak with a therapist. Not only will he listen to you, but also give you solutions and tips to solve your problems.
7. Address the root problem
If you are lucky enough to know or you have an idea what might be causing your mind loss, you can tackle with the problem directly.
For an instance, you are having a divorce. Obviously, this makes you go through a very difficult time and no wonder that you are losing your mind. You might be going through a few stages of divorce: denial, anger, negotiation, depression and acceptance.
"You must weed your mind as you would weed your garden." - Astrid Alauda
The solution: give yourself time to grieve. Also, socializing can help a long way not to lose your mind and keep you sane. It will also boost your mood and help you feel better. Don’t forget to do the things that keep you busy and make you happy.
Identifying your emotions is also very important. Sometimes, you could feel a lot different than you actually think you are. The problem is the lack of emotional vocabulary.
If you are feeling very down and experiencing severe depression, speak to a counselor.
The point of this message is that if you know what the problem is, there are always a few solutions to your grief. No matter how desperate the situation is, there are always good and wise solutions to be made to solve your problem.
8. Avoid self-pity loop
If you’ll always feel sorry for yourself whenever you feel down, you’ll never get anywhere. If you seek for someone to relate with you situation, that might indeed bring comfort to you, but it’s not the solution to your problem.
Having self-pity to yourself is important at some times, but you must learn to distinguish it when it’s toxic to you and makes you feel about yourself even more insecure.
To illustrate the situation, imagine this: you are losing your mind because you are having an exam tomorrow. You keep texting your friends how you feel stressed, you look for comments on the Internet to relate your situation with other strangers.
I call it self-pity loop.
Then, when another exam comes, you do it over again. This is not a solution nor it is any helpful to you in any way. Every time you only stress yourself and slowly lose your mind.
9. Leverage happiness to your advantage
I’m leaving one of the best suggestions for one of the lasts.
Before reading further, I’d highly recommend you watching this engaging video about happiness. It might just be what you need to hear:
"You have power over your mind - not outside events. Realize this, and you will find strength." - Marcus Aurelius
Now, here’s the sum up.
The happiness depends not by the external world, but how your brain processes it.
To be more precise, according to psychologist Shawn Achor, only 10% of our happiness depends on external world, and the rest 90% by how we perceive it.
Another big misunderstand is that people chase to work more, which results in overburn. Everyone’s end goal is to reach the success. People think that only then they will be happy. But do you know what happens once you reach it?
You change your goal again, and now your success is defined differently. Thus, you are happy for a very short time period.
The goal is to reverse false perception and start being positive in the present.
When you are positive in the present, you can use the happiness advantage. In other words, when you are happy, you are 31% more productive than being in negative state, you benefit 37% increased performance in sales, doctors are 19% more accurate with their diagnosis.
“Okay, that’s interesting. But how do I achieve that?”
According to Shawn Achor, you have to write down 3 grateful things that you are grateful for each day for 21 days in a row. That’s how you rewire your brain to work more optimistically. Very simple, yet it’s life changing.
Other changes that you can bring in your life are:
- Journaling. Writing about 1 positive thing that happened in 24 hours allows you to relive it which helps to rewire your brain.
- Exercising. Doing physical activities are proven to boost your mood and help you to be happier.
- Meditating. This activity helps you to focus on 1 task instead of multitasking which creates chaos in your mind.
- Doing random acts of kindness. Giving others makes you feel better. It’s one of the essentials to do in order to train your brain for happiness and create a structured mind.
So, here you have it. These are all the tools that have been suggested in this very informative and engaging video.
If you feel like you’re losing your mind, you must try these methods. They’re very simple, yet very effective.
10. Seek for help
"We are what we think. All that we are arises with our thoughts. With our thoughts, we make the world." - Buddha
If you are still unsure if anything can help you or if you’ve tried a lot of things already, look for help. Psychologists can help you diagnose more accurately your situation. Face-to-face interaction is invaluable and will always be fruitful if you are in the right hands.
The main advantage of professionals is that they are very experienced and know every trick in the book. They can help you find solution to your problem much faster and more efficiently than you on your own.
Final Words From Delightful Mindset
Losing your mind is a very frustrating feeling. Sometimes it can be worrying and depressing. If the case is severe and you feel like you can’t bear it anymore, seek for help.
On the other hand, if you think you’re losing your mind you should try focus more on 1 thing instead of multiple. To put it simply, people can’t do few things at the same time effectively. If it’s done for longer periods of time, they get burnt out and fall into negative thoughts.
Therefore, my proposal is to shift your mind and focus on one goal. Supplement it with exercising, journaling and other tips mentioned above, and you should be able to reach peaceful mind and be happy once again.