Trying to find a little balance in my life between my mindfulness and excessive thinking. More and more I am starting to have more periods where my mind is relaxed, essentially not thinking of anything consciously for durations of time. I think it is really heathy for me and part of finding my inner peace, going beyond just not thinking about the past or future, but rather not really thinking at all, just absorbing information.
Where I am trying to find balance now, is that I obviously still need to spend a portion of time thinking of new ideas to write about and planning out a bit of the future. I worry in a way that if I stop the racing thoughts, they won’t come back… In fact, I have a little bit of a funny story…
When this schizophrenia really started, and I began to feel I was part of a huge conspiracy, my mind just went into gear and wanted to figure everything out… it just raced and raced for years, always thinking… Well, when I started working on my anxiety and started with the medication, one night when I went to bed… I stopped consciously thinking, and I freaked out, I woke up in a panic thinking I had lost my memory, I just started trying to think of anything I possibly could. Eventually I got my mind racing again and stopped panicking. I eventually realized that it would be a good thing to relax and not think, but then it became a very gradual process of slowing my mind down in general and also starting to have moments of no thoughts at all. It is a good feeling, now that I trust I will think again haha… I think when I was younger I spent a great deal of my time not really thinking, but rather just absorbing information.
But, now I want to make sure I spend enough time thinking up new ideas… but I have to realize, that doesn’t mean I need to think about it all day, excessively. Rather I just need to set a certain amount of time a day to look at prompts, read articles, or whatever to get the wheels turning for a little while, think up my two ideas for the day and then be done with it…. If something else happens to pop in my head throughout the day I have a notebook ready to write it down.
I already worry about writers block somewhere down the road, whether in a year or whenever… But, I just need to develop my little system and stick to it… trust the system. Especially now that I plan to cut myself off from the news, that is obviously a source of ideas or a place to see what is going on in the world, or what may be important to talk about. I remind myself that the blog is a journal as well, so many days I will just be talking about day to day activity. The ideas should come if I get a good system…
I need to start letting my mind slip into relaxation mode after I do a little work though… It seems to want too. But, then sometimes, it is a new animal to deal with, because in that relaxed state yet, it is still battling depression and boredom… So, I may achieve a relaxed state, but for whatever reason I may still slip into a little bit of a depression… then my mind fires up its own dopamine drug and gets me all revved up again, and the cycle repeats itself… although I get a little closer every time to be fully relaxed. It is nice when I can finally sit down and watch an entire movie without stopping or fidgeting throughout, moving all around the chair.
I do get some moments of complete relaxation though… it is kind of like when I was getting out of the deep depression, first I might feel good a few hours a week, then eventually a day, then eventually a week, then eventually close to a month. I am at a few hours a week of complete relaxation right now, I have gotten lucky with a day, and have almost went a whole week before. So, it is the next thing my brain is working on. Which, I have always felt my brain has been systematically fixing itself, starting with the worst problems and then working its way up.
So, getting closer and closer, and also trying to find a balance between not thinking, and letting my mind race a bit.
I am in a decent place mentally though, bouncing back from little stressful and depressive moments much faster than before.
Think that about wraps it up today… I might as well be sitting on the couch in a therapist’s office haha.
theeclecticschizophrenic.com 