4 Quick Ways to Detach Yourself From Your Thoughts

Are you wondering how to detach yourself from your thoughts?

Dealing with negativity and repeating thoughts can be challenging. And having been someone who suffered from the symptoms of OCD (obsessive-compulsive disorder) myself, I know how frustrating and helpless it is.

It feels as if you’ve been possessed by your negative thoughts and have nowhere to run.

But there are some simple tricks that I followed and got the job done in a few weeks. And I will share them with you now so you can detach yourself from your thoughts and be productive.

So without further ado, let’s get started.

Why Does It Feel Difficult to Detach Yourself from Your Thoughts?

Trying to detach yourself from your thoughts can be real havoc and the worst way to do it is to force yourself from thinking about the negative thoughts.

Do you remember the pink elephant thing? If I ask you to not think about the elephant, that’s exactly what you’re going to think.

And the reason for it is quite simple, meta-cognition.

In simple words, meta-cognition is our ability to think about our thoughts.

For Example

You decide to leave for the office at 8 a.m., that’s your thought. But then you say, I may run into heavy traffic and be late so I should leave 10 minutes early.

What did you do here? You first got a thought and then another thought on the previous thought.

Though meta-cognition can be very helpful as a reasoning tool. However, if you don’t use it correctly, it will make get overwhelmed by your thoughts and freak out.

• You have an exam coming up and are not prepared well. You began to fear what if I fail and now can’t stop thinking about it.
• You are hunting for a job and can’t get good offers. Now you’re worried about how will I make a living if I remain unemployed.
• Your business has not been doing well lately which got you that you’re going to lose money.

Though the possibility of failure is always there, however, when you get overwhelmed by your negative thoughts, it becomes almost impossible to take any productive action. But there’s a lot you can do to make your situation better.

4 Steps to Detach Yourself from Your Thoughts

Detaching yourself from your thoughts isn’t like a magic button that you can turn on and forget about everything. Some of the steps I’m writing below require lifestyle changes while others are like simple tricks that you can deploy in the moment.

So let’s see what we got here.

1. Tell Yourself It’s Normal

A lot of people when faced with a negative thought tend to blame themselves for it and panic as if something is wrong with them.

This only overloads them with unnecessary tension and creates further negative thoughts.

A very common dilemma:

It also makes you feel urgency as you are losing control and need to fix something.

But the truth is these types of thoughts are fairly common and perfectly normal. In fact, they are deep-rooted in your mind and beneficial for you to a certain extent.

They are like an emergency alarm to your mind that goes off when it detects something off.

For Example

If you hit your toe on the corner of a table, you’ll feel pain. The next time you’re approaching the table, your mind will send you a thought that you may hit the table again so you’ll watch your movement.

That’s it. That’s how these negative thoughts are part of your mind’s programming and designed to protect you. But it’s only a speculation and possibility.

But when you begin to take it as a reality and overwhelm yourself with it, that becomes a problem. A thing that was supposed to be a blessing becomes a curse when you go off board.

So the next time you’re faced with such a situation and want to detach yourself from your thoughts:

• Tell yourself you have a healthy mind and thus are getting the thought.
• Remind yourself it’s just a safety reminder and precaution.
• Instead of being consumed by the thought, use it to channel your programming. (like you do when you’re approaching a table and get a thought you may hit it)

2. Don’t Fight Your Thoughts, Replace Them

This is something I personally dealt with and would spend hours being bombarded with the thoughts I wanted to escape.

The usual advice I got from people not only failed to fix my problem but only increased it further.

Remember the pink elephant earlier in this article? That’s what you’re calling for when you forcefully try to block your thoughts.

1. The best way I figured out to combat the issue is to replace your negative thoughts instead of fighting them.
2. Find something you really love to do or just pick up a new hobby and invest your time in it. You may be uncomfortable and as if you’re dragging yourself to do it, that’s fine. It’s natural to feel this way.
3. But once you pick up the pace and become genuinely interested in advancing your new habits, you’ll feel yourself being dragged out of the old negative thoughts.

It works by you assuming a new identity and thus closing the door of old negative thoughts.

Here are some ideas that could work out for you:

• Start working out. Not only you will slowly get rid of old thoughts but will also build your self-esteem.
• Start a course online about something you love or pick one from YouTube.
• Start hanging out in new places and meet new people there.

This works wonders and according to an NLP coach, Dr. Saim, we have neuro-pathways in our brains and when we adopt new habits, new neural-pathways are formed and the old ones get worn out due to inactivity.

Just like you walk on a grass field in the same location and over time, the grass on that particular location wears out and a path is formed.

It’s a great way to detach yourself from your thoughts and cultivate new healthy and productive habits.

3. Learn To Be Present with Mindfulness

Let me ask you a simple question. When you worry, what do you worry about?

You would either worry about your past maybe due to some guilt you’re holding onto or worry about the future that things should go right.

But what is the exact moment that’s free of the worry for most of the time? It’s right now! The very present moment.

At this moment, you’re not suffering from the thing you’re afraid of suffering (unless you’re ill or in jail) and it’s just in your head like Seneca said.

What you should do to detach yourself from your thoughts is to embrace this moment and breathe into it.

I won’t ask you to stop worrying forcefully since it’s counterproductive as we saw earlier instead you would want to feel the present moment to the fullest.

This technique is known as mindful meditation. But I don’t want you to sit in a yoga pose to meet your objective since we want to keep it as simple as possible.

The core of this technique is to focus on what you’re doing right and do it mindfully. It goes like this:

• If you’re driving a car, feel the texture of the steering wheel. Feel how comfortably you’re seated against the comfy leather.
• When eating your meal, feel the texture of it against your tongue. Feel it as you swallow it.
• If you’re writing, feel how the pen is brushing against the paper and the light sound it’s making.

Not only does it help immensely with stress, but it also helps you detach yourself from your thoughts and enjoy the moment.

4. Know The Zeigarnik Effect

Has it ever occurred to you that a song keeps playing in your head while you’re trying to concentrate? It definitely happened to me and people I know personally.

This is not a coincidence but a psychological effect known as the Zeigarnik Effect.

For Example

• You might have a quarrel with your friend at a party and you quit midway. Now you can’t stop thinking about it because your mind perceives it as an unfinished business.
• You did poorly in the exam and now are uncertain if you’ll pass or fail and these thoughts won’t leave you.
• You had a breakup where your partner left you without any explanation. You’ll find yourself pondering over these thoughts again and again.

Actually, your brain is wired to keep the unfinished tasks on top priority so you finish them first.

But if you encounter a negative experience without any apparent ending, your brain will also perceive it as an unfinished task and keep reminding you of it.

It’s like a friend telling you every day how badly you lost. Not pleasing, right? Especially when you’re trying to rebuild.

I also felt very anxious when I took my high school exams and couldn’t wait for the results. I was desperate to just get the result, whether good or bad. I ended up scoring A+ but these months of waiting were very miserable.

I would get thoughts every day about what if I don’t get good marks and secure the field of my choice. I then did the following to cope with my situation:

• I assured myself I did my best and will handle whatever the outcome.
• I asked myself what was the worst thing that could happen and then told myself it was fine. Life doesn’t always go according to your plans and that’s normal.
• I noticed it’s like a fear of failure, an expectation lying underneath and your brain just keeps asking you if you will meet your expectations. If you are fine with the failure, the expectation just isn’t there and your brain won’t have a reason to bug you.
• I wrote all my thoughts in the journal and told myself everything up to this point has been done. Closed the journal feeling that this bugging session had now been closed.

Though you’ll get the true relief when you get to see the sending of the thing bugging you, however, the above points will make your situation a lot bearable sometimes even completely kill it.

Conclusion

That brings us to the end of the article. I hope you can now detach yourself from your thoughts and stop feeling miserable.

Feeling trapped in your thoughts is fairly common but breaking out of them is a choice. It becomes relatively easy when you know what ticks you to behave this way because now you know what to fix.

That’s exactly what we did in this article. We broke the points into simple forms and explained them from a psychological perspective so you may implement them right away and shift your life for the better.

Your mind is a fascinating tool and when you know how to use it, the sky is the limit for you.