An Inquiry: I am struggling every day with severe anxiety, ocd thoughts, hypochondria and depression. I am on antianxiety meds but thoughts never go away. I can’t stand when I watch people around me feeling happy or they don’t worry about anything. I wish I could switch off my brain to get relief from this constant hell.
How We Would Respond: You’re dealing with two issues. The first issue is you have a stream of thinking coming into your awareness. The second issue is that you’re labeling this stream of thinking as something terrible. You have accepted as truth that this thinking is quite significant, quite bad, and is something you are unable to cope with.
Thinking, in and of itself, is harmless. What can a thought do to you? It has no form, no substance; it is a mental construct. Where thinking can become destructive is when you accept it as truth, and then thinking becomes infused with the power of your belief. You believe a thought to be true, and so it becomes true for you.
Thinking supported by your belief is powerful. Thinking that is not supported by your belief is quite impotent. The solution then is simple: stop labeling your thinking as truth. Step back from your thinking, neutrally observe it, but do not accept judgments of it as being either true or false. Let the thinking stand on its own, without you contributing to it in any way whatsoever.
