One thing that we often ask, apart from striving to achieve desires in the material world, is inner peace! So how to stop the over-thinking mind? There are so many people, things, life events that easily makes us feel irritated! Many of us know “to be positive” and have tried it. Yet, it doesn’t really work, the irritation doesn’t go away. The mind keeps rewinding the past events and making more narratives inside the mind. Why is it so? Does positive thinking actually work?

Then we may want to ask ourselves, do we just tell ourselves blindly and unconsciously “be positive” or do we really choose to be positive consciously?

Are we aware of our thoughts but the emotions in most of the life situations? Those emotions come in unconsciously, mixing with judgements. The Judgemental thought is the ego mind, which makes us become the authorities over others! And that moment, we identify ourselves with these emotions and judgements! We become those emotions! So, any thoughts that come in are colored by those emotions, and we are not really conscious of making decisions to respond to situations. It is that simple to lose control and lose the linkage of the thought that leads to action and to result!

If that happens in the beginning of the day, pretty much the whole day keeps playing those thoughts and emotions in the back of the head! But if we could actually control it with conscious choices! That moment and rest of the day would not be the same!

“I want to be calmer”, “I want peace and harmony”. It requires “awareness”, to be aware of our thoughts and emotions! How to increase awareness? There are tons of tips over the internet on increasing awareness; like meditation, mindfulness training. Meditation doesn’t sound easy for most people especially when the mind is always full! One useful tool can help us to gain awareness, often we forget about it, which is the breath!

Watch the breath when things irritate you! Start focusing on your breath, use the breath as a concentration tool. Pause for a few seconds before reacting! Build a habit to focus on breathing in, breathing out regularly. Slowly your mind easily follows the rhyme of inhalation and exhalation! That’s the moment you can experience inner calmness and stillness.

Extend your awareness of the breath for a longer duration of time as a practice; the longer you concentrate on it, you are in a meditative state! The Mind started to declutter and create space, that space is the mind space. And that inner space is so crucial for busy modern life, it allows room for us to act consciously instead of reacting unconsciously, mixing with emotions to life situations!

So you want inner peace and calmness, time to take back control of your thoughts and emotions! You open yourself to a better perspective to understand life situations, eventually, you light up yourself and free the over-thinking mind!