Mental Health How can i stop these disturbing thoughts

the guy

Greenlighter
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Oct 19, 2014
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16
i keep thinking of terrible things. Pet death, loved ones death, my own death...

Just I can't stop thinking - every time i do something life threatening dangerous I think "sometime i will not be lucky enough to survive"

I'm having thoughts of me actually in the process of dying, and these thoughts are very realistic and the emotions seem so real.

I also have thoughts about the fact that at some point I will lose my life and this body that i'm animating right now will sometime be buried. The funeral I see myself lying in the casket and loved ones cry hysterically, and I really don't want my loved ones to be upset.

I also am worried about what is going to kill me, how I'll die. A huge car wreck, being alive for minutes in so much pain. Perhaps just a quick blow to the head before i even realize it. Maybe I'll be buried alive...

So much wory. I'm all for 'think of the here and now" but these thoughts come on their own and I have no control of them
 
Provided you aren't thinking of helping the process along, thoughts are OK.

How are you normally? Depressed? Good with life? Ups and downs?

It may be that you are living a risk-taker's life (not much to go on here) and your thoughts are normal "watch it sunshine because one day the odds run out" or it could be something deeper.

One thing to try is go raw food for a while - just a week or so is usually enough to quieten the internal dialogue going on. If you're still having such thoughts, maybe look at a new life style?
 
thoughts come on their own and we have no control over them. yep this is true

but you missed out the fact that they also go on their own. thoughts come and go, and we are not our thoughts.

you don't have to engage in what you are thinking, what you can do is focus your attention on a single point of your body such as your breath. and before you know it the thought will have passed on by.

if you practice staying with the feeling of your breath for 5 minutes a day, its good training to be less of a believer of your thoughts. 5 minutes isn't long at all, 10 minutes is even better.

couple of other things that would be good supplementation to such an idea, is taking magnesium in powder form, morning and night, every day. and cardio exercise 30 minutes a day (i like running). [you can build up to 30 minutes of exercise, 15 minutes is good too]

let go of the desire to control your thoughts as well, thoughts will always arise so long as we can feel sensations in our body and thus emotions -> thoughts.
 
These thoughts aren't wrong, I'm just wondering what purpose they serve. In Buddhism we are asked to meditate on impermanence and how everything is temporary: this moment, the things we have, our relationships, this life itself. It all eventually goes away. They even ask you to meditate on your own death, and keep the idea of death (as impermanence) close to you so that you cherish each moment. Some Buddhists even go so far as to literally imagine themselves dying in innumerable ways so that they get comfortable with the idea of eventually dying.

Anyway, it's true. You could die at any moment, you could also live at any moment. It's all conjecture, and it's all mind. There is no suffering in the present moment. If your mind is spinning stories and you feel you have no control over the course it's taking, then you need to do something to bring you back to center, to the present moment. Look around you and notice the sights, smells, sounds, feelings and tastes of your environment. Be here, now. Worrying is about control and it usually happens when we project too much into the future. But there is no future, you're just experiencing a story about the future while in the present.

Your vision is not real. None of that is happening. You can practice observing mind spinning those stories while knowing that it has nothing to do with what's going on right now. You can also learn to just turn it off. The point is: don't believe your mind.

Sometimes, people with post-traumatic stress have this problem. They sit there in bed all night spinning stories until they drive themselves crazy. (I would know, I'm an expert at it.) It's the mind's attempt at conflict resolution, but it ends up going nowhere. Eventually you have to consciously choose to abandon the stories and stop telling yourself that you have no choice but to be subjected to them. Remember your power, and choose not to listen to mind.
 
Maybe some activities that can distract you from these thoughts might be helpful. I am a thinker/worrier myself mostly about health. A simple feeling of discomfort about any , part of my body will turn me into a hypochondriac. Although i am not as bad as before, I still would be paranoid about diseases and would spend countless hours on the internet researching what condition I have. It is not healthy but it is the fear of catching the disease that is uncontrollable to think about. I know I have mentioned this a thousand times but working out has helped me a ton a lot with my anxiety and has distracted me from doing so many unnecessary things.
 
Maybe some activities that can distract you from these thoughts might be helpful. I am a thinker/worrier myself mostly about health. A simple feeling of discomfort about any , part of my body will turn me into a hypochondriac. Although i am not as bad as before, I still would be paranoid about diseases and would spend countless hours on the internet researching what condition I have. It is not healthy but it is the fear of catching the disease that is uncontrollable to think about. I know I have mentioned this a thousand times but working out has helped me a ton a lot with my anxiety and has distracted me from doing so many unnecessary things.

I agree with you. You can try to make yourself busy so you spontaneously think about something else.
What I can share with you is the constant fear I have no matter nothing is really happening.
 
Sometimes, when you have disturbing thoughts you can do something very different from either distracting yourself from them (kicks the can down the road IMO) and dwelling on them; you can try examining them in a sort of emotionally abstracted way. Say you keep wishing someone you love would die and this makes you feel guilty and terrible and the more you try to push this thought away the more obsessed you become with it. It is trying to tell you something needs to change. So ask that thought, "why?" "What would I get out of this person dying?" "Why is this an appealing thought on some level?" Maybe it is that you have so much anxiety about losing that person that it is a way for you to summon and play-act the reality out in your mind, almost like a dress rehearsal that your mind believes will somhow prepare your heart for this trauma. Or maybe there is some hold that person has over your psyche and you want that hold to die and so you are projecting the death onto the person rather than your relationship with that person. There could be so many reasons for negative thoughts. Trying to stop them never works because they come from a need. Establish what the need is and you can address it.
 
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