Don’t Release the Beast Between Your Ears: Focus Your Thoughts Instead

When the focus of your thoughts is you, the beast between your ears is choking you out.

How many happy self-centered people do you know?

Healthy selfishness:

Our tendency to be selfish is essential to self-preservation. But Freud suggests that … “… in illness one’s focus on others is turned back upon oneself in the form of ‘secondary narcissism,’ resulting in megalomania and the inability to properly empathize and form relationships with other people.”

Outward-facing life:

The richest possible life always turns outward.

The five components of flourishing – positive emotions, engagement, relationships, meaning, and accomplishments – suggest an outward-facing forward-look attitude.

Real self-reflection:

Don’t release the beast between your ears; focus the thoughts in your head.

Your brain thinks things you don’t want to think. You try to push problems out of your brain, but they hide under your pillow every night. You want to forget a painful memory, but it comes back again and again.

Self-reflection is guided thinking, not random ruminating.

Dedicate time for self-reflection.

Ask yourself a series of specific questions to focus your brain.

Record your thoughts.

1. What am I thankful for?
2. What do I really want for myself? For others?
3. What am I learning?
4. Who is influencing me?
5. Who might I connect with? Why?
6. What do my frustrations tell me about myself?
7. What’s important to me?
8. How did I show up today?
9. How do I want to show up tomorrow?
10. Who is pouring into my life?
11. Who am I pouring into? How?
12. What do you want to do about that?

The list of potential reflection-questions is endless. The important thing is to give your brain something specific and useful to think about.

Give your brain something to think about or it will run wild dragging you behind it.

How are you giving focus to the beast between your ears?

Source of the Freud quote: Psychology Today