It’s Monday morning - you wake and become aware of the day ahead. As you swing your legs out of bed, what are your first thoughts?

Are you thinking about tasks you need to complete? Were you woken by an alarm/children/something external, or gently by your own body clock; has this had an impact on your thoughts? Or are you just anticipating that first coffee of the day?

We do have the ability to harness our thinking, to corral our thoughts and point them into the right direction; however it can often feel like our thoughts are a wild beast that drags us into areas we don’t want to go, like pits of mental quicksand and painful patterns. Our usual mindsets can dictate whether we sway to the negative or the positive, and we can automatically go to certain patterns seemingly without control.

There are two types of thinking - directed and undirected. If you are a creative type, there is definitely a place for undirected, free, “see where you end up” type thinking. Dreaming and imagining can be a joy, an unshackling and offer out of the box thinking. It has a place in our every day.

However, when our thoughts about EVERYTHING are undirected, we can stray into chaos and feelings of stress and uncertainty. If we decide to direct our thoughts, we can prevent our minds wandering uncontrollably into the fringes of panic and negativity.

We can take steps to stop going round in the same circles, dwelling on thoughts of past events, whether those things happened a long time ago or yesterday. The thoughts can keep it all fresh, including wounds. These become our mental movies, our perception playlists.

I’m not making a statement that all thoughts can and should be eliminated - that is often unrealistic at best and damaging at worst. Having negative thoughts does not make you a bad or broken person. Thoughts can come knocking à propos of nothing, sometimes - but you don’t need to allow one thought then another to accumulate into fatalist thinking (for example) or to be something you fixate on for the whole day. For your whole life.

Look at it this way: Imagine your mind is a bus. You are the bus driver, and each thought a passenger. In real life, passengers not only get on the bus, they also get back off. You can interact with each passenger as they get on, but you can also tell them when they have overstayed their journey and when they need to go.

Feelings are not thoughts, thoughts are not feelings. Both are interwoven (especially if you are an empath or highly-sensitive individual), but they aren’t the same. We often don’t have a say in how we feel (remember, feelings are valid, they are accepted, they are real), but we DO have a say in how long our thoughts hang around.