The power of the mind: Danger, growth or protection?

It is amazing what we can do with our minds, but if we are in a bad state of mind, it can be dangerous to ourselves. Our minds are very complex and vast, we can store memories, but our mind can also discard or hide memories in order to protect ourselves. Our subconscience can throw the same scenario or memory at us over and over and over again, just to force us to learn a lesson and grow.
But our mind can also pester us with negative thoughts in an endless cycle (if not stopped), at this point our mind can endanger us.

We can reminisce, we can watch movies of our past in our minds eye and re-live those memories, conversations and feelings. We can imagine scenarios to evaluate how a plan we have could work out. We can talk to ourselves in our mind and go through pros and cons on plans we have. We can ponder on our own development throughout our life, looking at how we were as children and how we developed over the years, the good changes but also the bad. Our mind is capable of so many more things than just standard every day thinking.

I am sure there are still alot of people on this planet that underestimate the power and possibilities of what our mind can do. Potential is lost, if people keep themselves distracted for a longer period of time, evading to use the potential they have. Some people even have the expression of: You are thinking too much. Yes, you can be thinking too much or even overthink something, but thinking once in a while about yourself, where you are headed, what you have done in your life, where you started and who you have become, can be extremely benefical. We can only grow, if we are aware of our mistakes and missteps we have made in our lives. If we evade thinking about them and try to push them aside, we will someday feel a weight on our shoulders. And for some people, when the time comes, they won’t even know where that weight came from. It will have been so long ago that they burried it, they do not know what it is, that is weighing them down.

I believe that alot of people have experiences with different depths of mind. Depending on their life experiences, they might have had deep thoughts about relationships, their career, their children or their plans for the future.

But for people who suffer from depression the depth of thoughts can go much deeper. Even when dealing with depression the depth and direction of thoughts vary immensly. Generally speaking about the thoughts and depth of people going through depression, they do tend to overthink or ponder for too long. That is also a symptom of depression. Depression, works alot with feeding us negative thoughts, rummaging through our past and throwing each mistake we ever made at us, just to make us feel insignificant, bad or even useless. This is the process, I have described before as the downward spiral. Our mind, when influenced by that kind of symptom of depression, can pull us even deeper into our mind. We become absentminded, just spacing and not truly partaking in what is going on around us. In those moments we just got sucked so deep into our mind, that the throughts, pictures and emotions we feel, are everything we are experiencing in that moment.

As I have mentioned at the beginning of this post, our mind is also capable of protecting us. It can erase or hide memories that are just too much for us to handle, it can also build up the wall around the heart as self preservation. Sometimes what we feel or remember is just too much for us to take in that specific time of our lives.
Just like our brain can make us faint, when faced with too much physical pain to handle, it can do the same for emotional pain. It can also build up that wall spontaneously, if we are faced with emotions that exceed our capabalities at that moment.

Our mind is:

• An extremely powerful tool
• A protection mechanism
• Very complex
• But also a dangerous force, if used in the wrong way, not just for ourselves but also for others

If there is potential for great things to be done with a tool, it also has the potential to cause great destruction.

We should not take the power of our mind lightly, it can come back to bite us in the end, if you undererstimate it.
That is why I have made this post to adress everyone, not just people suffering from depression. We need to be cautious and smart when dealing with our own mind!

Take care everyone!