Channel Changing

Thoughts are uncontrollable.

They come and settle in your mind.

They embed themselves like relentless ticks, simultaneously sucking your blood while leaving unsuspecting disease which slowly infiltrates your body over several days or weeks, sometimes affecting you for years and literally changing the course of your life.

A single thought can spark an attitude.

An attitude can inspire a prolonged mindset.

And that mindset?

That will ultimately provide you with the lens which you see your world through.

And that’s sometimes scary.

I’ve often talked to people who struggle with recurring, destructive thoughts.

And for years, I was one of those people.

Thoughts so pervasive, you can’t throw them off.

You feel like you’re drowning, suffocating in your own body.

And you stopped believing there’s any other way to live.

They paralyze you, saying things like:

“You’re going to screw up, anyway. Why are you even trying?.”

“You think they actually like you?”

“You’ll never be beautiful.”

“You’ll always be alone.”

“This is just my lot in life.”

“You don’t deserve to live.”

What if I told you these were all lies?

What if I told you, you have the power to change this?

Your brain works a lot like infrastructure.

Thoughts create pathways.

The more you think a thought, the more “worn in” that pathway is, and the quicker you jump to that same thought the next time you’re faced with a similar situation.

And just like the roadways, those pathways can actually be changed in your brain.

And also just like the roadways, sometimes it can take months of you intentionally catching your thoughts and rerouting them through another channel for them to naturally flow in the direction you want them to.

I was listening to a podcast a few weeks ago where someone presented this idea as channel changing.

When you have a negative thought, you train yourself to immediately change the channel.

You change the channel to another thought.

And then you choose to believe that new thought.

I’m not going to lie to you and say this is easy.

It isn’t.

As humans, we have this natural tendency to want to wallow in our own pain, to let our sadness wash over us without even attempting to stop it.

And while that’s not a bad thing in a situation like the death of a loved one or the end of a relationship, where it’s necessary to embrace the pain and work through our sadness, it is a bad thing if that’s our normal, everyday life.

Because frankly, those thoughts are not life giving.

They are absolutely the opposite, and they will steal, kill, and destroy any attempt at living a healthy, happy, productive life.

You don’t have to settle for destruction.

You have the power to change your world by changing your thoughts.

Don’t be afraid to say something to someone around you.

It’s time to change the channel.