How to stop your thoughts from controlling your life | Albert Hobohm | TEDxKTH

How many of

your

thoughts

today helped you achieve

your

goals in

life

and how many of them hindered you? Are you in control of what you thought when you first learned the answer to these questions? I was surprised to be at the suan mokkh buddhist monastery. in the forests of southern Thailand four years ago, as you can imagine,

life

in the monastery is quite spartan, you sleep on a wooden pillow and on a straw mat, you wake up at 4:30, you meditate for 10 hours all On days, you eat nothing but rice and vegetables and shower with a bucket in a specific morning meditation session I had a defining moment and suddenly realized how little influence I had over the contents of my mind.

I look back on my life since I was a child and I could clearly see that my mind had always been wandering constantly, distracted, unable to concentrate and the reason why well, because I have lived the way I have, like any modern, overstimulated person, it was my lifestyle that produced this unstable mind that had now become almost impossible to control. For 20 years I could not recognize this phenomenon within myself simply because my mind had never been given enough space to observe its own workings. There is a former Swedish monk named beyond Linda's living blood who lived as a Buddhist monk for 18 years before returning.

To his home, to ordinary life, just a few years ago, upon his return, a journalist interviewed him and asked him beyond his 18 years as a monk, with hours of meditation every day and without distractions, what is the key idea that he took home. The answer is no. I no longer believe in everything I believe that sounds so mundane and yet is not, and that is why, my friends, I am here today to present the radical concept that you are free to choose your own

thoughts

and therefore , become a free architect of building your own life through For some of you, this idea may be familiar, it is at the core of most meditation techniques, or perhaps it is a completely new idea that has not yet come into play. your mind or maybe you're just now feeling like this is getting a little unscientific and you're silently wondering how an overdressed hippie got onto Ted's stage, regardless of your current point of view.

I humbly ask that you suspend any disbelief or belief, whether you are a corporate CEO or a surfer. I invite you to enter a state of mind open to the In the next 13 minutes we find ourselves in a world where, for the first time in history, more people die from eating too much than from eating too little. More people commit suicide each year than are killed by war criminals and terrorists combined. I want to show you some data. In our current health profile as a species, this graph shows that as of today seventy-five percent of the US population is overweight in Sweden, that number is almost sixty percent.

This shows the ten-year increase in amphetamine-based drugs being prescribed to children under 17 because they are labeled with attention deficit disorders and this shows that today almost a tenth of the Swedish population is now we are prescribed antidepressants, that number is even higher now, this is quite alarming data, however, it could have been my personal data just a few years ago, as I have experienced many of these states myself, they started 10 years ago. and in a horrible series of events, my mother died hastily in an accident that was unforeseen and left me in chaos. She was 14 at the time, a few years later she developed addictions.

I had become addicted to cannabis, sugar, tobacco and video games. For a few years I lived a life in which I was constantly distracted from the pain of the fact that the woman of my life had left me forever. In our culture, we are raised from the beginning of our lives to crave stimulants and the world in which we live. It is an obvious reflection of this and I am not just talking about drugs, I think about anything we do, watching movies, watching sporting events, eating cream cheese, listening to music, the list is endless and all these things of Humanity occur as a response to humans.

We need to have lost control of how we use and ultimately let them gain control over us and how we think this was to the highest degree true of me and my past behavior and if you are a tech billionaire, a Buddhist monk, a military officer or a high school teacher, to some extent you are being dictated involuntarily by your own thoughts, but you are also free to change American psychologist and philosopher William James said that thoughts become perception, perception becomes reality Through your thoughts, you alter your reality, the world in which we live. Their quality, their character is nothing more than a reflection of our own minds and the only way to influence what world you want to live in or what world you want your children to live in is to learn to influence your mind.

I want to share with you today what I have developed as the two most important methods on how to

stop

thoughts from

controlling

you and ultimately take charge of your mind and therefore reality is the realization that made me process the trauma of my mother's death, the key idea of ​​18 years as a monk by bjorn linda blood and a central idea of ​​william james statement method number one practice meditation develop the habit of doing this for only 15 minutes at a time four days a week can change your life in many ways as it did for me By definition, it is the art of developing mindfulness, it is practiced by consciously directing and maintaining attention on a non-stimulating object such as the breath and by doing this for periods prolonged, this practice produces a calmer mind, less prone to overreactions, more rational and higher performance, but the ultimate goal of meditation is to begin to objectively observe the mind.

Let me give you a visual example of what I mean. Imagine yourself as a network made up of thoughts. Each thread is a possible path of thought that leads to different places. After some training in meditation, one is able to identify the thought. The bosses see where they will take me and choose to take another and this is what happened to me in the monastery when I began to see which of my paths led me to anxiety and I had done so for so many years that I was actually able to direct my thoughts towards something constructive and this means that as you gradually learn the structure of your own thought network, you will be able to actively predict which thought will lead you to which emotional state, allowing you to actively choose dates such as calm.

Serenity and a high focus on stress, anxiety and anger are pretty clear in theory, but again, it can only happen if the mind is given enough space and silence without being constantly stimulated. Method number two restricts your mental and physical input. They are saying that you are what you are. Eating certainly applies to food, but have you ever thought about the notion that bad information has the same effect, turning us into mentally unhealthy, obese addicts in our information age? An unprecedented precedent where loads of junk data enter our minds every day and this junk data then influences our minds, affects our values, creates our needs and desires and even how we think it is our responsibility as individuals to carefully feed our minds with selected information and which, if chosen wisely, will produce this desirable mental environment in which we can begin to understand our minds appropriately enough to control them.

I want you to ask yourself: is it constructive for me to be bombarded daily with tabloids of death, sexual fear and terrorism? In my opinion, most newspapers are more important to terrorists than the terrorists themselves. Choose your media source wisely. because they are rarely designed just to convey information more frequently and their main goal is not to pique your interest using catchy headlines fueled with fear and sex, which happens directly at the expense of facts. Social media is such a brilliant tool when used correctly and such a catastrophic tool when abused. No stimulant has ever reached such an addicted society so immersed in such a short time.

Did you know that the term Facebook addiction disorder has become a valid disorder that causes overuse and long-term anxiety with Rawal? There is a recent study from the University of Pittsburgh has now shown that the more we use social media, the more socially isolated we feel and the more isolated we feel, the more we want to use social media, so like a drug, we feel that by injecting a news solution in the mind, It will make us feel better, but in reality it makes us feel worse, so friends, you must take control over your social media use, otherwise social media will start to take control over you .

Advertisements are also often contaminated sources of information. Think, for example, of sugary and unhealthy products. food products there are quite a few advertisements for them and now sugar, the substance, sugar is our number one global health threat as a species, killing more people each year than heroin, cocaine and amphetamines combined, so what What we can do to prevent sugar and sugar-based products from being sold and marketed is, of course, not because they are not inherently bad, sugar is great for many people. Well, the problem does not lie in the externality, we must take responsibility for our thoughts and impulses when we are exposed to and consume these products and their commercials and you realize that your incentive for their consumption is not profit, now think about this: The human operating system is designed through millions of years of evolution to reward behavior that promotes survival in an environment of constant territorial threats and scarce resources in that world.

Eating as much honey as possible meant survival, as did killing other tribes when they invaded your territory, but man came out of the jungle where there wasn't enough and we built a whole ethic around not having enough as our environment has changed. completely our mental functioning. the system has become dangerously obsolete it is time for an update we need to go from being intelligent apes to becoming conscious beings you are like me a homo sapiens wise human member of the first known life you want to develop consciousness you are the pinnacle of evolution now please reflect It depends on the stories told, which ones are yours and decide what you want to do with them, because, friends, it is not the hard, traumatic or horrible events in themselves that you should fear most in life, but your own unwillingness to control your reaction to those events.

Ultimately, it is your ability. to take full responsibility for your thoughts that will dictate the course and growth of not only you but the entire world. Thank you very much for letting me be part of this.