How to Stop Suffering

Here’s what worked for me.

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Your mind is crazy powerful.

Like all powerful things, it can be used for good or bad.

It can help you attain your wildest dreams or keep you stuck in the darkest depths of despair.

In my case, I allowed my mind to hold me captive in a state of mental and emotional torment for over a decade.

However, I recently discovered that I CAN control my thoughts (without ignoring my emotions) in a way that nearly eliminates suffering from my daily life.

While I don’t think this is a substitute for professional mental health care, it has improved the quality of my life immensely, so I thought I’d share my experience.

What is suffering?

There is a difference between pain and suffering.

Pain is acute.

It’s an unavoidable biological reaction to something negative in our external environment.

For example, if someone insults you, it’s painful in the moment, but the pain should subside with time.

However, suffering is when we repeatedly re-live painful memories in our minds.

It’s an internal process that YOU control.

Not only do we re-live painful moments, but we assign meaning to them.

In other words, we tell ourselves ridiculous stories.

For example, one negative comment on your writing can become an internal story that “you’re not a good writer.”

If you replay this story in your mind over and over again, it turns into a belief.

Now, you actually believe you’re not a good writer, which makes you feel negative emotions like sadness, shame, despair, fear, embarrassment, etc.

This is suffering.

The worst part is it’s not even true.

Here’s an example of how suffering (aka. inaccurate storytelling) has impacted my life:

My mother has a severe mental illness. I didn’t fully understand this until recently.