Summary: There will be a lot of mechanisms that try to keep us from obtaining what we want. These mechanisms are often in form of thoughts, by training we can learn how they work and how to be more resistant to them, gaining discipline and asserting our own will.

Body: In the moment you perceive the world all that data is processed by a bunch of systems organized in a distributed manner inside our brain, one of the outputs of it is the thought. One key thing, though, is that even the thought is perceived, it has to pass through perception. That's why in most meditation systems the goal is to cease your mind from thoughts, to stop this processing from running, and be alone with the closest thing that you can say it's you: your perception.

I read something on a great book that stuck into my mind, it was like "...we're more like a board with greed members screaming their opinions than a unique self", sorry i don't have the exact quote, but the point remains that we're not an centralized system, there's a lot, from simple to complex, systems battling in us as we speak.

So, i don't have control over me? Exact the opposite, as i said we perceive the thought itself and when we do we can choose to accept it or not, it's like we're the board leader, we always have the final say in our mind. Every action that we did had to pass through that final say.

Then why don't we do all the things we wanna do? Why do we get carried and dominated by thoughts?

The mechanism: These board members are selfish by nature, they want you to keep using them, that's why sometimes we come up with big miraculous excuses in order to convince ourselves of doing something. Anyone who had the shit experience of dealing with nicotine addiction knows it very well, one part of your brain trying constantly to convince you of doing something.

But that's not unique to addiction, every kinda of thought that has a position of power in the board will fight to defend it, every time you think of starting a healthy life the thoughts of junk food lifestyle will fight you, every time you think of starting to lift there will be thoughts defending their position.

Fighting: The best way to learn these mechanisms is through fighting them, forcing battles, only in doing that you will learn their patterns, tactics, and more importantly you will learn how to exerce authority upon them. Every time you do something that gives you discomfort you're in the fighting zone, and every time you thrive a fight you'll gain power in your mind. It can be something completely unrelated, for example if you thrive a battle against the sedentary thoughts and win you'll be more powerful when fighting another thoughts like the ones that make you think that you're not good enough for approaching some specific girl. Some activities you can use to speed up the process of gaining control:

  • Running: My personal favorite, i actually thought of doing these post while running, it's my first post here after 2 years of lurking. Anyway when running your thoughts rapidly will become something like: "I'm tired already", "I can't run anymore", "I can only run a mile more", etc. But reality is you can always go more, i lost the count of times i thought i could only go for a mile more and ended going 5 more miles. Your mind will rapidly became a struggle, there will be lots of thoughts rapidly crossing your mind, desperately trying to convince you of stopping. Of course i'm not encouraging you to run until death, but to engage in a battle with thoughts, asserting your own will. I don't think you even can run till dead, one would need an enormous mind power in order to achieve that.

  • Hold exercises: These are great, maybe even better than running in the goal of training your mind, with exercises like wall sit and plank you can go way further your brain think you can. In less than a minute holding these positions your brain will be infested with thoughts telling you to stop. There are harder ones if you want, just search for hold or isometric exercises on google.

  • Martial Arts: I don't know much about martial arts to be honest, but it has lots of things that will push you through discomfort. My favorite in this aspect is Kung Fu, it is based completely on this concept of training your skill of battling your thoughts. I like doing some stances like the horse stance, it hurts like hell, my mind get desperate when i'm doing it. My personal record is 3min and 47 seconds holding that position if anyone curious.

It's important that while doing theses activities to be mindful, paying attention to the patterns our brain use try to convince us and creating counter-tactics against those patterns. This process never ends, every time we win against a thought we'll gain power against our mind, every time we give control to some thoughts they'll gain power against us.

Conclusion: Our mind will always try to defend the current configuration through some mechanisms, by realizing it and learning how they work you'll gain the skill of exercising authority into your life.

You can accelerate this process by training and engaging into battles against some thoughts. By doing that you'll have more authority with your life and you'll be easier to stay on track and keep completing our goals.