THE MONSTERS AT THE DOOR
How entertaining negative thoughts quietly changes who we are
Rethinking the old cliché: You become what you feed your mind
Our minds are our biggest enemies.
This is not me escaping accountability.
These are just… my thoughts.
Sometimes, I sit down and analyse the phrase, “ You become what you feed your mind”
I always end up disagreeing with it.
Because I truly believe that it’s our minds that feed us.
IF we let them
Think about it: If I agreed with that saying, it would mean that I am my own worst enemy. Again, I am not escaping accountability.
But that just isn’t true. I always want to be a better person. I have never once sat down and decided,
“ From that day onwards, I wanted to be a terrible human being. ”
In contrast, there have been countless days when I have actively trained myself to be a better version of me. I strive to be more kind, more honest, more loving and more of everything positive according to the scriptures.
Because of that, I refuse to believe that I am a terrible person. To me, being a truly terrible person means intentionally doing bad things to not only other people, but also to yourself.
It might sometimes feel like I am being a terrible person but trust me, it’s my mind.
And because we can’t walk around blaming people’s minds, we are forced to blame the person. We can see the person and that means we can jail them.
Which makes me realize something frightening: our minds might just be the ultimate curse of humanity.
Every single morning, my mind feeds me. It never stops; it keeps on going and going.
If I entertain my thoughts I sometimes feel myself getting overwhelmed. I even start making life decisions based on whatever my mind decides to feed me that day.
Those thoughts change constantly. Sometimes they circulate around the same familiar patterns but hold different gravities.
Positive thoughts bring me happiness. When I make decisions based on them, I find myself feeling happier and lighter. They only have power because I choose to entertain them. Most days, I gladly do.
But that’s the bright side.
Meeting my guests
who end up staying for life.
In fact, they battle me to death. That is the best introduction I can do for them.
Let’s talk about the negative thoughts.
They have their own way of arriving. Slowly and gradually.
They knock, I hesitate. Then sometimes, I open the door.
And then devour me. They are just like those monsters that only come out at night in the sci-fi series, From.
But it is only after I open the door.
If I do not, they go away. They leave and life goes on.
They come to change me. To convert me into being a different person.
I do not always realize it until later on.
Whenever I welcome them, they take a seat without me asking them to.
Then we have a conversation.
I never realise I’m conversing with them, until I am actively making a decision based on the conversation I had with them after they leave, to grab a space in my subconscious mind.
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When I realize this, I find it hard to reverse my feelings. That is because, they have already gone with a part of me.
The more I welcome them, the more terrible of a person I become. I do not realize this then, but I sometimes do later on.
The real world consequences
Entertaining negative thoughts have consequences.
Huge consequences.
Alcohol addiction is an example of entertaining these thoughts.
It starts slowly. In the beginning, you can always say no. But you don’t. You keep on going.
You promise yourself that next time you’ll say no.
The thing you do not realize is that next time, the temptation will come sweeter than it did last time.
You are only preparing yourself for their previous visit, not the future visits.
When your mind rewrites the rules of fullness
Food addiction is another brutal consequence of entertaining these thoughts.
I have been here before. I wanted to maintain my weight, so I would work out and carefully watch what I consumed. I even started following the Ikigai rules.
The core principle is simple: Once you feel full, you do not need to keep going.
I struggled with this, for a long time. I would feel like I’ve had enough but then, whispers would start:
Why not just finish it? It won’t cause any real damage.
But it did cause damage.
Because the more I kept going, I was no longer feeding myself, but feeding the monsters in my head.
The next time. it wasn’t just any meal, it was my absolute favourite food.
The loudness of anxiety
Another consequence that negative thoughts brought into my life is anxiety.
It was mainly fueled by repetitive thoughts. The moment I accepted even one of them, the cruel list in my head would start completely afresh.
I would find myself spending my whole day, narrating my thoughts other than being truly present.
I would be on a lunch date with a friend and as they talked I would be trapped inside my own head, going through those same repetitive thoughts.
Sometimes I’d get so tired that I would just want to scream it off. But they still knocked. And the more I welcomed them, the louder the next knocks became.
After some time, I came to a terrifying realisation.
They had stopped eating me up.Because they had already swallowed me whole.
They had transformed me to a point where I stopped resisting. They would just take over my days and it would not bother me anymore.
They took over me.
They stole my good days. They heightened my bad days.
Breaking the subconscious cycle
Keep the door locked
These habits convert us slowly, completely without us realising it.
At times, you suddenly find yourself doing things that you aren’t even okay with but you just do it anyway.
This happens because those invited thoughts stayed with you subconsciously and they quietly impacted almost every decision you made.
The point is that, once you plant a seed in your mind, you do not have to water it. Your mind does the watering for you. Then, once it grows, your mind feeds it to you.
The monsters are always going to walk up to your window. They are always going to smile. But remember: they can only destroy you if you choose to open the door.
