The Voices in Your Head are Real (and some are out to get you)

Most of you are probably not clinically schizophrenic. Then again, if you somehow landed into this publication of nothing more than possibility, there’s a high chance something wrong with you, but let’s not get into that right now.
Where were we?
Right, right, you were saying you’re not a schizophrenic.
But
that doesn’t mean there aren’t voices in your head, and the sooner you learn to identify and recognize them, the sooner you can start living an actualized, selful life.
They are subtle.
They tell you something is stupid. They tell you something is awesome. They are too quick to judge, or too quick to accept something as truth. They’ll make you feel like you shouldn’t be satisfied when maybe you should be, and just the opposite.
These voices sound just like you. But not all of them are. Many of them are ideas that have been given to you without your knowing. They are attitudes from your parents, your teachers, your heroes, your friends, attitudes you’ve adopted as your own. They are reactionary. And some of them are getting in the way.
If you ever feel depressed. If you ever feel like you can’t accomplish the things you really want to do. If you are seemingly stuck in a cycle of bad relationships, bad jobs, and bad decisions. You may want to pay careful attention to what’s going on inside your head.
What if you were to develop a new habit of simply checking in. Any time you’re upset; Any time you’re frustrated; Any time you’re anxious; Check in. Ask yourself, who’s talking right now? Ask yourself, are these ideas and feelings and attitudes helping me? Sometimes they are. I’m not suggesting you can control what happens to you. In fact, I’m not even all that certain you can control what thoughts enter your mind. But there seems to be a decoupling effect that happens once certain things come under examination. Sort of like in the double-slit experiment, but much less technical.
If you shine a light on what scares you, it’s amazing how much of the fear is taken away. But we’re so afraid to look, for some reason, that we rarely shine that light.
But if you could just take a tip-toe in to this habit of noticing the thoughts in your head, identifying them and examining whether or not they come from you, or from fear, or from some other default belief system in your life, you might reduce your identity away from them. And then they’d lose their power over you.
Here are a few:
The voice of defeat: Why am I even trying? This isn’t going to do anything.
The voice of frustration: This is so stupid. I hate this. I shouldn’t have to waste my time on this shit.
The voice of distraction: I want to do a great job at this project, so now that I’ve started, I’m going to let it marinate in my brain for a minute — I know — I’ll check my email. I’ll read some articles on Medium. I’ll click through my tabs. I’ll text my mom. I’ll clean my room.
The voice of unworthiness — both your own, and that of the project you’re working on: Why am I wasting my time on this? It doesn’t matter. I should be doing something big. I should be auditioning for a movie. I should be starting a billion-dollar startup. I should be having better conversations. People just don’t get me.
Ah, we could go on and on. The point is, fear, depression, resistance; they don’t have your back. And if you keep listening to them, you’re going to discover you never accomplished a quarter of the things you hoped to in life. You’ll feel powerless, resentful, and full of regret.
But remember in the movie, A Beautiful Mind, how at the end the characters he thought were real people were still there, but he paid no attention to them?
This can kind of be like that.
— The better you get at seeing the voices for what they are, the easier you can ignore them.

