Mental Health Article - Automaticity is both a blessing and a curse depending on where you are with your habits and controlling your negative thoughts or negative self-talk. Saying or thinking something via automaticity is connected to our intuitive sense. It can be just outside of our conscious awareness. Merrian-Webster describes this word, automaticity as, "the capacity of a cell to generate an action potential spontaneously without an external stimulus."
Ultimately, the brain is associated with automatic and controlled processes. In this complicated modern world we live in and consume much in, we try to find pleasure in but it is complicated at times. By trying to not to be so impulsive, giving greater thought to your deep thoughts is a habit worth investing greatly in with your impactful mental habits and to help with your overall mental health.
(Illustration, Herb of Grace, characteristics of this herb may improve our cognition similar to our positive thoughts)
The Direction of our Strongest Thoughts
An important resource to shine a light on regarding your "thoughts" that has helped me is a book by author Craig Groeschel called, Winning the War in Your Mind. The book helped me confirm and get a better understanding of what many scholarly research articles on mental health and science currently discuss in great length, the power of our thoughts.
In science and mental health, we are now just touching the surface on how the brain works and how thoughts are becoming automatic and how behaviors follow our strongest thoughts. Brain imaging has helped with shedding a light on what might be control and what might be automaticity and how decision making follows.
(Book reference, Winning the War in Your Mind, purchase book, click on link here)
“Watch your thoughts, they become your words; watch your words, they become your actions; watch your actions, they become your habits; watch your habits, they become your character; watch your character, it becomes your destiny."
The Rumination Process
One thing that has helped my thoughts is by placing positive books and words right in front of me nearly constantly to aid the automaticity and good outcomes. One strategy with this process is building a trench, as Craig discusses in Part 2 of his book, The Rewire Principle, Rewire Your Brain, Renew Your Mind. By ruminating on certain words and devotions will help us with our thoughts. By seeing something that has great value to us, we need to study it, understand the context of it, the true meaning of it. Go over it in our mind, write it down. Go over it for an extended period until it becomes a trench of truth to ourselves. This type of approach is called the rumination process and a helpful strategy to share.
By practicing this type of exercise, frequent execution, also called at times, "reflective reasoning" is a consideration of the larger context. Simply changing your thinking, exploring our options, our thoughts, our words, we can start to become more hopeful and attainable and your actions will follow. Another way of looking at it, be aware of your negative self-thinking and your negative self-talk. It can be a bad habit and challenging to control if you don't have great awareness of this hurtful mental habit. Other things that can contribute or fuel negative self-talk is a stressful home or work environment or your circle of friends and family. Having great awareness of what and who influences you are major factors of how your thoughts and thinking are impacted and regards to interference which is a whole subject by itself.
The hope is we see great value in certain changes and it becomes your new habit and ultimately becomes part of your character. What you decide putting value in, influences you leading to the right life, a way where you can rewire your brain. Living a life based on truths and facts. The basis of automaticity, where your thoughts will change your behavior. Something we learn very early in our life is our attitude directs our thoughts and actions.
A Winning Formula
In the end, using certain characteristics related to our thoughts such as being more thoughtful for longer periods of time, giving things we find has great value, giving it more of our attention, being purposeful, having less interference from others and having more awareness and curiosity will build our concepts for better thinking with tangible results and positive outcome.
Simply put, use a simple formula such as this, thoughts>words>actions>habits = character/destiny.
(Illustration, Bodhi Tree, Wisdom Tree)
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