Be aware of this trilogy, Well-Being vs Coronavirus vs Thoughts, how are they linked? Find your way to well-being by knowing that thoughts can defeat fear.
But, how thoughts can defeat fear? There is a viral quote used almost by every speaker or writer about mindfulness, consciousness, spirituality, self-help, personal development, and all related topics. That is :
A human being has approximately 60,000 thoughts per day—and 90% of these are repetitive!
Deepack Chopra and Forbes, According to the research of Dr. Fred Luskin of Stanford University
Who had counted our thoughts?
Although this quote is well known from different sources and commonly used, you can’t find a research paper proving it. The most trusted sources claiming this fact are #1 Deepack Chopra and you can find it in his books, blog posts, and Quotes. Here is an example: ” We each have an estimated 60,000 to 80,000 thoughts a day – unfortunately, many of them are the same thoughts we had yesterday, last week, and last year. ” from Deepak Chopra blog articles
Also, #2 Forbes in its article back to 2012 by Christine Comaford “Got Inner Peace? 5 Ways To Get It NOW” refers to the well known Dr. Fred Luskin of Stanford University as a source of such claim. Others refer to #3 the NSF National Science Foundation adopted researches in the early 2000s.
You can get a sense of how many thoughts you have.
Anyhow regardless of the mysterious source of this statement and if you agree to it or not. Let’s agree that there are streams of thoughts running through our subconscious mind and some of it is caught by the conscious one. You can find an evident on this if you watch the ideas that pop up to your mind while watching the news, sports, scrolling through social media accounts or even chatting with a friend. Did you try to follow one idea from where it started and to where it is heading?
If you managed to be aware of one of those ideas, you will find an endless stream of thoughts that started either from the past and heading to an imaginary future that your thought is knitting its details. Or, the other way around, when we start thinking about expected future results. This idea generates a stream of thoughts. This stream of thoughts opens all the files of similar events that you targetted before. And, You start to feel again what you felt at those events. This occurs regardless that those events actually passed by your life or you had listened to them from a friend or on a Life Show from a loved presenter.
Now, let’s do some math
This stream of thoughts is related to one idea. How many ideas you have per day? We can do some easy math: the number of thoughts/day = the number of ideas/day X The number of thoughts in the stream generated by each idea.
You can feel these thoughts when they storm in your head in the midst of a chaos of ideas due to a rising event or at a fork in your way when you need a decision which way to go. This may cause you some pain in the head or dizziness. That’s an indication that the number of thoughts is enormous to withstand. That’s regardless of how many of them you are actually comprehending through your conscious mind. These thoughts arose in collaboration between your environment and your ego.
The ego has a vital role in keeping this body, safe. The ego panics at any threatening stimuli from the environment you are dwelling in. It sends repeated messages to fight or flight like the old days when humans were living in caves to protect them from wild animals. This fight or flight signals triggers our stress hormones and peaks our anxiety.
But, where coronavirus (Covid-19) fits in this equation?
The number of tweets, articles, posts on Facebook, TV or LIVE shows that speaks about it is extremely high. What is interesting about these information sources is that it is diversifying. To the amount that you had a subconscious impression that everyone is susceptible to it. Celebrities like Tom Hanks when announced that his coronavirus analysis showed positive results, grasped the attention of millions as you can see in the reaction to his tweet here.
What about this article on CNN:
Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau will isolate himself for 14 days after his wife, Sophie Grégoire Trudeau, tested positive for coronavirus.
https://edition.cnn.com/2020/03/12/americas/sophie-gregoire-trudeau-coronavirus/index.html
Then governments from all over the globe are taking action as holding the education for 2 or 3 weeks or converting the teaching to online classes for an indefinite time. Airports and train stations had applied strict health checks to control the movement of coronavirus carriers. Some countries are panning the travel to and from certain countries. Some Countries as Italy and China quarantined some of its cities and those are not poor undeveloped countries.
Is the ego helping me?
All these signs trigger the ego to be over-reactive in what concerning your health. This keeps you all the time thinking about the coronavirus and anxious about what’s coming next?.
Do you get alerted when you hear anyone coughing? What idea pops up then? and which stream of thoughts you flow with?, Do you feel afraid to be in closed places with other humans, Are you frightened that you might not find food if the government applied curfew?
Do you have some or all of these frightening thoughts while you are sitting alone?
If your answer is YES, I’m sorry to say you are programmed to panic and you are well under the media control. Your stress levels are all-time high and your actions are reactions to what is posted today and what fearful expectations are propagated in the news.
Does this mean that those are fake news?
No, but they are trying to get your attention. So you feel alerted and take enough care about your own health. Also, they intend to frighten those who have some typical or atypical symptoms. Then, they will rush for support to survive and protect their loved ones.
It is not intending to get you frightened to death. Your own +50K thoughts are what causing your anxiety. You need to be alerted, take the necessary precautions and live in faith that all is OK. This way, your thought can defeat fear not exploit it.
What can we do to maintain our well-being during these times?
- Find something useful to do while you are locked from your daily activities.
- Think calmly. If you can’t, try to start learning meditation. This will slow down your mind and give you a chance to think better.
- Creat conscious opposing thought pattern. Example: this is a temporary period, a few days and weeks all this anxiety will be over. I had done all the precautions then I’m Safe
- No one can tell you better about the necessary precautions than WHO, the World Health Organization. This article will show you what you need to do. There are simple and clear steps detailed in this article.
- Focus your attention on useful things to do in order to divert your focus from the Covid-19 news
- Why don’t you finish a book or a project you dream to do?
- Keep telling your self ” I’m Safe and Healthy”. Your today words shape your future and your faith is the power to make it true