Stress fighter tip #4. Putting in a new tape.
Often when buying an electronic CD or cassette player one of the features we like to have is a device that will play the tape over and over again. Something like that may work for our favorite music but it doesn’t work for the tapes we often store in our heads. One of the biggest contributors to stress is the tapes we play in our heads. Those recordings in our minds and heart that remind us of past mistakes, failed relationships, lack of something, overabundance of other things like trouble and trials. Recordings or thoughts that need to be erase and replaced.
We need to learn to put in new tapes that reflect something more positive than the long list of failures, flukes, and fumbled situations we’ve encountered.
Even the CD of our favorite music gets old after awhile if we hear it over and over again in a long enough cross country journey we are on. Eventually we will change one favorite CD for another, why not do this in our mind with the tapes we like to play back again and again.
An ideal situation would be to design our thinking to be like the cassette recorder or VHS player that always seemed to eat our favorite tapes. It could design it to destroy or “eat” the bad ones we shouldn’t be listening to over and over again. When I was diagnosed with cancer the tape recordings in my mind suddenly got stuck on automatic re-play. Time and time again I heard it said, thought, and felt “You’ve got bone cancer. You’ve got bone cancer. You’ve got bone cancer.”
Currently my dad is starting to show signs of dementia. Often he gets something “stuck” in his mind and it’s almost impossible to get him off on a different train of thought. We suffer from that same kind of dementia when we choose to play over and over again those destructive recordings in our minds that are not beneficial in any way. Dwelling on them and playing them repeatedly will not erase what we have endured in the past so why do we allow it to mess up our present and future is beyond me.
The time is now to get new recordings, make new memories, think new thoughts, doing whatever it takes to erase and replace what we don’t need to be listening to.
Bad things happen to good people and we can’t escape that but we don’t need to use those bad moments to tear us down by re-living them in our minds in such a way that they utterly destroy us.
We are the ones who need to put ourselves in charge of destroying the old tapes as we erase and replace them with something better.
Read more posts by Karen Gillett here. Karen blogs for JenningsWire.
