How to stop your thoughts from controlling your life | Albert Hobohm | TEDxKTH

[Music] [Applause] how many of your thoughts today helped you get towards your goals in life and how many of them hindered you are you in control of what you think as I first learned the answer to these questions I was shocked I was staying at the Buddhist monastery suan mokkh in the forests of southern Thailand four years ago as you can imagine life at the monastery is quite Spartan you sleep on a wooden pillow when a straw mat you wake up at 4:30 meditate for 10 hours every day eat nothing but rice and vegetables and shower with a bucket one specific morning meditation session I had a breakthrough moment it suddenly struck me just how little influence I had over the content of my mind I look back on my life ever since I was a child and I could clearly see that my mind had always been constantly wandering distracted unable to focus and the reason why well because I've lived the way I have like any modern person over stimulated it was my lifestyle that had produced this unsettled mind of mine which had now become nearly impossible to control for 20 years I had been unable to recognize this phenomena within myself simply because my mind had never been provided enough space to observe its own functioning there is a Swedish ex monk named beyond live Linda blood who lived as a Buddhist monk for 18 years before returning back home to ordinary life just a few years ago upon his return a journalist interviewed him and asked beyond from 18 years as a monk with hours of meditation every single day and no distractions what's the one key insight that you took with you home is answer I no longer believe in everything I think sound so mundane and yet it's not and this my friends is why I'm here today to introduce the radical concept that you are free to choose your own thoughts and thereby become an architect free to construct your own life by design for some of you this idea might be familiar it lies at the core of most meditation techniques or perhaps it's a completely new one having yet to enter your mind or maybe just maybe you are now feeling that this is becoming a bit unscientific and you're silently wondering how an overdressed hippy got to the Ted stage well regardless of your current stand point I humbly ask you to suspend any disbelief or belief whether you are a corporate CEO or a surfer I invite you to enter an open state of mind for the next 13 minutes now we find ourselves in a world where for the first time in history more people die from eating too much than eating too little more people commit suicide every year than are killed by war criminals and terrorists combined I wish to show you some data on our current health profile as a species this graph shows that as for today seventy five percent of the u.s. population are overweight for Sweden that number is almost sixty percent this one shows the ten year increase in amphetamine based medication being prescribed to children under the age of 17 for being labeled with attention deficit disorders and this one shows that as for today nearly one tenth of the Swedish population are now being prescribed antidepressants for us that number is even higher now these are some quite alarming data however it could have been my personal data just a few years ago as I have experienced many of these states myself it started 10 years ago now and in a horrific series of events my mother hastily died in an accident which was unforeseen and left me in chaos I was 14 at the time a few years after that I had developed addictions I had become addicted to cannabis to sugar to tobacco to video games for some years I lived a life where I was constantly distracting myself from the pain of the fact that the woman of my life had left me forever in our culture we are raised from the very beginning of our lives to crave stimulants and the world we live in is an obvious reflection of this and I'm not only talking about drugs I think of anything we do watching movies watching sport events eating cream cheese listening to music the list is endless and all of these Humanity's they are produced as a response to human need we have lost control of how we used and have ultimately let them gain control over us and how we think this was to the highest degree true for me and my past behavior and whether you are a tech billionaire a Buddhist monk a military officer or a high school teacher you are to some degree being unwillingly dictated by your own thoughts but also free to change that the American psychologist and philosopher William James said that thoughts become perception perception becomes reality all through your thoughts alter your reality the world in which we live in its quality its character is nothing but a reflection of our own minds and the only way to influence in which world you want to live in or in which world you want your children to live in is to learn how to influence your mind I wish to share with you today what I have developed as the two most important methods on how to stop thoughts from controlling you and ultimately take charge of your mind and thereby reality it's the realization that made me process the trauma of the death of my mother the key insight from 18 years as a monk by bjorn linda blood and a core idea from William James's statement method number one practice meditation developing a habit of doing this for just 15 minutes at a time four days a week can change your life in many ways it did for me by definition it's the art of developing mindfulness it's practiced by consciously directing and maintaining your attention on an unstimulating object such as the breathing and doing this for lengths of time this practice produces a more calm mind less prone to overreaction more rational and higher performing but the ultimate goal of meditation is to start objectively observe the mind let me give you a visual example of what I mean imagine yourself a web made up of thoughts every thread a possible thought path leading to different places after some meditation training one is able to identify thought patterns see where they will lead and choose to take another one and this is what happened to me at the monastery as I started to see which one of my sort path led me to anxiety and had done so for so many years I was actually able to direct my thoughts towards something constructive instead and this means that as you gradually learn the structure of your own web of thoughts you become able to actively predict which thought will lead to in which emotional state which will make you able to actively choose dates such as calmness serenity and high focus over stress anxiety and anger in theory quite clear but again it can only happen as the mind is provided enough space and silence without being constantly stimulated method number two restrain your mental and physical input they're saying that you are what you eat certainly applies to food but have you ever thought of the notion of bad information having the same effect making us mentally unhealthy obese addicted in our age of information an unprecedent that junk data load enters our minds every single day and this junk data then influences our minds it effects our values it creates our needs and desires and even how we think it's our responsibility as individuals to carefully feed our minds with selected input and that input them if chosen wisely will produce this desirable mental environment in which we can start to understand our minds properly enough to control them I want you to ask yourself is it constructive for me to be bombarded daily with newspaper tabloids of death sex fear and terrorist in my mind the majority of newspapers are more important for terrorists than terrorists themselves choose your media source wisely because they are seldom designed only to transmit information more often and not their primary objective is to spark your interest using catchy headlines fueled with fear and sex which happens on direct expense of fact social media such a brilliant tool when used right and so catastrophic when abused no stimulant has ever got in a society so addicted so immersed in such a short time did you know that the term facebook addiction disorder has emerged as a valid disorder causing with Rawal excessive use and long term anxiety there is a recent study from the University of Pittsburgh has now showed that the more we use social media the more socially isolated we feel and the more socially isolated we feel the more we want to use social media so just like a drug we feel that by getting a newsfeed fixe injected to our minds it'll make us feel better but it actually makes us feel worse so friends you have to take control over your use of social media otherwise social media will start to take control over you advertisements are also sources of often polluted information think for example of sugary unhealthy food products quite a few commercials out there for them and now sugar the substance sugar is our global number one health threat as a species killing more people every year than heroin cocaine and amphetamine combined so what can we do stop sugar and sugar based products from being sold and marketed of course not because they're not inherently bad sugar is great for a lot of people alright the problem does not lie in the externality we need to take responsibility over our thoughts and impulses when being exposed to and consuming these products and their commercials and realize that their incentive for your consumption is not to benefit you now think of this the human operating system is designed through millions of years of evolution to reward the behavior that promotes survival in an environment of constant territorial threats and scarce resources in that world eating as much honey as possible meant survival so did killing other tribes when intruding on your territory but man has come out of the jungle where there was not enough and we built a whole ethic around not having enough as our environment has completely shifted our mental operating system has gone dangerously obsolete it's time for an upgrade we need to transition from being smart monkeys and become conscious beings you are like me a homo sapiens wise human member of the first known life want to develop consciousness you are the pinnacle of evolution now please reflect upon the stories of told which are yours and decide what you want to do with them because friends it's not the harsh traumatic or horrible events themselves you should fear the most in life but your own unwillingness to control your reaction to those events ultimately it's your capacity to take full responsibility for your thoughts that will dictate the course and growth of not just you but our entire world thank you so much for letting me be part of this

Channel: TEDx Talks

Views: 1,371,545

Rating: 4.9089375 out of 5

Keywords: TEDxTalks, English, Life

Id: 29Vj0-TVHiQ

Length: 14min 59sec (899 seconds)

Published: Wed May 02 2018