Do you have any of those thoughts that spiral round and round in your head? You know the ones I mean: the ones that make us feel bad about ourselves. ‘I’m looking awful these days’, or ‘I always get that wrong,’ or ‘I’m not very good at…’ they can be like a stuck record, only worse, because they don’t just keep repeating, they seem to collect extra debris on the way, and add to their weight and criticism or fearfulness! So ‘I always get that wrong’ collects things like, ‘and I get this wrong as well, and oh this too..’ and after a while, we begin to believe we don’t get anything right. What’s more, we think that ‘everyone’ must think we’re an idiot!

It’s like having a computer virus in your head, gradually infecting your thinking until it seems to have taken over.

Well, the good news is that it is easier to tackle than a computer virus, because it isn’t really infecting anything. It would be more useful to view it as a vacuum cleaner. It’s collecting some of the crap you’ve got lying around in your thoughts, and if you were to empty the dust bag, you could get rid of some of the thoughts that are no longer useful to you, and have more space to notice the other, more useful thoughts that have been hidden by that carp!

So next time you notice that you’ve got one of those spirals going on in your head, empty the dust bag and clear them out! Write them on a scarp of paper and put them in the waste bin (not the recycling!). And remember, you’ve probably got quite a few similar bits of crap floating around somewhere in your mind – we collect a lot over our lifetime – so you may need to repeat the process. And each time you do, your mind has a little more space to put useful thoughts in. so remind yourself of some of your lovely qualities, and store something more useful in those spaces!