By Writer and Freelancer Author Denise Turney

Your happiness is linked to healthy mental discipline. Spend one day ruminating and you know how fast you can seemingly lose control of your thoughts. Before you know it, you’re doing more than thinking about a deadline, situation or project. You’re replaying a conversation or upcoming event over and over in your head. And getting back on track is not as easy as just thinking happy thoughts.

Healthy Mental Discipline – Keep Your Thoughts from Holding You Hostage

To keep your thoughts from holding you hostage, you need to discipline your mind. Start small. Choose a school assignment, work project or relationship situation that doesn’t trigger anxiety, fear, anger or distrust. Set a day and time that you will think about this school assignment, work project or relationship situation. As an example, you could set aside 15 minutes on Monday at 12 noon to think about how you’re going to apologize to your sister for dropping your kids off at her apartment last Saturday with no notice and not returning to pick your kids up for four hours.

Or, you could spend 15 minutes on a Friday morning mapping out how you will prepare for a 45 minute presentation that you’re slated to give in a month. To stay free of rumination, stick to the time limit that you set and definitely limit this time to no more than 30 minutes. Remember. You’re setting the date and the time when you’ll invest energy on the topic. As you become more experienced at living with a disciplined mind, you could invest the majority of your mental energy on what is occurring right now, rather than focusing on past or future events.

Also, as Forbes shares, to develop a disciplined mind, get rid of temptations. Ways to pull this off include turning off your computer at 5pm, 6pm or a set time each night. Once you shut down your computer, stop thinking about work. If you don’t explore the disciplined mind path, you could physically leave work but remain at work mentally all day and all night.

Stop Ruminating and Gain Healthy Mental Discipline

You could even ruminate about work on weekends, holidays and vacations. There may be fewer easier ways to stumble into burnout. So, engage the disciplined mind and set healthy limits. Remove temptations in order to make it easier to make smart decisions.

Another way to discipline your mind is to start breaking up a few of your routines. Breaking routines is a great way to get your brain off autopilot. Dangers of your brain being on autopilot include slipping into bias, missing data that you could use to make good decisions and getting into accidents. Keeping your brain on autopilot could also cause you to slip into mental, dietary and lifestyle ruts.

Breaking Mental Patterns

Now, imagine that your brain’s autopilot behavior included looping thoughts, where you repeat anxious thoughts over and over, similar to playing a record again and again. When it comes to finding happiness, that’s a mental pattern to break. Here are ways to get your brain off autopilot:

• Eat a different healthy food for breakfast.
• Get out of bed an hour earlier than normal. To avoid cutting back on sleep, go to bed an hour earlier.
• Shampoo and condition your hair at night instead of in the morning.
• Sleep with your head at the foot of the bed for several nights.
• Sing a song first thing in the morning, even before you eat breakfast or brush your teeth.
• Breathe deeply five times before you engage in an angry or fear-based conversation.

Another way to get your brain off autopilot is to write in a journal about a situation that you’ve been ruminating about. Actually, write down the specifics of the situation. Write about how you felt before, during and after the situation. Psychology Today shares that you also benefit from writing about what you learned from the situation.

Focus On What’s Happening

The key is to focus on what is happening. Start taking in data and new information that you may have been excluding while your brain was on autopilot. Other small actions that you could take to discipline your mind are to do three loving things for yourself each day.

And forgive yourself for mistakes that you’ve made and have yet to forgive yourself for or let go of. After all, forgiveness is a key part of the disciplined mind. That includes asking forgiveness of other people who you mistreated in word or deed.

Forgive once and you may come to know how freeing that choice is. Forgiveness frees up your energy. It removes the energy and mental space needed to “hide”. As a tip, forgiveness is an action that you may have to practice repeatedly over the course of your life’s journey.

But, when you experience the benefits of releasing energy that you’ve been spending to “hide” a memory, you may become eager to forgive others and yourself. It really is freeing.

Practice Forgiveness to Gain Healthy Mental Discipline

While you practice forgiveness and break routines to get your brain off autopilot, explore new hobbies and activities to engage in. Traveling, taking a free or low cost community college course or joining a professional discussion group are ways to explore new activities. This is important because your brain is going to seek out new mental investments.

Throughout the day also take breaks. Treat your mind to rest intervals throughout the day. Should your mind work like mine, this may take a bit of practice. The key is to get started. The three loving acts that you engage in each day may prove to you that you’re loved and worth loving.

You’ve got it. Healthy mental discipline isn’t a one and done effort. Practice self-awareness to stay on course. However, for self-awareness to work you have to be honest. This means that you disallow yourself to engage in rationalization when it comes to getting to the core of why you made a mistake or mistreated someone, including yourself.

Path Of Healthy Mental Discipline

Instead of rationalizing, become aware of your emotions, thoughts and your behavior. Become aware of how you treat yourself and how you let other people treat you. In fact, you could come to see the way that you allow others to treat you as an extension of how you are indirectly treating yourself.

Even if it doesn’t appear to be, the way that you treat yourself and the way that you allow others to treat you is part of mental discipline. So, treat yourself to three things that you love each day, forgive, break a few routines and practice self-awareness to enjoy living on the path of healthy mental discipline.