We all have it. That voice in our heads. The once that’s constantly commentating on our lives. The one that’s constantly making us feel bad. The one that’s constantly telling us we could be and should be doing more with ourselves.

Following on from last week’s blog on ‘Who are you without your thoughts?’, I’ve been exploring the idea of who the voice in my head really is and I’d love to share my thoughts with you.

During this past week I’ve been really trying to explore who this voice in my head is. Is it my voice? Is it the voice of my conscience? Is it the voice of my ancestors? I even thought I had struck gold with; “Oh my! It’s the Universe isn’t it? It’s definitely the Universe…. surely!?”.

But then I realised that all of those thoughts were coming from the voice in my head. So I was back to square one.

A question that really stumped me was “when did this voice start?” because it’s definitely not there when we are born – it can’t be because we don’t even have a concept of words or language, so how can we think in those words?

So my enquiring continued. I went deeper.

What is a thought? I, erm, thought.

Each thought is a little like a notification on our phones – it pops up to notify us of something happening in our world. But it also helps to create our experience of the world. Ok, so that’s interesting. Now we’re getting somewhere.

Sticking with the phone/notification metaphor I started to see myself as a phone (Ok, stay with me on this one!). If my body was the phone itself then my mind was the processor inside the phone, which makes sense of every bit of action inside the phone. Then the thoughts are most definitely the notifications.

Ok great, this is making sense now! (I hope it is for you too).

So then, each time I have a thought, it’s my body and brain notifying me of something.

For example, if someone pinched your arm, your body would feel it, your brain would process the signal the arm is sending and then the brain would notify you with a thought of “my arm is being pinched by someone”. Then would come your reaction and experience of this moment. And that could range from “Oi, what the bloody hell are you doing pinching my arm, it hurts!” to “Haha you are always goofing around” and everything else in between.

So that voice in our heads is actually a notification. It’s actually helping us to navigate the world around us by letting us know what needs to be addressed.

When you have an uneasy feeling about something, that is just your brain signalling to you that something needs to be addressed. When you are feeling stressed or overwhelmed it’s just a case of having too many notifications left unopened, because we tend to ignore the ones we don’t want to open right away. So we feel overloaded and our processor (the brain) has to work even harder to send you more notifications.

Our mind is a complex yet simple thing. It wants you to deal with one notification at a time. It doesn’t have an agenda against you, nor are the thoughts necessarily your own voice or thinking – they are being sent to you from an inner wisdom to help you address something or navigate the world around you.

And that’s it. It’s really that simple!

Peace and love,

Alex