Sometimes you hear about good personal hygiene , but have you ever heard about good mental hygiene? It’s important to monitor our thoughts and make sure our mind isn’t going where we don’t want it to go. Having good mental hygiene will help us to be more productive and have an increased sense of satisfaction in life.
In our book, Splash! Increase Your Life’s Impact, we talked about having positive inputs. In addition to putting good stuff in, we need to be careful to not let in a lot of negative stuff. One of the largest sources of negative ideas is the internet, especially social media. (The news is a huge source of negativity, too, but we already looked at that in a previous blog.)
My Facebook feed is stuffed with fear and doom and gloom. sometimes people write about their own thoughts and feelings and experiences. Other times, they just click the “share” button and pass along other people’s thoughts instead. In fact, every post, whether it’s a picture, a personal post or a news story, is a thought. It plays across the newsfeed screen and enters our minds. By reading our feeds, we are exposing ourselves to LOTS of other people’s thoughts.
I recently watched an interesting video on thoughts as germs and how they are passed from one mind to another. You can watch the video here. It was enlightening for me as a became more aware of how I am letting other people influence my experience of life. An I am deciding to be more in control of where I let my mind go.
Do you really want lots of thoughts that have passed through many minds? Are they the kind of thoughts you really want to be thinking? Maybe you would be better served by contemplating your own thoughts more. Journaling is a great tool for processing your own thoughts and feelings.
I encourage you to check out that video about thought germs. And you may want to consider how many thought germs you are getting and how many thought germs you are passing along. Be vigilant about the thoughts you indulge in. They will certainly have an effect on you and the people around you. That’s why good mental hygiene is so important.
