Maintaining control over your mind when the latter is challenged in the battle of influences, inducements and restrictions we call daily life is a critical survival skill.

People fight to win this battle because they don’t understand eliminating mental spam shouldn’t take any willpower at all. 

We flitter away a lot of emotional energy in trifling mental brawls with no consequence.

Remember, when these intrusions occur, that no matter what the background noise is that day, your truth did not change.

I say your truth, and not the truth, because we all live in personal bubbles and can’t behold absolute truth. We don’t have access to it.

From the moment we wake up to the moment we go to sleep, irrelevant blather constantly bombards our minds. 

While we easily ignore thoughts with neutral emotional value, the ones that have negative connotations weaken our focus: our brain treats them as emergencies, and dump cortisol into our systems in anticipation of fight or flight.

These thoughts, which can be anything you find unsettling, but usually cluster around insecurities, regrets, failures, personal tragedies, health concerns, dominance issues and relationship problems, will consume all the bandwidth you have available for processing and leave no room for you to think. 

The key word is inconsequential. Don’t use your energy to fend them off; the useful reaction is not processing them at all.

All the thoughts that make a difference to your life have been catalogued and sorted by you the moment they came to your attention. Everything that appears out of the blue is probably a drain on mental capacity.

You can label them trash and erase them without checking their contents, the same way you do with junk mail.

Create a sorting mechanism for every thought that enters your mind:

1. Is this thought mine
2. Is this thought relevant to my life
3. Is this thought beneficial to my goals
4. Is this thought true and
5. Is this thought worth storing to process later?

It seems cumbersome and time consuming, but in reality, this analysis is lightning fast, and deftly clears the mind of clutter.

In conclusion, what are the points worth remembering?

1. Maintaining mental control in the face of irrelevant thought challenges is a critical survival skill.
2. No matter what the background noise is that day, your truth did not change.
3. Negative thoughts throw you off balance and weaken you, because the brain treats them like emergencies and starts preparing you for fight or flight. They only have one purpose: to split your focus.
4. Treat mental spam like you would the malware that floods your computer system with inconsequential requests until it crashes.
5. Sort thoughts the moment they enter your mind to check whether they’re yours, relevant, beneficial, true and worth storing for later.