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Your mind is a land of mystery. It has strong wills of its own. Sometimes it becomes hard to remember something. On some other occasions, it is harder to forget something or someone. I bet that you have wondered how to stop thinking about someone on many occasions.
To stop thinking about someone, you need to control the emotions attached to the particular person. Be it despair, love, hatred, or rage. Self-assessment is the best tool to forget an unwanted person. Occupying your mind with duties and hobbies is also helpful. You can also use meditation and psychiatric counseling.
This article can work as a mentor for you to get rid of any obsession with someone in particular. Be it your ex-partner, deceased parents, influential enemy, or an unwanted crush. I believe there cannot be a single cure for the obsession for everyone. That is why this article includes almost all the proven methods to fight unwanted thoughts about someone.
10 Sure Methods to Stop Thinking About Someone
First of all, admit that it will be hard to forget a person, attached with such strong feelings in your mind. Then you have to strongly believe that it is possible to forget someone whom you think is impossible to forget now. You must be sure about the necessity to forget that person, thinking about who is harming you and your discipline of life.
1. Focus on Your Duties
Life is very demanding in its way. We need to perform a lot of duties each day. It can be cleaning your house, ensuring physical hygiene, doing office work, etc. When you are obsessed with someone, these trivial daily duties seem not worthy to concentrate on. But the reality is the opposite.
From brushing your teeth to getting ready for sleep- every task can be a respite from the emotional torture you endure by thinking about someone particular. All you need to do is concentrate on the little jobs like they are very much important. While doing the chores, try to enjoy them. Think out how to do them better.
Proactiveness at your office is also a solution to being haunted by the thoughts of a person. Confirm your devotion to your job. Think about where you want to see yourself in the coming years. Be ahead of the goals set by your boss for you. Set your personal goals too. Focusing more on your career will help you a lot to get rid of the unpleasant thoughts of that person.
2. Appreciate People Around You
Your mind is busy thinking about a particular person. But there are hundreds of other people around you who deserve equal or more importance. You have to convince your mind that a single person cannot be so powerful to overshadow so many other people. Think of all your family members, friends, and colleagues who care about you, unlike that particular person.
When it is so hard to stop thinking about someone, you should interact more with other people in your life. Spend some time with your mother. Tell her how important she is to you. It will make both of you happier. Spending some moments with children will work like therapy. Their innocence can fill your mind so much that you may easily forget the person you want to ignore.
Meet your friends more often to reclaim your mind from the thoughts of a specific person. Throw a party for your friends. Attend more and more social gatherings. If you are into art and culture, go to Broadway or movies. All these activities will enable you to interact with more people and also to make new friends.
3. Remember the Goals of Your Life
In a quiet and calm place, allow yourself to rethink your whole life. Start from your childhood. Think about what exactly you wanted to have in your life when you were a kid. The specific goals from your childhood might sound funny. But the point is, you wanted to see yourself happy from the beginning. Being joyful was the ultimate aim in your life.
Now think how the sickening thoughts of that person are ruining your happiness. Promise yourself that you will do anything to make yourself happy, including getting rid of the person of interest from your thinking.
You will know how trivial that one person is to your life if you can watch your life from a bird’s eye viewpoint. It will help you a lot to say goodbye to his thoughts from your mind.
4. Learn to Ignore
If you can master the skill of ignoring someone in your heart, you can win most battles of your life. Even the most cunning enemy of you will feel helpless if you can ignore them from the bottom of your heart. To me, the best way to stop thinking about someone is to ignore him.
You cannot stop thinking of people because your mind is so habituated to giving them importance. Now that you believe they are harmful to your life, you have to train your mind to value them less. Thinking about all the consequences you had to face for that person is an effective way to start ignoring him.
5. Think of Others who Depend on You
You have to remember that you have a position in society. Many people around you need your guidance and help. You can occupy your mind with many positives by performing your duty to others. It will help you stop thinking about someone you do not want to remember.
So, look hard around you and find people who you can help with kind words, good advice, or any other kind of support. It will also help you find the self-esteem needed to fight negative emotions that force you to think of someone in particular. When others look upon you as a mentor and treat you with importance, you will also learn to prioritize yourself.
You do not need to be rich to help others in need. Standing for a social cause like climate change or poverty and creating awareness against social injustice will also help you get out of the negative emotions.
6. Fighting the Unwanted Infatuation
We are humans. We are to act irrationally sometimes. You can be overwhelmed with emotions towards anybody, whom you know is not the right option. When you have an infatuation, it is hard to stop thinking about that person.
Even after knowing the person to be bad for your life or impossible to have a relationship with, you are unable to forget him or her. In that case, I would suggest you take a break and assess the whole situation by yourself. While doing the assessment, try to keep away from that person.
Start with the goals of your life that you have already set for your life. Think how all your success can be tarnished if you have that person in your life. Think about the current relationships of yours. Realize how your new infatuation could hurt the feelings of your present near ones. Fight the unwanted thoughts with rationality.
7. Avoiding Thoughts of the Deceased
The magnificent people that you lost by death are a treasure to your life. The good memories you shared with them, the care they offered you, and how they valued you, will help you find your path throughout your whole life.
But you cannot live a complete life only with their memories. If you are upset by their demise most of the time, you have to learn to stop thinking about them at some point. Otherwise, you will fail to celebrate your life and be dutiful to it.
The best way to stop thinking about dead people is to make your mind convinced that they are gone and will never return. Paying a regular visit to the graveyard is one way to control the thoughts about the deceased. Getting busy with the living people’s joy and sorrow will also help. Always remember how happy they would want you to see if they were alive.
8. Stop Thinking about Your Ex-Lover
The hardest person to stop thinking about can be your former fiance, spouse, or live-in partner. We always start a relationship with the highest possible expectations. And in most cases expectation fetches frustrations. Ex-partners are hard to forget because they are embedded with high-voltage emotions in your mind.
The first step to stop thinking about your former partner is to consider them as ordinary people with all kinds of inadequacies. In your mind, you have to change their position from the position of unrealistic glory to the place for any other regular person in your life. To do it, you can note down all the negative aspects of the person and think how harmful they were for your life.
Our mind remembers a person by a particular memory. You can think of the exact moment when you were hurt by your ex-partner the most. Tag that memory with the person in such a way that whenever you remember him or her you feel the pain of the worst moment. Our mind tends to avoid painful memories and most possibly it will not think of her anymore.
9. Coping With the Mean Persons
It is too irritating to keep thinking about the mean persons of your life. They take up a place in your mind by their rude behavior and unkind activities. Memories of such persons keep haunting you like an illness.
This happens more when you give a free pass to the bad people in your life and let them act nasty without a protest. The best way to prevent this is to give a befitting answer to the misdeeds of the mean people. Sometimes answering them is hard because they are likely to drag you down to their level and make you lose your dignity.
However, you must find a way to respond to the mean person keeping your mental height intact. Moreover, you should think more of the nice people in your life and think about how insignificant those persons are to you. Remember that you are responsible only for your deed. If any person has a poor spirit it should be them to regret it and not you.
10. Live in the Present
Most of your emotions are from your memories and future worries. That is why you should try to live in the present as much as possible. Living in the present- is an ancient technique of religious leaders to get rid of all kinds of earthly torments. This is also helpful to stop thinking about someone you do not want to remember.
The idea is about enjoying the not-so-important incidents of your daily life such as having a meal or conversations with random people. You have to give so much importance to these little things that your mind does not get the chance to be sad with memories or be anxious about future troubles. This method can be very useful to stop thinking about someone unwanted.
Living in the present is one of the vital teachings of Gautam Buddha. He taught his followers to use this technique to get rid of the influences of day-to-day sorrows of the world. Spiritual practitioners around the world still follow and admire the method to overcome mental torments.
Controlling Your Emotions to Stop Thinking About Someone
To be able to stop thinking about someone you need to have control over your emotions. Because those persons ride into your mind on emotions. The relationship between you and your emotions is a simple one. Believe it or not, it is an eat-or-be-eaten type of relationship. Either you dominate and control your emotions or they control the path of your life.
● Sort Out Your Priorities
The norms and values the society imposes on us, work as powerful factors to decide on how to react to a particular scenario. If you are habituated to giving other people more priority than yourself, you can never stop thinking about them.
The smart option would be to rearrange your priorities in life and put the welfare of your own life in the first position. If you can do that, you will no longer get emotional enough to keep thinking about someone that you think is improper.
You have to remember that if you are happy and free from negative emotions, you can be helpful to others. Otherwise, you will become another burden for society.
● Give it Time
No matter how hard and how fast you act, your mind has its ways to cope with emotions and people. Time is always a good healer of unwanted emotions. You should rely on it too.
Suppose someone has lost his or her child. Do you expect him or her to be free from emotions and stop thinking about the dead child? It will be an absurd idea to think so. Besides trying all methods to get control over emotions he or she has to wait for the time to get back to normal life.
● See Things from Another Perspective
One of the biggest problems of the human mind is that it is accustomed to thinking from a singular perspective. Most of the time we get emotional by some other person’s activities as we fail to see the situation from his perspective.
It is always a good idea to think about what you would do if you were in his or her shoes. There is a good chance that you may hate the person less if you knew his or her state of mind when he or she acted cruelly towards you.
It is even better to be able to judge yourself from the perspective of others. It may clarify what went wrong and what was your contribution to the mess. If you can forgive the person from your heart, you will be free from the negative emotion that keeps him coming back to your mind again and again.
● Manage Your Stress
The highly mechanized modern age has put our minds under huge mental stress. We have become so habituated with the stress that we cannot feel them. But the stress keeps working against us. The worst role of stress is to instigate negative emotions.
You can manage your stress level with a proper balance between personal and work life and also by denying the social standard of wellbeing. It should be you to decide whether you need a new phone, an apartment in a posh area, or a brand new car. Otherwise, you may never get rid of the extra stress that society imposes on you in the name of ‘being accepted’.
A stressful mind can never get a hold of its emotion. In other words, in most cases, it acts on whims and never knows how to stop thinking of someone harmful.
● Eat Balanced Diet
You will be surprised to know about the relation between your food and your mood. Research shows, skipping a balanced diet provokes mood swings and less control over emotions. Taking too many refined carbohydrates like pastries causes sudden fluctuation in sugar level, resulting in unexpected irritation.
So, if you are thinking of controlling your emotions to stop thinking about someone, you must take a balanced diet at least twice a day. If necessary consult a nutritionist to know your precise balanced diet.
● Get Regular Health Check-ups
At the end of the day, your mind is a collection of many activities of your body. That means you cannot have a sound mind without a healthy body. In that case, you must do whatever it takes to remain healthy to control your emotions. As you know, controlling your emotions is the key to stopping thinking about someone you are not supposed to think.
You cannot ignore the importance of proper food, sleep, exercise, and overall hygiene to remain healthy. Above all, do not forget to get an appointment for a regular health check-up.
Why Is It So Hard to Lose People in Our Lives?
Losing someone very close to you is always very painful. Because a large part of your mind carries the influences of people you care for and love. It is very important to understand the nature of the pain to find a way to cope with the torments.
The constant pain never lets you stop thinking about the departed. It could be your parents, siblings, childhood friends, lovers, spouse, etc. You can lose any of them by sudden death or deterioration of a relationship. Though the person is physically away from you, you cannot annex the good memories that you shared with the person.
The fact that you get attached to some people so much that they become a part of your entity makes it hard to lose them. Still, the show must go on. You must live your life to the fullest, accomplishing all your duties to yourself and others around you. You must find a way to fight the hardships of losing people in your life.
Importance of Letting Go of Your Past
Your mind becomes overwhelmed with all the memories and emotions that come from the past. If you know how to let go of your past, you can belittle the tormenting memories and emotions. Here are some reasons to let go of your past.
● To Make You Stronger
All your inferior and weak characteristics are born from some unpleasant past incidents. When you learn to let go of your past, you do not think of yourself as less powerful anymore.
For example, if you nearly drowned in a pool in your childhood, you could have aquaphobia. After you have let go of your past, you will not fear the water anymore. In short, you become like a blank canvas if you can let go of your past. There you can rewrite your life with new ink.
● For a Stable Life
You cannot change even a little bit of your past. But the past is always with you in the form of memories. It always dictates your mind to react in a certain way which could be harmful to you and your life. We all have some accidents in our lives. If you cannot let go of your past, you cannot find the rhythm lost in the accident.
You need to learn how to let go of the past to maintain stability in your life. Otherwise, it will be hard to recover from any untoward incidents. Moreover, you can play down the person in your mind by letting go of your past.
● For the Ultimate Freedom
Humans are born free. They are chained later by society in the name of education and culture. You can become a completely free person if you can let go of your past.
After letting go of your past, you can judge and analyze the universe and your life with a fresh perspective. No matter what and how you learned in the past. This new freedom of thinking can help you decide on when to stop thinking about some unwanted person.
What to Do if You Still Cannot Stop Thinking About Someone?
It is always easier to say than do it. There is a chance for you to try the techniques detailed in this article and still fail to stop thinking about someone. In that case, you have to adapt some formal approach to have better control over your mind.
● Use Meditation
Meditation is a thousand-year-old proven therapy for the mind to get rid of harmful emotions. Moreover, it can fill your heart with compassion, presence, and kindness. That is why meditation can do magic to win your mind and stop thinking about any inappropriate person.
You can adapt your course of meditation after doing online research. It is supposed to work fine if you can follow the instructions properly. However, you can also join a nearby meditation course. A supportive environment for meditation will help you master the techniques of mind control easier.
● Get Professional Help
Psychological therapy is a crucial part of medical science. If you cannot have control over your emotions, you must consult a psychiatric counselor. Sometimes it is better to leave the job for the professionals.
Unfortunately, visiting a psychiatrist is still considered taboo even in the western world. But you must understand that it is just like visiting any other doctor. Be open and cooperative with your counselor as much as possible.
Bottom Line
Now you know how to stop thinking about someone. But this knowledge will be of no use if you are not determined enough to act on it. No methods or therapy can help you if you lack the will to move on in your life. Remember that accepting failure to have control over your mind is never an option. Since every success of your life depends on this.
I believe this article can become a game-changer for you. But it is you who has to bell the cat. I am confident that you will be active enough to make the change. Otherwise, why would you read my article till the end?
If you would like more tips, you may be interested in this post as well on how to heal from a broken heart.