Healing the Mind
How to Stop Overthinking, Quiet Negative Self-Talk, and Find Your Way Out of Depression and Anxiety
What This Page Is About
This page is about the mind. Specifically, it is about the way the mind often tends to work against us, why that happens, and what you can do about it without medication, without years of therapy, and without pretending to be someone you are not. It examines the thought patterns that lead to depression and anxiety, how those patterns form in childhood and follow us, and what it looks like when they take hold in both the teen years and adulthood.
I would like to offer you a free download of one of my Daily Mind Tools, a set of practical exercises I have used every day for years to keep my thoughts working for me instead of against me. They take five minutes. They are free. And they work, if you use them.
The Mind Is a Powerful Thing. It Is Also the Source of Most of Our Suffering.
The mind is not your enemy. But left to its own devices, it can work against us in a relentless fashion.
Think about where your thoughts actually go when nothing is demanding your attention. Do they drift toward things that haven't happened yet, running through worst-case outcomes and what-if scenarios? Do they pull backward, replaying past conversations with regret, rehearsing arguments that are long over, picking at experiences that cannot be changed? And when the mind is not doing either of those things, is it often busy judging. Comparing what is in front of you right now to everything it has catalogued before, instead of just quietly, allowing you experience the moment?
Anytime your thoughts are living in the future, the past, or locked in judgment, you are not present. Your mind is somewhere else entirely. There is actually a word for this that most people use without thinking about what it really means. Absent-minded. The mind is absent. You are here, but your thoughts are not.
This is where most of our suffering comes from. Not from what is actually happening in the room, but from what the mind is doing with what happened before, or what it imagines might happen next, or enacting judgements. Racing thoughts, negative self-talk, anxiety that has no clear cause in the present moment. These are almost always the mind running patterns it learned a long time ago, in circumstances that no longer apply.
How Negative Thought Patterns Form
Of all the forces that shape the way we think, our relationships with other people are the most powerful.
As children, we come into the world with open hearts and minds focused towards those around us. When love is withheld, or when the people a child depends on are inconsistent, critical, absent, or abusive, the child does not conclude that something is wrong with those people. Children often turn inward and begin to assume that something is wrong with them.
This is how the negative inner dialogue begins. Not as a character flaw, not as a chemical imbalance, but as a learned response to early experience. The child starts to doubt their own thoughts, words, and actions. That doubt becomes a habit. The habit becomes a voice. And that voice seeps into every relationship, every decision, and every moment of quiet for the rest of their life, unless something interrupts it.
If left unchecked over years and decades, that negative inner dialogue can create a set of false beliefs about who we are and how we fit into the world. This can create confusion within the mind which evolves into negative thought loops that can manifest life experiences that confirm the false beliefs. That confirmation is the gateway into depression and anxiety. "No one understands me." "I am the person that nothing good ever happens to." "I don't belong here." Treating depression and anxiety successfully often means going back to that voice and changing what it says. Not suppressing it, but actually replacing it with something that is truer and more useful.
The good news is that this is possible. The negative relationship we have with ourselves is not permanent. It can be rebuilt. And when it is, the effect reaches every other relationship in our lives in a loving and constructive manner.
My Own Mind Has Not Always Been Easy to Live With
I would love to tell you that I have mastered all of this and that you should do what I do. That would be a lie.
I was born with ADHD, which means my mind wants to run at a speed that most people would find exhausting, and I have had to learn to work with it rather than fight it. It ran me into clinical depression twice, once in my teens and once in my twenties. I know from direct experience what it feels like to be trapped inside thought patterns that seem to have a life of their own, that loop on the same painful material no matter what you do to stop them.
What I also know is that there is a way through it that does not require you to depend on medication for the rest of your life. I am not against medication. For some people it is the right tool at the right time. But it is not the only tool available, and for many people it addresses the symptoms without touching the source.
Over years of working with my own mind, and with the minds of many people who came to me looking for a way to heal anxiety without medication or to find relief from depression that conventional treatment had not fully resolved, I developed a set of exercises I call the Daily Mind Tools. They are not complicated. They do not require any equipment or any special setting. But they require intention, focus and repetition.
What the Daily Mind Tools Are
The Daily Mind Tools are a set of mental exercises that are designed to break the negative thought loops and replace them with a healthy inner dialogue. The are fast, effective and can be used anywhere, at any time. Our lives are fast paced; we don’t have time to sit and meditate anytime our thoughts start to wander in an unhealthy manner. We need quick and easy solutions that set us up for success.
They work because the mind responds to repetition. The negative self-talk that most people carry did not arrive overnight. It was built through thousands of small repetitions over many years. Replacing it works the same way. You repeat something true and useful until it becomes the default voice that replaces the critical one.
Some of the tools are about staying present, keeping your thoughts in this day, this moment, this conversation, instead of drifting forward into anxiety about the future or backward into regret about the past. Some are about the relationship you have with yourself, including the part of you that was formed in childhood and still carries the doubt and confusion that was placed there before you were old enough to question it. Some are about the way your thoughts shape your experience of the world, the understanding that the universe responds by providing us with life experiences based on what we are thinking, saying, and doing. If our thoughts are chaotic and self-defeating, our life experiences tend to reflect that back to us. If our thoughts are clear, constructive, and intentional, our life experiences tend to reflect that back as well.
This is not magical thinking. It is the practical application of something that ancient cultures from the Buddhists to the great Greek philosophers came to understand and put into practice thousands of years ago.
Learning these practices and putting them to use, will change your life for the better, which changes lives of every person you encounter.
The Quiet Mind Cannot Be Trespassed Against
One of the tools I use every day is a single sentence: "The quiet mind cannot be trespassed against."
When the mind is racing, it is exposed to everything. Every fear, every worry, every old wound has an open door. When the mind is quiet, those things do not carry so much weight. Quieting the mind is not about achieving some kind of blissful emptiness. It is about reducing the noise enough that you can hear yourself think clearly, make decisions from a grounded place, and move through your day without being dragged backward or forward by thoughts that are not serving you.
This is the practical goal of the Daily Mind Tools. Not enlightenment. Not perfection. Just a quieter, more directed mind that you are actually in charge of.
How to Keep Your Thoughts in the Moment
The question people ask most often when it comes to stopping overthinking and quieting negative self-talk is not what should I think about instead. It is how do I actually make my mind stop doing this.
The answer is not willpower. Trying to force the mind to stop thinking about something is one of the least effective strategies available. Tell yourself not to think about something and the mind immediately thinks about it. The approach that actually works is replacement, giving the mind something specific, true, and meaningful to do instead.
That is what the Daily Mind Tools are designed for. Each one gives the mind a clear direction. These are not affirmations which fall under the category of wishful thinking. They are instructions. The mind needs instructions, or it will write its own.
Our past is an explanation of why we behave the way we do. But it is our thoughts, words, and actions in this moment that define us today and shape our tomorrow. The Daily Mind Tools are how you take that seriously in a practical way, every single day.
You Can Treat Depression and Anxiety Without Depending on Medication
This is not a promise and it is not a guarantee. If you are in a mental health crisis, please reach out to a qualified medical professional. What I am saying is something more modest and more real than a promise: many people who have struggled with depression and anxiety, including people who have been in therapy for years and people who have tried multiple medications, have found that working directly with the mind in a daily and disciplined way shifts something that other approaches had not reached.
Healing anxiety without medication is possible for a lot of people. Treating depression and anxiety together, at the level of the thought patterns that sustain them, is real work. It is not easy and it is not quick. But it is available to you, starting today, for free.
The Daily Mind Tools Are Yours for Free
I have put together one of my favorite Daily Mind Tools as a free download. I call it. “Morning Mantras.” The document includes the full set of exercises I use every day, with a short description of what each one is for. It also includes a blank version so you can write your own in your own voice and your own words, which allows you to personalize the practice.
They are not attempts at wishful thinking of creating positive outcomes. Mantras have been used over thousands of years by many ancient cultures. The word mantra comes from the Sanskrit language, which translates into “Mind tool.” Scientific studies have shown that the use of mantras produces improved mental health.
I recommend committing to seven days in a row before you decide whether they are working. At first, they may feel like words on a page. That is normal. Keep going. The mind builds strength through repetition the same way the body does, and the results tend to arrive quietly, before you have noticed them coming. I have used these practices to keep me free of depression for over thirty years. Drug-free. They can help you do the same.
Working With Me One-on-One
Sometimes it can become very difficult to work on ourselves even when we are given a great set of tools to use. The negative thought patterns are so engrained that there is energetic attachment to each one of them that can block us from making progress no matter how hard we try.
If this note finds you in this state, I invite you to explore working with me one-on-one to help you improve your mental health. I have over 18 years of professional experience in helping others just like you.
We learn how to map out the thoughts that are blocking you from healing and preventing you from creating your very best life possible.
We create a custom mind healing program to help you get your thoughts working for you instead against you.
We practice the techniques together so that you get to experience their effectiveness directly. This allows you to gain confidence and learn the practices for yourself.
Once you learn how effective the mind healing tools are, you have them ready to use anytime, anywhere for the rest of your life. You can share them with others to help them enrich their lives.
It’s time to take control of your life, instead of letting your mind be in control.
Change your thoughts and you change your life.
It begins with a phone conversation where you can learn more about my practices and I can learn more about your specific life challenges and the negative effects that they create in your life. There is never any judgement or sales pressure and all calls are 100% confidential.
Book a Free Consultation
Remote sessions available worldwide. No travel required. Full refund if I cannot help.
Mark Lemohr has been recognized and referred by the Albert Einstein College of Medicine (New York), Vancouver General Hospital, St. Paul’s Hospital, and Jackson Memorial Hospital (Miami).
Important notice:
Mark Lemohr is not a medical professional and does not provide medical diagnosis or treatment. Energy healing and shamanic healing are complementary spiritual practices intended to support overall wellbeing alongside, not instead of, licensed medical and mental health care. If you are experiencing a medical or mental health emergency, contact your local emergency services immediately.