Everytime I have anxiety I catch myself spiraling down harmful thoughts in a never ending stream of fear, sadness and worry.
For a second, I'm able to abstract myself from all those thoughts and look at it from outside the vortex, and say: "Wow, my brain really enjoys seeing me suffer or something.".
And from those experiences I realized, that thoughts and consciousness are different things.

Thoughts really seem to be the noise of your brain activity, just sparks of electricity, treading common connections, generating streams of thoughts within the context and information held by those neurons in the way... Or so I imagine, please understand I have no idea how a brain works, and I doubt anyone really knows how they work to that level of detail.

And then, the consciousness seems to be a layer of abstraction above, that exists in, or outside those trains of thoughts. Ourselves.

We can often find ourselves drifting along our thought streams, not really paying attention and just letting the noise guide us.
At least I don't pay attention to everything I do.
Things like showering, eating, and many other tasks, I just do without consciously thinking about it.

It also seems like the consciousness can bring thoughts to the surface, like when we decide to think about a specific thing.
But even that is a bit blurry, because, how did we get the idea of thinking about that specific thing? Did the consciousness do it? Or was it just a random thought that we decided to anchor to?

The brain really is an amazing machine is it not?

I wonder if people that go insane are just people that have lost the consciousness part of the mind, and are just forever drifting between spontaneous thought geisers that burst all over their minds, unable to abstract themselves and realize that it's just their brain tricking them.

Anyway.
Every time I catch myself having anxious thoughts, I feel very lucky to be able to see it from the outside and realize that it's just that, that I'm not in any danger, and that like every other anxiety episode I've had. It will also pass.

Thanks a lot for reading.
Much love.

Strelly.