Training the Ego: Working With Ego

“Thoughtless or thoughtful?” by Joe K Gage is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0

Working with Ego – A mind without thoughts

Lesson Sixteen

Before we start this lesson, let’s take a moment to watch this video, and settle our mind.

A helpful way to understand “ego” here is: the part of your mind that keeps talking, judging, worrying, and trying to protect you, even when you don’t need it to. Working with your ego is mostly about learning how to notice that constant inner chatter and gently turn the volume down, so you can think and feel more clearly.

Why Quieting the Mind Matters

The first step is learning to quiet the mind, or at least to slow it down.

For many people this is hard, especially if overthinking and worry have been a habit for years. Some people also live with more intense, obsessive thoughts; for them, silence might not be possible right away, but even reducing the “automatic” worry can still make a real difference.

The key idea: you do not need to completely stop all thoughts to make progress. Even a small gap between thoughts, or noticing them sooner, is already a win.

How the Ego Creates Problems

The ego can develop a habit of keeping you thinking all the time. That can start in school, where having a “busy” mind is rewarded, but later it can turn into:

Struggling to “switch off,” especially at night
Getting pulled out of conversations because your mind is elsewhere
Constantly worrying about what might go wrong in the future
Making it hard to focus on anything more complex than very simple tasks

When this gets extreme, it can feed anxiety and low mood, because you are repeatedly imagining negative outcomes and living them in your head before anything has even happened.

Stopping Unhelpful Thought Loops

There are two broad ways people try to handle these thought loops:

Using logic to challenge the thoughts

Some people respond to worrying thoughts by arguing with them logically, for example:

“This worst‑case scenario isn’t guaranteed.”
“I’m predicting the future without evidence.”

This can help, but there is a trap: you can end up thinking a lot about your thoughts, and worrying about whether you are defeating them properly. In other words, you start “thinking about not thinking,” which keeps the ego busy in a different way.

Using healthy distractions (recommended here)

Another approach is to give your attention something simple and absorbing to rest on, so the worrying thoughts fade into the background. For example:

Listening very closely to a piece of music
Paying careful attention to a sensory experience (the feel of your feet on the floor, your breathing, the sounds in the room)
Doing a focused activity (drawing, gentle exercise, cooking) and really noticing each step

The goal is not to “win an argument” with your thoughts, but to stop feeding them attention. When your mind wanders back to worry, you gently bring it back to the activity. Over time, this teaches your ego that it does not have to run the show 24/7.

Returning to the Present (“the Now”)

A core idea behind all of this is that constant thinking about the future, other people’s motives, or past mistakes pulls you away from what is happening right now. When your attention is stuck in those mental stories, you are not really living in the present moment.

Working with your ego is not about destroying it; it is about:

Seeing when it is over‑protecting you with endless “what ifs”
Choosing to come back to the present (the task, the person, the music in front of you)
Letting go, even briefly, of the need to control every possible outcome with thought

If it feels impossible to quiet your mind completely, that does not mean you’re failing. Start with tiny steps: noticing one worry, choosing one healthy distraction, or giving yourself one small moment of full attention to the present. Those small moments add up and gradually loosen the grip of an overactive ego.

Lesson Affirmation

I will quieten my mind

Lesson Video

Appendix: Additional Notes

Show Additional Notes

Now that I’ve laid out the basic principles of ego management it is probably wise if I look into the practicalities of working through this process, to give you an idea of some of the activities that you can do as practical exercises to help you master your ego quicker.

The first task is to quieten the mind. This is perhaps the hardest task, since the first task and the concepts that I have introduced may be unfamiliar to you.

There is also a caveat: Not everyone will be able to quieten the mind by following these steps, some people have ego challenges that run deeper than simply learnt behaviour that can cause intense obsessive thoughts that are seemingly impossible to stop.

I will be covering these issues later, so be assured if you find it impossible to quieten the mind at this stage, there are other solutions coming.

Also be aware though, that there’s always something that can be done. For example, automatic thoughts can be stopped, even if the obsessive thoughts can’t at this time. That, in itself, csn be a marked improvement.

Ego’s Bad Habits

One of the bad habits the ego can pick up is that it can constantly keep you thinking about things. This is often picked up from school where it can be seen as beneficial to have an active mind, however when this habit carries over into adult life it can cause significant problems.

For example, you can find yourself unable to “switch off”, interrupting sleep, distracting you from conversations and normal day to day thoughts and activities. It can also mean you constantly worry about things; projecting negative outcomes into your future. This can be a serious cause of depression and it can actually help manifest these negative outcomes into your life.

It also means that you can be easily distracted and unable to concentrate on anything other than the simplest of tasks.

Stopping Thoughts

There are a number of techniques you can use to stop these thought patterns, often people defeat worrying thoughts by holding a simple logic to defeat the thought, for example, remembering that any general worry, or even a constant hope can cause problematic outcomes for the future: Because they get in the way of living in the “now”. In short by thinking too much about the future, or of other people’s actions you end up sacrifice your attention on what is important – the “now”.

Distract rather than Defeat with Logic

Many people faced with anxiety caused by over thinking, at first tend to defeat those thoughts by finding solid logical reasons as to why those thoughts should not happen. They work hard to make sure that every time the mind slips into those thought-patterns they stop them with the defeating logic.

Another approach, one that I encourage is by the use of distractions. In the case of my example of listening to music intently: this is a distraction from thinking completely and I find it more beneficial, as it avoids the trap of thinking too much about not thinking. Which sounds odd, but it happens.