The world is chaotic. Layers upon layers of information are bombarded onto every second. This is the age of information. Knowledge condensed into concise chunks piling up like a mountain. It is natural that this can be stressful. And it looks like the amount of information will not lessen in the future so it's important to explore ways to reduce the chaos in our minds.

I shall now impart to you how I handle the stress. Note, this is not a guide or something you must follow, these are merely my personal experiences. There are plenty of guides out on the internet but I hope this post will provide new info.

I will begin with my meditation journey. This begun during the last year of high school, where I was particularly worried about my end of year exams. I begun by simply 'emptying' my mind for a few minutes each day. Unfortunately, this did not work, my mind was already under too much pressure from anxiety - this only aggravated it. I took a step back, having previously suffered from an insane video game addiction, I tried to adopt a similar method to the one I used to break the addiction. I replaced the rampant thoughts with a single word, 'empty'. By concentrating on that word I was able to gain greater control and space over my mind.

This control and power of the mind felt extremely refreshing and I decided to take another step - controlling my dreams (the ones you have during your sleep). This took alot of effort and I often woke up with headaches. At first, I tried to imagine entire scenes but soon realised this was too hard as I had to imagine all 5 senses for each individual item and think of a way to proceed. Instead I tried visualizing single objects in natural dreams. E.g a gun if I was being chased in a nightmare.

Then, I gradually increased the number objects until I could imagine whole scenes. This gave me another layer of control over my mind and also helped me understand real life objects in a more spritual way. However, I do not recommend attempting this as making your dreams too realistic can blur the line between dreams and reality.