Nothing is more annoying than a toothache.
It disrupts your sleep (because when you are at rest you tend to notice the pain more as your other senses have less stimulation), makes you constantly aware of it’s presence and may be the most annoying thing on Earth next to Gilbert Gottfried.
Mine usually pass after a few days, but there is minor relief until then in some old home remedies for toothaches. A hot wet tea bag next to the source of the toothache, rinsing with both warm salt water and a mixture of water and hydrogen peroxide and the disgusting but somewhat effective method of letting a Tylenol or aspirin melt next to the gums in the painful area.
Today, rinsing with the peroxide mixture, it occurred to me that a bad thought or negative persona is very similar to a pained tooth: The tooth usually causes great distress, especially in the quiet moments and additionally the methods we use to fix the issue usually solves nothing, it is only a mask, covering up the issue to avoid real forward action.
Like the tooth, the best method is removal of the bad thought completely, or at the very least repairing it so it is no longer so sensitive and causes no more discomfort.
Methods for doing this will change with what you read and take in, from the Buddhist method of just acknowledging the thoughts exist and letting them pass by like a floating leaf on the water to psychology where these rotten thoughts are examined and re-framed in cognitive therapy.
A pretty deep thought for one poised over the sink, looking ridiculous in the bathroom mirror as he swishes the mixture around his mouth for the recommended sixty seconds, but one that seemed appropriate, as I am sure we have all indulged our ‘sweet tooth’ for bad thoughts from time to time, even if we are seemingly the most put together person on the planet.
Getting angry at that reckless driver who cut you off in traffic on the way to work, getting irritated with the service at a restaurant or retail store, family members who you love dearly but if they do that one really annoying thing they do one more time…
On most of these daily little negative thought transgressions the enamel has already worn off, it was after all some of those little things, the small touches be they good or bad that really become the main theme of life.
However we keep the ‘bad’ events in us the same way we keep the good events, labeling them and filing them away for future use. Except they have no future use except to give us grief later on if not immediately in how they color our daily outlook.
Personally, I find using logic and reasoning against such incidents to work for me, although it can and has backfired at times, as the world does not work on logic most of the time.
Still, anything is better than a root canal, especially being in need of a mental one, brushing and flossing away those nasty thoughts as they arise is much easier when all is said and done.
