Unexpected Advantage of Mindfulness

In the book ‘a million thoughts’ Swamiji mentions how most of the thoughts we have all day are not fruitful , they are just a repetition of the past playing like a cassete or a mental conversation(argument mostly) we have with someone. Excerpt is:

Every time a have an unresolved issue with a closed one, I catch myself thinking and having mental conversations about it. During my effort to be mindful today itself I caught my mind having an imaginary conversation about one such issue. In the imaginary conversation I was expressing my upset at the other party by telling about my feelings. The need is arising because the unresolved experience has some emotions stuck in it and as per Dandapani ji(another monk I listen to) If I manage to take that emotion out of the experience(catharsis of some sort) then It will no longer keep playing in head as much.

I have felt in the past that there have been times when I got very angry at someone for something and kept being very unsettled due to that for sometime. Now If I bursted out then there was first a sense of relief and then regret and sadness for the outburst but I will admit(with guilt) that the bad itcy feeling called anger did get released in the form of outburst although offcourse that is a very unhealthy way to get rid of it. Also there have been many times when I got angry and controlled myself by not saying anything hurtful but since the anger energy had already been created it played  havoc inside me.

Now coming to the point of the post. In past few days I have been making conscious effort to stay mindful during the day and In order to not go overboard I decided to do that only during work hours. Countless times I have caught myself having mental conversations ,mental arguments , imaginary future related images , random past thoughts and words replaying and it was still worth the effort because every time I became ‘aware’ of that mental conversation I put a stop to it and restarted my work.

Unexpected fruit of this exercise is that despite the long-term issues which are anyway not in my control they have occupied lesser real estate in my mind in past few days compared to before. When I had a long travel day I decided to not numb my mind with loud songs or meaningless videos I decided to watch my mind instead and It did the same thing again! It kept showing me image and having mental conversations.