Paranoia Help

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I think everything is correlated and related and connected. How do I stop this sort of thinking?

Seek the advice of an appropriately-trained and licensed mental-health professional.

I see a psychiatrest and therapist twice a month. I believe I am seeing messages from the TV and the internet. I believe everyone sets up cameras in my room and everywhere I go and watches me. It has made me paranoid and I know it is fake. I take medication daily and my family has agreed that it is at its peak at the moment. I made sure to have lunch and dinner but forgot about my breakfast. I went to bed last night at 11 and woke up at 7 in the morning. I am keeping up with my grades. I just do not like having to be paranoid everyday because I know it is fake and not real but it is indeed annoying. The train of paranoia starts when I make a mistake and I start believing the other stranger who is talking to me has a hidden agenda. I don't like it and it feels fake. There are some days when I try to sit in peace and listen in class and sometimes I hear hallucinations, which is not fun either. Like right now I believe you guys are watching me outside of the internet. It isn't fun. I do try to talk to my psychiatrest and therapist about my issues.

It's a good sign that you recognize it's your mind playing tricks on you.

I will PM you.

Like I was saying earlier O.P, inner anxiety issues are masked from a deep central nervous system response. I have studied a bit of Sociology, and okay, whilst it isn't science, it programmes and channels your thinking on a higher level.
So, whilst this may be hard to believe there aren't some hidden voices inside your head screaming to get out, trust your inner voice about all these other voice and noise, and start to notice yourself through the interactive differences or direct actions, you appear to have on other people. You could be highly determined, anxious, intelligent, shy or even very resourceful.
Use your gift of sight wisely, trust your inner powers of perception, work through the brainwaves and channels of heightened feelings of mind pretence and practice yoga and try deep, shallow breaths. Find a casual, but focused yoga instructor and try other breathing exercises if these don't work. You'll soon feel better.

To Zack, it is good you are reaching out to people. That is an act of connection. You may even end up helping some people beside yourself. Here is a direct antidote that is easy to try: when any of these disturbing thoughts/feelings come up,(which they invariably will for a little while, because it is at this point, to some degree, a habit that is conditioned into your functioning), bring your focus back into the body by deliberately experiencing sensation* in a particular part of your body, preferably the area right above your navel* as this is the center of your body, but it could be your foot or your hand or your thumb. This will serve as a grounder.* As a matter of fact and simple as pie. Do not connect any thoughts or feelings to the experiencing of this sensation. It is simply an antidote, nothing more.

It IS good that you realize the voices and other such affects are not real, but you already know this, so by thinking about the voices or whatever any further, in a way would be kind of like feeding the 'troll' and subtly reinforcing the affect. This different approach or antidote could be effective because it takes the focus away from what is not practical and brings your attention back into the body so you can do and enjoy in your life what you need to do. If you try this, hope you will let us know. Actually I will trying it, too, starting now, as I have been going through something not exactly the same, but kind of similar.

I have suffered from paranoia before. I saw connections everywhere and messages on the TV and internet. Also, every time I looked at the clock all the numbers would be the same. Ever since I moved out on my own and started taking antipsychotics I dont think everything is connected anymore. Im not sure if I really need the medication. When I was seeing all these coinsidences I was under a lot off stress. I was being abused and thought I was going to end up homeless.

What you have described sounds like schizophrenia, especially if you have been having auditory hallucinations. Its good that you dont believe them though. Like you said it is fake. I thought my hallucinations were somewhat fake too but they still stressed me out. So I dont know you might need some kind of medication.

"I think everything is correlated and related and connected. How do I stop this sort of thinking?"

So, to continue with my two cents: thinking does NOT stop thinking, so do not even try to stop thinking, as that is a thought; however, one can go to another part of ones functioning, the body, and deliberately put the attention there. This would diffuse the tendency toward excess up-in-the air thinking. For example, simply focus on what one is doing, experience the sensation of where the foot is touching the ground and/or the hand is touching the object, the dish you are washing, the pen as you write, the keyboard. You can do this and still type; it grounds the excess energy.

This said, it is work, and what if what a person is doing represents something else, but there is not a conscious awareness of this? For instance doing something to succeed can also mean other things to someone. By the way, is not necessary to always succeed. That can put a lot of pressure on a human being in that a person has to always keep preforming, so it is like oneself is being taken away from oneself, even by someone, but if the latter is true, then who is that someone? If I do not know who the someone or 'someone' is, I can pretend to know, but that would be making a false correlation, and what if the someone or someones putting pressure on oneself do not even know they are doing so, or, even if they do know, cannot stop. What if their motives are mixed and what if what they are doing also represents to them something else? This is probably the case, as usually things mean more than one thing to most anyone, so there is no way to exactly figure everything out.

So I suggest trying to find ones internal magnetic tape which connects to where a person is going, not later, not ones greater goal, but now. The greater plan is already built into taking the smaller more immediate movement. If a person is walking across a room to get a glass of water and consciously knows he is doing so instead of just functioning like a robot, then that orienting is like a good magnet. It does not take anything away, just connects a person back to the ground. Thinking floating around upstairs is not magnetic. Though there could be a little magnet there, it is not big enough and would be a lopsided orientation. The magnetic tape of physical movement is connected to sensation,so is much stronger, This would be entering a different world in that everything is connected back to the ground. It is like finding earth, ones true home. Of course a person would have to give something up in order to do so, but what is received though sensation is being of being grounded. That is helpful because energy is not leaking. There is a possibility to function in a simple and rewarding way, but it would need to be reinforced by practice.

To Sarahsmith, you wrote:

^ That's not the type of connected he's talking about dude.

Thanks, SaveFerris. Agreed. I think what the OP meant , and please correct me if I am wrong is not that everything is not interdependent, but that he was seeing direct cause and effect correlations between objects ,events, and maybe even thinking processes that he knows in reality do not exist in this way. And a person could experience paranoia because of that. An example of this re the thinking process would be thinking it is going to rain and then right after that it starts to rain, so the person thinks/feels he himself caused the rain. I think that is a form of magical thinking.

To the op or anyone, what I wrote about taking meds was not to suggest that a particular person should or should not take meds, but just to suggest to at least read up on the literature about this, and also about the recovery rates from schizophrenia, that kind of thing.

Also, a little more on the subject of auditory hallucinations--my opinion---if you know it is fake you are already ahead of the game, and yet if a person is experiencing this kind of phenomena, as I previously suggested, it is good to be proactive in ones response. I believe that trying to turn off this kind of thinking process by so called "not" thinking about it can on some level can reinforce the dynamic, as resistance can play into strengthening the pattern. This is why I suggested working with sensation, as it is grounding, and it is easy and even kind of fun or at least interesting, and definitely benign, to establish a sensory subject/object relationship between two different areas of the body. Over course do not interpret the results or read any meaning into it. Just register that the sensory fact of the experience. Once you start to interpret the sensation, that opens a door to the experiencing of the previous mental process. Another possible suggestion, if you do think then try to think in a new way that has more grip, such as try to ficure out what a proverb means by pondering.

I am not a social worker or psychologist, just a very friendly person, and I have talked to many schizophrenics on my job over some decades, almost all of them male, and have made some interesting observations, some of which I will share later, maybe.

To the OP and any of us, I would seriously at least consider that stress, both internal and external, is behind a lot of different kinds of physical and psychological symptoms.

I agree with the above...especially the notion that stress exacerbates pre-existing neurological and psychiatric disorders.