How can I stop thinking about work constantly?

I work as a developer. Whenever I receive an email from someone complaining about something I did (mostly small things which happen rarely), I feel really bad and wouldn’t stop thinking about it for days. It’s killing me and sometimes I wouldn’t be able to sleep at all, because I feel really bad.

What is happening in your emotions is the tip of the iceberg.

In this world, from the beginning most people are conditioned to believe that they are not worthy as they are, and grow unaware that their innate worth doesn’t change no matter what happens.

We humans are taught to suffer emotionally when we don’t fit a certain definition/standard, over many many years, by people having the same core beliefs about life in their minds. Who we learn from act as if this whole setup is real because they actually believe it, so we come to believe it too, not being aware of deeper truths.

Geared towards working to prove our self worth by our profession or achievements, our focus remains turned mostly to outside and we remain aware of mostly the surface of our minds, remain mostly unaware of our emotions and deeper psyche.

It is as if we are witnessing exceptions arising from a complex software, but are taught only to try to deal with these exceptions by working on the surface level of interfaces. But if we learn to study the exceptions, we can see that the stack trace can be traced to the cause of the problems.

Your audible thoughts are like messages popping up from a complex software, except that the ‘software’ is running in your mind. It is your energetic conditioning. Your emotions are a result of your thoughts/beliefs.. basically your entire conditioning interacting with your perception of reality.

As a software developer, we work to debug software by examining it from various angles. By examining how the software is running, then by going into the execution step by step, working to become aware of where exactly within the program is the cause of the bug.

Similarly, to understand where our suffering arises from, we need to stay aware in the present moment, and see how our mind works by observing our thoughts, emotions.. basically everything that arises. A very important catch here is that while observing, we must not subscribe to the belief that we are the software. We must work to stay unidentified from the content of our mind. This way we don’t get carried along with the thoughts/emotions and fail to see the reality of the situation objectively. If we get identified and get carried along, we remain on the surface levels of the software, that tries to compensate for the deeper emotions we feel, but remain unaware of the core programming that creates the emotions that we run away from, kept hidden within ourselves.

When a programmer becomes aware of the source of a bug, they can easily fix it. Likewise, when we understand the source of our suffering, we can choose to live our lives in a way that won’t create this again. But usually, this takes patient inner observation to develop our understanding of ourselves.

The reason that this takes personal growth is, we haven’t developed our awareness to an extent yet that we are aware that we are the creator of our reality, we have been taught to identify with only a small portion of ourselves; our audible thoughts/bodies/perhaps some emotions. However, we are the awareness that all of this is happening in. We are both the programmer of the software, and the container that the software runs in, and the user of the software who experiences how the software works.

This article below teaches how to understand ourselves as the awareness that all this reality is happening within. As we learn to live ourselves from this awareness, the root causes that create our suffering are addressed. In the beginning of this answer I had written that we come to be conditioned to believe (over a very long period) that we are not worthy as we are unless we fulfill a certain set of conditions with all the implicit and explicit expression of the society. When we discover through meditation that we are the awareness and not the content occurring within us, that all this content is temporary and constantly changing, and that we can feel the unconditional love in the depth of ourselves any time we desire.. that it is our true nature.. we become free of this belief of unworthiness programmed into our minds.. We understand the core programming behind it, and we can live our lives by upgrading the programming henceforth. Our suffering.. the exceptions that keep arising cease.. after a period of purification, a period of becoming aware of the entire tree of the programming and a period where the energetic momentum of the previous programming is let to die out.

What is meditation? How to practice meditation.

Initially, it is shocking to awaken to these deeper realities. The terminology will appear foreign initially. It will take some time to get used to it.

Establish a daily practice of meditation, and if you work patiently, you will gradually develop your understanding about your issues, and discover that you can transcend them all and experience yourself as the creator of your life.

You can refer to Higher Consciousness Spiritual Teachings & Guided Meditations ” Channel Higher Self (the search option is a feature that links to a broad number of topics) for any additional questions that may arise while you are working to evolve your understanding. To make sense of all this, correct conceptual understanding from a good source is very helpful, but you can alleviate your suffering only through actually working to understand your mind, which is learning to live as the programmer/container, the creator of our reality. This is learned through a meditative lifestyle, and that article describes it concisely and accurately; it is an excellent starting point.