I've never been a fan of the phrase “pain is in the mind,” but if there's one thing I do agree with, it is that the mind is very powerful, and you can be surprised by the many things you can do with it if you do have a way to have total control over it.
You see, over here in my country, people always make a joke that whenever we're trying to sleep at home, we find even the tiniest form of noise to be distracting, meanwhile when we attend vigils at church, we tend to sleep peacefully, even with all the speakers blaring beside us.
I never really understood why that always happened because it has happened to me on multiple occasions, until I eventually came to the conclusion that it all has to do with the mind.
You see, because your body knows at those vigils that you don't have an option but to either endure the sounds coming from the speaker or not sleep at all, it immediately finds a way to adjust to it, in a way where the sound no longer acts as an obstacle to you having a good night's rest.
Unlike back at home, where your mind knows that you do have a choice to put an end to whatever it is that may be causing that noise in your home, and since you have that power to do that, your mind will remain restless until you go do something about that same.
Funny enough, the same thing happens to me too when fasting. There have been days when I've had to eat breakfast by 3pm in the afternoon, simply because I got distracted or just wasn't feeling hungry at all. But then, I noticed that whenever I had to fast on purpose (maybe due to a church prayer), I found myself struggling and starving before 12pm.
The difference between both situations is that in the first one, due to the fact that me not eating until 3pm was entirely my choice, and me knowing full well that I could eat whenever I wanted gave me that peace of mind, which in return also made me feel comfortable and not hungry.
Unlike the second scenario, where I know that I don't have power over when I want to eat, so my body becomes restless, and I find myself immediately feeling hungry, even though I know full well that I can't eat anything yet until it gets to a particular time.
When I think about these things, it fascinates me how powerful the mind is, but most importantly, how powerful we could be if we found a way to be totally in control of it.