How The Way You Think Affects Every Aspect of Your Life
Everything Begins In The Brain
For centuries humankind has been evolving, thriving, suffering, and everything in between.
If you were to travel back in time, to the days of the Cro-Magnons and Neanderthals', life was a bit different than the one we experience today. On one hand, it was a much simpler life, basic instincts of survival dictating how we felt and lived.
On the other, it was a vastly complex and deadly (even by today’s standard with modern politics and ICBM missiles) life, filled with the constant threat of death and the stark reality of having to ‘hunt and gather’ enough food and water to sustain yourself and family.
In those days, I doubt people thought much about how felt emotionally, or what Jane in 7th-period math class would think about the outfit you were going to wear. It was a much more visceral existence, where the weak died and the strong thrived.
No room for emotionally insecure people in the village. They were a liability.
Humankind As It Stands Today
With the year 2020 coming to an end, and 2021 on the horizon, we live in a world that would not be the least bit recognizable to our ancestors just a few generations past, let alone all the way back to the earliest days of existence we know of.
Today we face many different problems and life challenges than our ancient ancestors had.
Most of the world doesn’t have to think twice about food, and even the countries that do struggle with it don’t have to go out and hunting all day every day and locate a new well every few weeks to replenish the village water supply. Well, at least a good 90% of the world anyway.
There remain places and peoples we have yet to lay our eyes upon in this still alien planet we inhabit.
That’s beside the point, what I’m eluding to is the fact that today, a human can have a belly full of food, warm shelter, a mate, and just about any other thing that was once considered a luxury or a dire necessity.
Humans of today face such vastly different problems due to the lack of having to really fight for survival in life. We became the apex predator of the world and it made us soft.
Before I offend someone with this next part, by soft I simply am trying to paint a vivid picture. Prove a point. For example, something that cavemen or a lion maybe doesn’t deal with depression.
Today a human may get depressed. Once depressed the will to live starts to dwindle and the person sometimes can’t pull through and unfortunately takes their own lives.
Other times they simply live in silent misery, with a fake smile, projecting a false sense of security outward so that their family and peers don't worry about them. At other times, severe anxiety will overtake people, causing them to isolate and never explore the world and at times even denying themselves the fulfilling experience of raising a family, falling in love.
When people fall into these patterns of thought and emotion, it can harm them in a number of different ways, other than what we are taught by radiational standards. Physical ailments can manifest from severe depression and anxiety, and unknown to the person at the time, this can usually be traced back to a single thought. It may sound like an extraordinary claim, that a single thought can turn into severe depression, leading to physical symptoms and if left untreated cause permeant damage or even death.
Think about it for a second. You don’t just wake up depressed one day. It also doesn’t happen because of some grand and tragic event occurring in your daily life, like some teenage high school drama movie. It usually occurs over an extended period of time and stems from a single thought or emotion that you had in reaction to an event, person, some piece of news you were told, etc.
You may have gotten rejected by a girl at a high school dance, and although it stung a little bit, another was there and willing to dance. You may have even enjoyed yourself that night.
Never once thinking that at that moment of rejection, when your stomach knotted up for a second, and embarrassment and anxiety set in, that in the back of your subconscious the memory of that rejection and the subsequent feeling you associated with it will live and wait, for the day that your brain gets triggered with yet another stimulus.
Then another, and another, until you start to feel slightly sad and discontent.
It had begun to build in power and influence, in the depths of your subconscious, waiting for the final push to break it free and wreak havoc on your life, sometimes with as much as 10 years or more of time passing between the original thought and the resulting depression.
Trauma Runs Deep And Can Come From The Past To The Present In An Instant
I am no doctor, nor am I a psychologist, and I do not claim to have some deep understanding of this topic or insights into the human brain that the world’s most foremost neurosurgeons and scientists don’t have.
I’m simply relaying to you what I have observed throughout my own life and experiences, and through what others have told me about their past and the things that happened to them.
If you listen to people’s experiences, and you know them well enough to know what they’re like on a daily basis, you will notice that sometimes it clicks when they tell you a certain thing.
For example, your friend may tell you about the girlfriend who cheated on him in his freshman year of high school, and another time he may tell you how his dad cheated on his mother and cause them to get a divorce. Equipped with this knowledge of his past, you think about the person standing before for, and who they are. How they act towards people and situations. Their capacity for trust and empathy. Perhaps this person has trust issues because of his father’s behavior and getting his poor little 9th-grade heart stomped on by Jane in 7th-period math class.
I understand that this is not a new concept, and doctors and psychologists have known this for years and have treated it with therapy and medications in severe cases. That’s not what I’m talking about here. Most modern theories surrounding this have the base belief that some traumatic event happened in you’re past, which is manifesting itself now in your adult years of life. What I’m suggesting is that perhaps there is more to it. Or rather, less to it.
It doesn’t have to be a memory of a battlefield in some war in a faraway land, or a horribly tragic memory of a family member killing themselves. You get the point.
It can be such a small, and at the time not even noticed or relevant thought or reaction to a person, place, or thing, that ultimately left a small memory in your deep subconscious. Years it sat in wait, lurking on the fridge of your mind's consciousness.
Slowly building power, taking over your mind. It fed on your life’s experiences, little by little, until one day it came bursting out of you, causing you to behave in an erratic way.
Perhaps you suddenly became violent when provoked by a small and simple thing that would normally never have bothered you.
Maybe a very seemingly insignificant situation occurred at work with your co-workers, something embarrassing and you became depressed. Reclusive and lonely, losing weight and cutting people off from your life.
Your co-workers are all thinking, “But it was just a joke.” “You usually have such thick skin. I mean, shoot man, isn’t he usually the one who is making fun of people?”
Maybe it continues to get worse, you never seek help.
Perhaps it causes you to take your own life…
This Is All Too Real And Often Goes Unaddressed Until It’s Too Late
There are other things besides depression, anxiety, and premature death that harboring these thoughts and emotions can cause. There have been studies that suggest the way we feel and the thoughts we have are inseparable.
Thoughts left unchecked can cause physical symptoms on top of the mental and emotional ones already present. Disease, cancer, weight loss or gain, lack of energy. Maybe you just a general feeling of discontent and misery in your day-to-day life.
Life Is To Short And The Solution Much To Simple
Look, I am not diminishing the severity of depression, anxiety, and mental/emotional illness with a subtitle that says the solution is much too simple.
Rather, I’m suggesting that it is do-able. Although it may be harder to accomplish in some aspects, it’s easy relative to some of the other obstacles that humankind has overcome.
Take being a few links from the top of the food chain to becoming the dominant Apex Predator in nature, or dealing with famines and mass plagues, world wars, and natural disasters that are growing larger and more frequent each and every year, and the list goes on.
In fact, that list could become an article unto itself it’s such an issue and important factor in the lies of all living creatures on our little blue planet.
It’s hard to imagine, but if you begin to control your thoughts, regulate you’re emotions, and process the ones that occurred earlier in life to make sure that they aren’t holding the bag for a potential breakdown later in life, you will begin to experience to general feeling relief and happiness. The feeling that you get once you master self-control, and learn to regulate and decipher your thoughts to uncover the reason your brain formed it in the first place, is one that you will have to discover for yourself. It is indescribable.
As For Me
So many long, miserable, and drawn-out years I spent feeling sad. I had no energy, and it did not matter how things were external. I had a house, family, kids, dogs, nice car… anything that a person might think will bring some joy into their life, I had it. Yet no joy did I feel. I was tired all the time, sometimes not enough energy to rise out of bed.
At others, I would be sitting there with my laptop, but just staring at the screen thinking, not about anything profound or particular, mostly about how bored I was and yet did not feel like using the computer. I would have a book nearby and not want to read it, and x-box yet the thought of turning it on felt like a chore that I was in absolutely no way shape, or form going to follow through with, epically because then I’d have to play it… And… I just didn’t want to.
It was a horrible dilemma and a constant conflict going on inside of me every day. I would be restless, irritable, and discontent when I woke up in the morning.
While sitting on the couch in front of the TV, and all the aforementioned ‘luxuries’ I had readily available for use whenever I wanted, (when so many people all over the world would have been happy with just the book that isn’t ripped and stained, actually readable), yet I couldn’t even find the motivation to use them.
Something had to be done about this because I was getting to the point, (although at the time I had not known this), of having that preverbal “monster” break fee from the prison my mind's subconscious had built up without letting me know or giving me a spare key.
I was miserable, plain and simple, and it wasn’t fair to myself, or the people around me. Most important though, and ultimately the reason I finally did gather the courage and dedication, (I say dedication because, even with this sudden burst of action, I was still not motivated to follow through), to make the moral inventory of myself, and start to dig for the root of why I felt this way.
I began to list all of the things that made me angry. Like the people who I thought wronged me and the aspects of life and the world that needed to change, (because I did not like them so therefore they had to be wrong) when suddenly I realized that I was basically doing the 4th step.
Anyone reading this who does not know what a 4th step is, this is the 4th step of 12, in the program of Alcoholics Anonymous.
I have had addiction problems, even went through the 12 steps before, but doing a ‘4th’ step, was not what was required this time. What I needed was to figure out what (if any) thoughts/memories, I had filed away in my brain. The best, or at least quickest and easiest way to accomplish this, is probably to write out a journal/memoir.
You don’t have to write an autobiography but just go through your life from your earliest memories you have, write out the most influential memories for each year,(good and bad), then go through them. It’s kind of like going through your life in a strange way. When you come across a memory that seems significant, mark it, leave a note. Anything really.
There is really no sure way to do this, and ultimately the goal of what I am trying to get people to do is simply be aware that thoughts can, and will ultimately influence your life, health, and the overall state of mental and emotional wellness.
Happy Thoughts Equals A Happy Life
Remember, I am not a Psychologist. One thing I am an expert on though is my own mental state and how I feel. As you are the master of you’re own thought process and mental awareness. You’ll have to figure out a way that suits your own needs. Tweak my idea, make it your own. Contribute to the theory I have and improve upon it. Perhaps even try to help someone else with this process, and then they themselves will tweak it and improve it, until one day, hopefully, we have a solution to end temporary self-induced mental and emotional instability, which left untreated will cause much larger and severe issues later in your life.
I say self-induced because there are two types of mental and emotional states like the ones we have discussed. Type one, (as I’ll call it for argument's sake), is not a choice. It may have no underlying cause and be completely genetic and/or a chemical imbalance that a person was born with, severe cases of PTSD, etc.
Those are legitimate mental issues that are serious and should be diagnosed and treated by a medical professional. Something I am not. Now, do I believe that this can help those individuals as well?
Absolutely
I am simply stating that this is more for people, (type 2 for lack of another word) who let thoughts and emotions go unchecked for years, either knowingly or unknowingly, and then they fester and grow into unmanageable situations, and in the most severe cases, lasting long-term depression and health issues.
In my own personal life, once I became aware of my thoughts and emotions, I have noticed such dramatic improvements that it is undeniable to anyone who knows me that something has changed. I had a girlfriend who I loved dearly and who ultimately cheated on me with my best friend.
Was that my fault?
No.
Did I have a role to play in it?
Absolutely I did.
Once I knew what to look for and learned this simple concept that I am talking about here. I had another girlfriend do something similar, although it didn’t hurt as much, and was over 15 years ago in grade school. My father cheated on my mother. I have also seen many people, men and women, cheat on their significant others behind their backs, or have heard the story from one of them.
These stories and experiences started to leave behind driblets of doubt in the back of my mind.
Thoughts
Every time I heard another story, I thought to myself, even briefly, “People are unreliable and unfaithful.”
Thinking this over and over again throughout life, started to reinforce the idea in the back of my mind and subconscious, and ultimately, every time I entered a new relationship from that point on… Can you guess how I acted and how the day-to-day played out?
“Where were you? You said you were going to lunch with your girlfriends, it’s 10 pm?” “Let me see you’re phone!” Etc. Etc. You get the drift. It may not be my fault that she cheated on me, but my emotional state, constant jealously and suspicions, and from past thoughts of past relationships and of past people in my past life found their way into my future and current life, causing me to react in sometimes irrational ways.
It needed to be dealt with, and a notebook and pen, a few hours alone to think, and some honest and thorough self-inventory and searching will go a very long way in doing so.
Thanks for reading, and I hope this helps someone.
If it helps one person then I would definitely feel better and that I had accomplished something. Stay safe, and remember, 7th. period Jane from math class might be the reason you’re so fucking exhausted at 12 pm.
