Track Your Thoughts
“ If someone had the ability to read your thoughts for a day, how do you think their perception of you would change?”, posed an acquaintance over ice cream.
I paused to wonder, “What do I think?”
Popular culture says that we have 70,000 thoughts a day. Those thoughts can range from the insignificant, “ I want to try the raspberry sorbet today” to life changing ones such as “ Is it time for a career change?” Some thoughts are easy to recognise, but more often than not, we’re on auto-pilot.
It’s impossible to be present with your thoughts 100% of the time. Yet, it begs a question: if we wrote down every thought we had for just a day, what would our thoughts look like? Would they skew more positive or negative?
Raj Raghunathan, Associate Professor at The University of Texas Mccombs School of Business, asked his students do exactly that and write down their spontaneous thoughts for a day. Surprisingly, they found that 60–70% of their thoughts were negative, often revolving around topics of inferiority, love and approval, and control-seeking.
Backing this, Paul Rozin and Edward Royzman, Professors of Psychology from the University of Pennsylvania discovered that people have a general tendency towards negative interpretations despite an equal proportion of positive and negative events. This, they called negative dominance. Putting it into other words, we tend to interpret and remember events more negatively than reality. This is because as a species, we’re more attentive to and we learn faster and harder through negative experiences.
So despite a cool and positive outward appearance, most of us tend to run around with negative chatter in our minds. It makes sense from a psychological, evolutionary and cultural perspective that we have learned this as a survival technique. Yet, running around with a head full of negativity is toxic. Especially when your negative thoughts are not based on facts. You’ll end up living in a screwed up Bizarro world where you’ve cast yourself as the super villain.
As a frequent ruminator, I’m prone to deceptive thoughts. Sometimes I will back myself up into a corner of self doubt and insecurity. It turns out you shouldn’t believe everything you think because your thoughts can be misleading.
Having learnt to write down my thoughts when I feel overwhelmed, I’ve noticed that there are patterns and connections between the quality of my thoughts and my feelings. They may feel all over the place but instead, they’re usually revolving around in a big cycle of self criticism and worthlessness.
Let me give you an real case, one I struggled on whether to open up about my experiences with depression or not:
See how one thought leads to another and influences how I felt? You don’t need to read some book about the magic of thinking to know that what you think is what you believe. The quality of your thoughts determines the quality of your life.
The best way out of this is to apply the war strategy “divide and conquer”. Gain and maintain control of your life by breaking down the powerful storm in your mind into individual thoughts and corresponding feelings.
Using a systematic approach, logically address each negative thought from a 3rd person/ observer’s perspective. “ Will the people that matter really judge me having depression? The people I surround myself with because they are respectful and supportive people and shown nothing less than that. If they decided to judge me negatively then that’s their own decision. However, they’re probably not someone I need in my life”.
I also empathetically acknowledged my fears as an inbuilt security system trying to protect me from being hurt again. I cannot blame my subconsciousness for trying to preserve and protect myself. However, I also need to acknowledge that what my thoughts are screaming may not always be the best course of action and make decisions for myself.
It took months for me to decide to publically share about my experience with mental illness. I decided to do it in the end (and I’m glad I did). This happened largely though because I consciously wrote down my thoughts and addressed each one with logic and empathy.
With so much happening in our lives, it’s easier to be on auto-pilot with our thoughts. I understand. Yet, our thoughts can be deceptive and they can hinder us from moving forward. They can trap us into a cycle of insecurity, worthlessness and self criticism.
Becoming aware of your thoughts will take effort. Actively dividing them in to individual thoughts and countering them with logic and compassion can be tiring. But hopefully, what you can find through this is that it will be easier to breathe. That you can eventually free yourself from a downward spiral.
