Don't Believe Everything You Think: Why Your Thinking Is The Beginning & End Of Suffering (Beyond Suffering Book 1)

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Oftentimes, these are “should” thoughts. (e.g. “The world should be different,” or “My significant other should act in a different way.”) One minute you might be feeling down about a challenge at work, and the next minute you’re laughing at the joke of a friend.

For the sake of example, let’s say you were feeling upset with your friend Jane, and had the thought “Jane should be nicer to me.”It would probably be more accurate to say that some Republicans don’t care about poor people (I’m looking at you Wilbur Ross), some Republicans believe that the free market is the best way to help the poor, and some Republicans are themselves poor. Is it Helpful? Examine what you do to yourself by choosing to hold on to and believe the thought. Does the thought create peace or stress? What emotions and physical sensations arise when you believe this thought? If you can learn to get more control over your thoughts, then you’ll tend to have better emotions and better responses to your emotions. You’ll also have an easier time doing the things you need to do. After all, some of your thoughts are excuses. When examining one of your thoughts, the first consideration is whether or not the thought is valid. Here are some questions you can ask yourself to help with this:

But when you hold on to your thoughts as if they are the utmost truth, unpleasant feelings are sure to follow. You can’t always control when these thoughts will surface. But you can develop strategies for responding to them in a way that doesn’t bring you down.

You might feel insistent that this thought is true! If it really does feels true at first glance, inquire again. Can you really know that it’s true? Be honest with yourself. One is that we like being right. It’s uncomfortable to discover that one of your thoughts is, in fact, wrong. So rather than open-mindedly examining the validity of our thoughts, we usually prefer to just assume we’re right and move on. But if our habitual thoughts routinely lead to unhappy outcomes, then we need to do the uncomfortable work of examining those thoughts. Some thoughts appear in an instant. Others are reoccurring, and represent a longer-standing narrative in your mind.

For example, a Democrat might have the thought, Republicans don’t care about poor people. Now, there is evidence to support this viewpoint: the gutting of social programs that benefit lower-income individuals, the sabotaging of the Affordable Care Act, big tax breaks for the rich, and so on. But there is counter-evidence as well. Many Republicans genuinely believe that free-market capitalism and private enterprise will improve the economic prospects of poor people more than government support will. Plus, a lot of poor people vote Republican, and it’s probably safe to assume they care about themselves. Now, if you find that your thoughts aren’t valid or aren’t helpful, you’ll want to replace them with better thoughts. Here are some questions you can use to help with that: What do I mean by that? I mean developing a better relationship with your thoughts. I mean recognizing and altering your habitual patterns of thought. I mean developing better habits of thought. Most of the time, your thoughts are just a story you tell yourself to make sense of the world. It’s all based on your interpretation of the world around you. Not some universal truth about reality. Even if our thoughts are valid, they still might not be helpful. Just because a thought is true and logical does not mean you want to act on it, embody it, or allow it to occupy your mind. Here are some questions you can ask yourself to help determine whether or not a thought is helpful:Now, turning that statement around in three ways, consider how the following are as true, or truer. Noting what arises in your mind has a host of benefits. It helps you stay present and see the contents of your consciousness more clearly. This creates space between you and the thoughts you experience, which gives you more power to act with intention. The fundamental truth that gives you these powers is that your thoughts are not always true, so you don’t have to believe them. Don’t Believe Everything you Think Consider what it would be like if you let go of this thought that brings you down. How would you feel? The irony of this situation is that everyone talks to themselves all day long. You just don’t verbalize this dialogue, so it isn’t heard by others.