How seriously should thoughts be taken?
How important are thoughts? Reading the quotes from these heavy-hitters below, you would assume that thoughts should be regarded with the utmost seriousness.
“Watch your thoughts, they become your words; watch your words, they become your actions; watch your actions, they become your habits; watch your habits, they become your character; watch your character, it becomes your destiny.” ― Lao Tzu
”Our life is what our thoughts make it.” ― Marcus Aurelius
“The ancestor to every action is a thought.” ― Ralph Waldo Emerson
For a long time, quotes like these led me to believe that what I needed to do was control my thoughts. Any time negative thoughts came up, especially the thoughts my religion deemed evil -- like sex -- I would do everything I could to banish them immediately. While this kind of policing of thoughts was manageable at first, albeit exhausting, in the long run the policing evolved into rumination and this rumination eventually led to anxiety, depression and spiraling anxiety attacks. Dr. Michael Greenberg’s definition of rumination fits well with what I was attempting to do: engaging mentally in an effort to ‘solve’ them. I felt like I was constantly losing the war against my mind and as a result, thoughts were ruining my life just like those quotes above warned about.
The first thing that helped me decrease my anxiety was an incredible insight from the book, Overcoming Unwanted Intrusive Thoughts: A CBT-Based Guide to Getting Over Frightening, Obsessive, or Disturbing Thoughts. At one point it says, “thoughts are meaningless and harmless, and don’t require controlling.” Thoughts are meaningless?! I’d never read a claim that stood in such stark contrast to what I thought I understood about thoughts.
Coming to accept that thoughts were meaningless was an incredible relief. This led me to believe that thoughts were in fact meaningless. After that, it was easy to treat threatening thoughts in the appropriate way - just how you would treat anything that was meaningless: allowing it to just be there, not wishing it was gone and not giving it any attention or response. I learned to treat thoughts like walking past a telephone pole - there’s the telephone pole, I’ve seen thousands of them in my life, no cause for alarm here...and now the telephone pole is gone.
To quote the book:
“Techniques for ridding yourself, bypassing or avoiding unwanted intrusive thoughts are attempts at control. The problem is that attempts to control are prime examples of paradoxical efforts that are guaranteed to increase entanglement. Trying to control thoughts is entirely the wrong attitude. It ignores the fact that the thoughts are meaningless and harmless, and don’t require controlling. The attempt to control them reinforces the wrong message. It is an example of paradoxical effort; it worlds backward. It suggests urgency, importance, and danger, when none exists.”
This lines up with Dr. Michael Greenberg’s solution ruminating:
“Identify a problem that you usually ruminate about. Your job is to not try to solve that problem. Don’t try to push it out of your mind or forget about it. Don’t actively try to keep it in mind either. It can be there or not be there; it doesn’t matter. Your job is to not try to solve it.”
So what are all those quotes about the supremacy of thoughts talking about? I think what they are alluding to is not controlling thoughts, but actively choosing the information you give your mind to think about.
Paul Graham, in an essay titled, The Top Idea In Your Mind, wrote:
“Everyone who's worked on difficult problems is probably familiar with the phenomenon of working hard to figure something out, failing, and then suddenly seeing the answer a bit later while doing something else. There's a kind of thinking you do without trying to. I'm increasingly convinced this type of thinking is not merely helpful in solving hard problems, but necessary.
...You can't directly control where your thoughts drift. If you're controlling them, they're not drifting. But you can control them indirectly, by controlling what situations you let yourself get into. That has been the lesson for me: be careful what you let become critical to you. Try to get yourself into situations where the most urgent problems are ones you want to think about.”
The attitude on thoughts that I now try to cultivate is that thoughts are unimportant. They don’t mean anything. I am not afraid of any thoughts. I don’t take thoughts seriously. Thoughts are not warning messages, moral acts or facts. No thoughts are my thoughts. Thoughts don’t cause any type of behavior. My choices cause my behavior. What I choose to think about is the content I choose to watch, read or listen to. So, I maintain high standards for that content and then let the thoughts take care of themselves.