“You are not your thoughts.”

This is a phrase that has been offered up by philosophers for many centuries.  In our modern era, this detail has been often overlooked.  Even if acknowledged intellectually, this idea is difficult to internalize.  Our thoughts seem like our reality; they seem like who we are.

“White Bears”

Daniel Wegner is a Harvard psychologist who did an experiment published in 1987.  It is often referred to as the “White Bears” experiment.  He found that if you try to think about something, you think about it less.  If you try not to think about something, you not only think about it more, but it is easier to access these thoughts.  He called it the “ironic effect”.

We all need anxiety to survive.  Although anxiety is such a basic survival feeling, we hate it and do anything to avoid it.  One strategy is to suppress it.  Well guess what? The more you try to suppress anxiety, the worse it gets and it takes off like a rocket.

Anxiety is a “psychological reflex”

I also choose to look at anxiety as a “psychological reflex” and not an emotion.  I look at the brain’s response to anxiety in terms of neurological pathways.  Just like an athlete, artist, or musician improves his or her skills with repetition, the brain becomes adept in imbedding anxiety. Your response to a given stimulus becomes very fast and intense.  As you age, anxiety without the right tools ALWAYS get worse.  So what do you do?

Negating the “ironic effect”

Neurological pathways are created by associating thoughts with:

• Thoughts
• Physical sensations
• Emotions
• External events

Dr. Wegner points out the solution in an essay, “The Seed of Our Undoing”. Simply writing down or saying negative, and often unspeakable, thoughts negates this process. It is also effective to say the thoughts aloud in quiet room. The words are

Why is this so effective?  It is the one tool that inadvertently pulled me out of a serious tailspin.

Detaching from Your Thoughts

It’s a hard claim to genuinely accept.  Say it to yourself: “You are not your thoughts.”  You might know this intellectually, but your thoughts still seem like such a real part of you.  You also cannot get rid of them. They are permanently imbedded circuits. Once you know how to ride a bicycle you cannot unlearn how to ride it. The only effective solution is to detach from them. Unlearning to Ride a Bicycle

So let’s try the writing exercise. Get out a piece of paper and a pen; write down any of your negative thoughts. When you’ve written them all out, destroy the paper. Do this right now. I’ll wait.

Done? Great. By writing the unspeakable thoughts on paper, you have created a space between you and the piece of paper.

• You have also connected yourself to the separation of those thoughts with vision and feel.
• Connecting the space between you and these thoughts with physical sensations creates new neurological pathways.
• With repetition this separation from your thoughts becomes your new reality.

Writing down negative thoughts and immediately discarding them should be a practice that every human being should do on a regular basis from the time they can write.

• It is not about psychology.
• It is just the way your nervous system works.
• It is universal, and no human escapes these circuits.
• Some are just better at hiding them from others, but the suffering occurs deep inside.
• There is always a price to pay for trying to control them.

Throwing the paper away allows you to write with complete freedom.  The more negative the thoughts you can release, the more effective the process is.  Consider this a task you would do regularly like brushing your teeth.  It is your “mental hygiene.”

NH, BF