Thoughts, Chatter and Your Next Chapter

Thoughts

Thoughts are images and sound bites, not reality. Scientists estimate that we have 50,000-80,000 thoughts per day.  That is 2,100-3,300 thoughts per hour. Our brains are designed to have thoughts.  Most of the thoughts we have are reruns of stories we play in our minds: rehashing the past or stirring up anxiety about the future.

Thoughts are stories that pull us into a narrative, which might not be true, and they pull us away from what is happening in the present moment. We can’t control what stories come up and we are often not even aware of the story that is playing. But, with practice, we can become aware of the story and be the author of the next chapter.  If we are aware of the story, we can decide whether we want to remain lost in the story, whether we want to believe the story and whether we want to allow that story to influence our words and our actions. By doing so we become the author of the next chapter.

When we look closely at thoughts, we find that many of our thoughts are figments of our imagination. Some thoughts are replays of the monologues of your parents, or other influential people in our lives.  Other thoughts come from our inner critic who is so worried that we will fail that it is constantly trying to fix us.  Many of our thoughts were helpful at some time in our past, we continue to replay them despite, the fact that they are no longer helpful.

If we allow ourselves to become lost in negative thinking, we can become distressed. Our prefrontal cortex stops working and our amygdala pushes us onto the hamster wheel of reactivity. The wheel spins round and round and we can’t get off no matter how hard we try. And each time we spin, we strengthen the neural pathway of that negative thought. That is the bad news about neural plasticity. 

Chatter

Most of the time, our inner voices function well.  However, when we are stressed, emotional from facing high stakes, our inner voice can turn to chatter.  The chatter may be rehashing the past, worrying about the future, or making up stories about what others are thinking. Sometimes we jump from one negative story to the next. When that chatter takes over, we torment ourselves and often feel paralyzed.

We tolerate this constant chatter in our minds telling us how horrible we are, we eat too much, we are fat and lazy, and we will never be able to meditate. We let that mental chatter go on and on until we somehow come to believe that these ruminations, judgments, and worries are an accurate representation of how our lives and the world ‘really are.’ What they really are is just thought bubbles, figments of our imagination.

When we are lost in chatter, our thinking mind stops working and our emotional brain pushes us onto the hamster wheel of reactivity. The wheel spins round and round and we can’t get off no matter how hard we try. And each time we spin, we strengthen the neural pathway of that negative thought. Then we often act unskillfully and sabotage ourselves. 

“It is as if your brain is stuck in the wrong gear and the judgments are quietly whirring just below your perceptual threshold, gnawing away at you and draining precious mental resources. In this state of mind, it can be difficult to think clearly or make decisions. It can feel like your brain is frozen and you’ve lost the antifreeze.” Mark Coleman

We think about how we screwed up, said the wrong thing, or mistreated someone; so we end up feeling bad about ourselves. Then we think about it again. And again. And this negative thought tends to activate another negative thought, which triggers another, and so on. We are so busy running from one negative thought to the next that we lose sight of the big picture. So instead of moving past, we are stuck on the hamster wheel of reactivity.

All these negative thoughts hog our neural capacity. Our attention narrows to the thoughts that cause us the most distress. We use our brain to listen to our inner critic instead of solving the problem or doing what we want to be doing at that moment. Try reading a really good book when you are ruminating about being mistreated.  Your mind can’t stay on the story. Each time you think you have read a page, you can’t remember what you read.  That is how our chatter divides and blurs our attention. We lose the ability to step back and see the bigger picture.

Your Next Chapter

We practice mindfulness so we are aware of those thoughts and can make a conscious decision whether we want to continue to pay attention to those thoughts or change the channel. We can choose to pay attention to the thoughts that tell us we are not good enough and do not deserve happiness, or we can change the channel to a better life story. We don’t have to believe the old narrative that we thought was our identity.

Our mindfulness practice helps us to work with our thoughts in two very important ways.

1. First, become aware of the constant torrent of thoughts cascading through our mind.

• “What is going on right now? What am I seeing? What am I hearing? What am I feeling? What am I sensing?”
• Pay close attention to whether you are adding your perceptions on to that.  Typically, we add the thought “something is wrong”—either wrong in general, or, more likely, wrong with another person or with ourselves.

2. Second, we learn to extricate ourselves from the stories we are constantly creating.

• Develop the skills to step back and disentangle yourselves from your thoughts.
• Realize that just because you have a thought doesn’t mean you have to believe it—much less act on it.
• Uncover what you are believing.
• Discover with great relief that your thoughts do not fully define you.
• Rewrite the next chapter.

Some Ways to Control the Chatter from Ethan Kross

1. Distanced self-talk – use your name and the second-person you to refer to yourself. Referring to yourself in second-person makes you less likely to ruminate and generate negative emotions and more likely to improve performance under stress and think more skillfully.
2. Imagine advising a friend – talk to yourself as you would to a friend going through the same experience.
3. Broaden your perspective – think about how this experience compares to other adverse experiences you have navigated and how it fits into the broader scheme of your life.
4. Reframe your experience as a challenge – instead of thinking of the experience as a threat that you can’t manage, turn it into a challenge you are up for.
5. Normalize your experience – Know that you are not alone; think of all the others in the world who are facing or have faced this experience.
6. Engage in mental time travel – think about how you will feel in a month, a year, or even ten years out.
7. Journal – write your deepest throughs and feelings for fifteen to twenty minutes a day for three days.
8. Create order in your environment – chatter makes us feel we are losing control. Boost your sense of control by cleaning, organizing, making lists, or arranging objects.

Our minds are extraordinary; they allow us to survive and thrive. We can choose what we want to do with the thoughts that pop into our heads.  We can let the negative ones derail us, or we can choose to savor the positive ones. We can look at obstacles as threats or as opportunities. We can be supportive of ourselves, or we can be our own worst critic. Most of us have been creating unhelpful neural pathways, so it will take practice to strengthen the good ones while letting the unhelpful ones atrophy. By doing so we become the author of the next chapter of our lives.