In Day 6 I talked about how feelings are just telling us something about our thinking.
When I first heard about this, I didn't believe it.
It didn't seem that I was doing any 'angry thinking' when I was feeling angry.
Rather, that feeling seemed to come directly from people, situations and other stuff outside of me.
But then I read a study that suggested we have 70,000 thoughts a day.
Thoughts are just stuff coming into our awareness. What to have for dinner. The unusual pattern on that coat in the shop window. What the boss said as I was leaving the meeting. And so on.
I wondered what it would be like to be aware of all those thoughts, let alone giving them a good old thinking.
I quickly concluded that it would be exhausting, and that us humans are not built to do that.
That suggested two things to me.
Firstly that we are not aware of all our thoughts. Not consciously, anyway.
And secondly, we don't think about all our thoughts.
Crucially,
If we don't think about all our thoughts, the implication is that we don't need to think about any of them in particular.
I'm not suggesting that we can easily make a conscious decision how to think about a particular thought. For me, positive psychology - finding the silver lining in every cloud - doesn't seem easy, especially if I'm upset. And once I'm thinking negatively about a thought, no amount of well-intended reframing from self or others will help me snap out of it.
But realising that I can choose whether to think about a thought is a game changer.
And even if I've started thinking about a thought, I don't need to continue.
