Being a human being means that you get a thinking mind. And having a thinking mind means that you experience thoughts. In fact, the average person has about 60,000 thoughts per day, and about 45,000 of those thoughts are repetitive. 

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Within that subset of repetitive thoughts are thoughts that are related to yourself. I don’t mean thoughts about your basic needs like “I need to drink water” or your plans for the day like “I’m going to go to a yoga class later.” I’m talking about what I like to call ego-centric thoughts, which are thoughts about the story of you, the character, moving through life. Things like: 

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“I’m such an amazing, capable person!”

“I’m terrible and can never do anything right.”

“I’m right and the other person is definitely wrong.” 

“I’m broken and something is wrong with me.”

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Our brain generates thoughts like these automatically. You can never really, truly, select your next thought, although you can begin the process of thinking. For example, you have the power to start or stop solving a math problem with your mind. But you don’t have the power to prevent that math problem from popping back into your head again. If we had the power to consciously choose all our thoughts, we’d all obviously only pick positive and happy ones, right? 

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And this is where things get tricky. Because those ego-centric, or “I” thoughts, are actually the source of most of your psychological suffering and we’re all powerless to ‘stop’ them from arising in our minds. 

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Don’t believe me? Let’s take a closer look at your day-to-day experience. 

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None of your thoughts are totally true

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Truly none of them! Not even “the sky is blue” or “I am a man” are 100% true. That’s because these thoughts are language-based, and language uses concepts to put reality into neat boxes that we can all agree upon for the sake of having a functioning society. 

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In those examples, “sky,” “blue,” and “man” are all concepts. But what actually is “blue?” It’s the name we’ve given to a particular perception of visible light. But the version of “blue” I see is probably slightly different than the version of “blue” that you perceive. And if one of us was somehow to become totally colorblind, we’d no longer be able to perceive “blue” at all. 

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Sounds heady, right? But none of that changes the fact that most of us experience the perception of different colors. Which is the main point to be made here. 

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Truth can only ever really be experienced in the present moment, with our 5 senses. Because our thinking is language and image-based, it is always referencing conceptual approximations of reality. That means that you have never had a totally “true” thought in your life! 

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“But what about the time I thought that someone was talking about me behind my back and I was RIGHT?” Well, did that situation go down 100% how you imagined it in your head, or was it slightly different in reality? 

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“Ok, but what about when I order food off a menu in a restaurant. I know in my head what I’m getting, right?” Well, when you order duck confit, you have an idea of what the meal will be, but your idea of the meal is not the actual textures, tastes, and portions you experience when you eat the duck confit in front of you, right? 

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I could go on and on here, but the point stands that your thinking is only ever an approximation of reality and never holistically descriptive of experience. So now that we’ve got that covered, let’s bring it back to those ego-centric “I” thoughts in your head. 

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Every thought you’ve ever had about yourself is also not totally true; but we act like it is! 

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Using the same theory as above, thoughts like “I’m a terrible person” or “I’m broken and worthless” or even “I’m full of endless light and love” are also not ever the truth of ourselves!

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But because these thoughts begin with the word “I” and they originate in our heads, we have a tendency to immediately believe them and act as if they’re true. It feels like we were the ones creating these thoughts, so therefore, they must be ‘ours’ and true! 

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But that is so flagrantly NOT the case! 

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Because again, you’re never choosing your next thought! Your brain comes up with it automatically and it’s most likely just because you’ve had that same thought before. Or, for most of us, somebody put that thought in our head and we internalized it a long time ago. If a parent or authority figure told us to think or believe something about ourselves as children, we didn’t yet have the mental capacity to question its validity. We just took it at face value! 

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So perhaps you’re beginning to see the problem. Each of us carries a compendium of self-referential thoughts, some positive and some negative, and our brains have been reciting them to us for decades. So much so to the point that we believe that the reciting voice in our head is actually our true self, and therefore we must believe everything that ‘we’ are saying! 

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You’re not your thoughts. That includes the nice ones, too! 

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When you begin to see that you’re separate from the narrating voice in your mind, you’ve just awoken to the possibility of psychological flexibility and freedom! If no thought is totally true, and you’re not the creator of thought, no thought can ever fully define you. 

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BUT, that also includes the nice thoughts, too. A lot of psychotherapies can go off the rails here by getting us to internalize positive messages about ourselves like “I am a great person” or “I’m beautiful and unique” but that also quickly becomes a trap of expectation because you’re still playing the game of thought—an untrue game! 

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Let’s say you internalize “I’m beautiful and unique” and begin to act like that is true. You’ll probably feel pretty good telling yourself this story, until something happens in your life that inevitably makes you feel not beautiful or unique. 

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Maybe somebody doesn’t return your affection, or you go to a party and discover 5 other people are wearing the dress you thought was super unique. Some of us might feel crestfallen because our expectations weren’t met, and we might begin to feel like something is wrong with us. Others might take the path of denial or rationalization— “well I know that I’m beautiful so clearly the other person just must have bad taste” or “I bet I found that dress first so I’m definitely still unique and cool.” 

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Either path can bring us towards suffering because it is still predicated on defining ourselves with conceptual labels and thoughts that limit the full potential of our being. 

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Ok, so how do I break free from thought? 

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Well, frankly—you can’t. None of us get to choose to stop having thoughts. Your brain is going to continue to send you self-referential thoughts every single day that make you feel great or make you feel like shit and there’s not much that can be done about that. 

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But that’s ok, because you don’t need to stop having thoughts in order to see through the illusion your thinking is continually weaving. 

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The next time a self-referential thought comes up, whether it's positive or negative, try exploring what it would mean to not take that thought as totally true. Perhaps you just say “hmm, maybe” in your head. Or “I don’t know, I guess we’ll find out.” These non-engagement responses are an unlikely path to psychological freedom because they allow you to engage with the present moment without demand or expectation. 

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For a lot of us, non-engagement can dredge up a lot of anxiety. We’re talking about going to a party without knowing for sure if you’re beautiful or unique and willing to be perceived as ugly and predictable by some people. We’re talking about discarding every label you have about yourself—the good and the limiting—so that you can actually experience the present moment as it is rather than how you want it to be, or how you want to appear within it. We’re talking about embracing the inherent uncertainty that’s the fabric of every experience, and not using our minds to pretend like we can actually create certainty about what happens next. 

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It’s a big ask, but the prize is waking up from the stories that constrain our vast, ever-changing selves into cages—some made out of spikes, and some gilded—so that we can be free to be whoever we want to be in the next moment. 

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Let me know how this resonates in the comments! And if you’re looking for a coach to help you explore some of this work, I’m here to help—please reach out.

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Photo by Darius Basher on Unsplash.com