I’ll sometimes get clients that ask me why I don’t do much work around positive thinking or “brain reprogramming” in my practice. 

The true answer is a lot longer (hence this article) but the flippant, shorter answer I tend to give is something like “because I’m a life coach, and our thinking is the literal biggest barrier we have to living our lives. Why would I want you to spend more time on your thoughts?”

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If my client is an intellectual, smart person who is used to worshiping at the altar of their thoughts (hint: they tend to be!) this response often elicits a pearl-clutching reaction. And then I have to explain what I’ll try to do here in this article. 

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If your goal is to live a life that has more contentment, joy, and freedom, you need to understand that those things can never exist in your mind—they exist within you, here and now, in the present moment. 

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Your mind is never content with what’s here now—and that’s by design

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Because as I’ve spoken about in many articles before, your brain is not designed to give you happiness—it is designed to give you safety! 

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What’s the best way to ensure safety? Think about every single thing that could go (or is currently) wrong so that you do not end up hurt in the next moment. 

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Asking your brain to stop running negative scenarios about the future is like asking your stomach to stop digesting food or your heart to stop pumping blood. It will simply never happen because that’s not what these organs were designed to do. They are fulfilling a very basic, very biological purpose, and we don’t actually want them to stop. 

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If your brain stopped trying to keep you safe, you’d be dead quite quickly. Imagine just walking into the middle of the street before checking the stoplight because your brain was in total chill out, “it’s probably not a big deal!” mode. 

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So while I frequently rag on the catastrophizing meatloaves in each of our skulls in these articles, I do want to make it really clear that no part of living better is about trying to “stop” our thinking processes. True growth comes from realizing that because we (and reality!) are so much more than our thinking, we don’t need to give our minds so much attention and seriousness! 

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Your ideas and images about happiness are not real

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I struggled with this concept for a long time because I remembered when I was younger, it felt like I could actually think myself into happiness. 

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As a teen, I’d think about how great college was going to be and how many friends I’d make there. In college, I’d think about how fun having my first job and living in the big city was going to be, and that’d make me feel really good. Then, I’d start thinking about my first boyfriend and how good—

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You get the picture, right? You absolutely can create passing positive emotions when you think about stuff that makes you happy. There’s an entire meditation practice called “metta” (which means “lovingkindness” in Pali) in which the whole point is to sit around and intentionally generate thoughts of love and compassion. 

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But the problem with this is that it requires us to conjure up images, concepts, and scenarios in our imaginations and to spend time exploring them as if they actually were right in front of us. Aka, to intentionally dissociate from the present into a more pleasant or exciting story about our lives. 

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While a little imagination or some day-dreaming here and there never hurt anybody, doing this regularly is a great way to live what Charlotte Joko Beck calls the “simulacrum life.” To live the idea of your life rather than the actual life that is present and in front of you here and now. 

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The result is that you inadvertently live from a mindset of “happy when” because you’ve put your mind in the driver’s seat, again. When I lived that way as a teen and a young adult, I continually just moved the goal post for my own happiness and ended up missing a lot of the opportunity to enjoy life that was literally right in front of my face. 

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We all have an image of what a “happy” or “fulfilled” life looks like for each of us. And that image can serve as a powerful future vision to help us make decisions about what to do here and now, but ultimately—it is just an unreal image. You will never achieve that image in exactly the way that you imagine it. And once you come close to it, if you are unaware, your mind will just establish a new detail in that image for you to go and chase. The result is that you keep chasing an image of a happy life instead of living one—potentially all the way up until you’re in the ground! 

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How to work with your mind 

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The first and fundamental step is disidentification from your mind. You must give up the illusion that “you” are up there in your head, creating all your thoughts. 

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You can choose to think certain thoughts, sure, but as we spoke about before— your brain is a biological organ doing its job of keeping you safe. You must understand that most of the chatter happening up there isn’t “you” just because you’re the only one who can hear it. 

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Sounds easy, right? The problem is that this mental dialogue is also not stoppable. You can’t just turn your thinking off—it is running 24/7 nonstop. Again, this helps you stay alive as an adult. 

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So if we can’t shut our brains off and we can’t guarantee they only ever make happy thoughts, what do we do instead? We get really good at being disinterested in our chattering minds and engaging with life outside of them. 

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I hate to use this analogy, but think of your brain like a violent, verbally-aggressive person on a crowded subway. If you yell back at this person, they will get louder and escalate, which will cause you more emotional pain. If you stand there and try to shut your ears and ignore what they’re saying, you’ll end up paralyzed and unable to function. 

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But if you look outside the window and ground your attention in all the beautiful sights there (let’s assume this is an aboveground train…) you’ll still hear the person yelling, but not as loudly. Your attention will want to naturally drift back to the person, but the more you commit to moving it outside, the more details you’ll notice. The more richness there is to take-in. Eventually, with your attention focused externally, you’ll barely notice the yelling at all. 

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And what does this person do when they realize they aren’t getting any kind of reaction at all from you? They move away and go bug someone else. 

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Practicing non-engagement with your own mind doesn’t really “stop” the thinking processes—it just moves your attention outside of them, into present reality. 

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Presence is the foundation of all forms of happiness 

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When you live outside of your own mind, you’ll find that reality as it is here and now is actually quite peaceful and nice. You’ll realize that quiet contentment is actually your natural resting state, and that it does not come from anything external. It is the natural result of living in the present moment. 

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(Caveat: this is contingent on you actually being in an environment that is not, truly, dangerous to your life. People in war zones, situations of domestic abuse, intense poverty, etc can not realistically be expected to find this contentment until they can give their bodies safety in reality. Recall that the mind exists precisely to get us out of compromising situations like these!) 

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You will also find that the image you have of the word “happy” is very different from the actual lived experience of quiet contentment. You will (probably) not suddenly be bursting with joy and light and love. It will not be as if you’ve become an 8-year old child again, and all negativity has been banished from the world. You will not magically become immune to pain. 

‍ut you will find that operating from present contentment makes you more open to the rich, ephemeral nature of experience. 

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When you do things you love with presence, it’s as if joy overtakes your entire being for a short while. You’ll want to hold onto that feeling, but that desire to cling is another trap to get your mind back into the driver’s seat—please plan out ways I can feel like that again! 

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When you meet painful moments with presence, it’s as if they, too, overtake your being. But you will find that this, too, is a very short unpleasant experience if it is left alone by your thinking. You’ll want to avert this feeling in the future, but this is also another mind trap—please think of things that I can do to never feel this way again!

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You will not remain present and outside your thinking for your entire life. Seeking perfection is also a thinking trap here. But the beautiful truth about presence is that you can always return to it. And if you make a commitment to keep coming back—to keep being more interested in experience and feeling and reality instead of thinking and images and concepts—you will increase the chances that happiness can fill your being. 

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When I was young and a smarty know-it-all child, my parents would ask me if I’d rather be right, or be happy. It took me decades to see that wasn’t actually a snippy false dichotomy, but an actual, real prompt to choose experience over rumination. 

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So, don’t make my mistake! Let that mind chatter on, step outside it, and see what’s here waiting for you! 

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Photo credit: Edu Lauton, Unsplash.co

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