I love thinking the majority of my thoughts are worthless without action. That I am an observer of, not subjected to, the electrical storm within my mind. A growing gale nurtured through my focus and attention.
I love thinking I can choose to engage and ignore my thoughts -- to give life to my deepest passion and exile my darkest anxiety. These are things I focus on within my West Los Angeles psychotherapy practice. "...5% of our thoughts are actually meaningful and relevant..." What an empowering reminder. Here are a few of my favorite quotes from the Forbes article "A Better Way to Deal With The Negative Thoughts In My Head." Shannon Kolakowski, PsyD notes: “Defusion is the process of noticing your negative or anxious thoughts, such as ‘I'm going to be alone forever,’ and then responding to it with openness and curiosity as a distant observer,” says Kolakowski. “Rather than accept your thought as the ultimate truth, you recognize that thoughts will come and go, but you don't have to believe them or act on them. You become an observer, saying to yourself ‘I'm having the thought that I'm going to be alone forever,’ and then try to explore that thought with curiosity." “Creating a new relationship with your thoughts is freeing,” says Kolakowski. “You may not be able to control what thoughts pop up, but you can control how you respond to them. And you can control what action you take." Ajahn Amaro notes: “We tend to think that our thoughts are oppressive,” says Amaro, “and that therefore we should make them go away…Oftentimes meditation instruction is about stopping your thinking, as if thoughts are a kind of brain disease, an infection, an intruder. But the very act of pushing them away, and adopting the sense that they’re intrinsically intrusive, actually makes them more powerful. Rather than relating to them in that way, there’s another attitude we can have toward them—not taking them personally.” He adds that the vast majority of our thoughts are, at best, random, and at worst, destructive. “One of the first things I emphasize when teaching,” he says, “is that 5% of our thoughts are actually meaningful and relevant, and 95% are replaying movies, music, and recollecting. It’s mostly just debris. I often encourage people to look at it like listening to neighbor’s radio–you understand the content, you can hear the words; you might sometimes get excited about an ad, or a talk show. But you don’t really care on a personal level. You relate to your neighbor’s radio in a non-personal way—we can have the same relationship to activity of the mind. It doesn’t have to make a big story around the thoughts. It’s an attitudinal shift.” #thoughts #thinking #shift #mindfulness #meditation #anxiety #givelife
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Nick HoltMental Health and Therapy Writer. As featured on Huffington Post, Vox Media and elsewhere. Archives
January 2019
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