Stop Thinking, Start Living

Now suppose that as you were reading the morning paper, you came across an article about a little girl who was rescued from a burning building. As you read the story you had the thought, ‘What a relief.’ As soon as you had this inspiring thought you felt an uplifting of your spirits. Again, your emotion was created by your thoughts about the event – not the event itself. If you had thought differently, you would have felt differently. For example, if you had the thought, ‘It’s about time they included a happy story. The papers are always filled with bad news,’ you wouldn’t have felt uplifted but pessimistic. The feelings that accompany the thoughts you are having happen in an instant. This psychological dynamic is true all the time – there are no exceptions. Whenever you have a thought, and believe that thought to be true, you will feel a corresponding emotional response to that thought. Your thoughts always create your emotions. Understanding the significance of this fact is the first step in escaping from unhappiness and depression.

Negative and pessimistic thoughts, regardless of their specific content, are the root cause of all of your negative and self-defeating emotions. In fact, it’s neurologically impossible for you to feel anything without first having a thought – you simply wouldn’t have a reference point. Try feeling guilty without first thinking guilty thoughts. Try feeling angry without thinking about something that makes you angry. You can’t do it. In order to experience an event, you must process that event in your mind thereby interpreting it and giving it meaning and significance. This understanding has enormous implications. It suggests that if you feel unhappy, it’s not your life, your circumstances, your genes, or your true nature that is creating your unhappiness – it’s your thinking. Unhappiness doesn’t, and can’t, exist on its own. Unhappiness is the feeling that accompanies your negative thinking about your life. In the absence of that thinking, the unhappiness can’t exist. There is nothing to hold your negative feelings in place other than your thinking.

I am not saying that there are never physiological components that compound an unhappy or depressed state, or that make a person predisposed to unhappiness or depression. I am saying, however, that without thought there is no fuel to throw on the fire, there is nothing to foster the predisposition or physiological components into a reality.

It’s interesting to note that there have always been people who would seem to have every reason to be depressed – circumstances that depress some of us just hearing about them: helpless poverty, unbelievable hardships, cruel treatment by others. But some people simply don’t experience unhappiness regardless of how serious their circumstances appear to be. They make the best out of the situation they are in. There are other people who apparently have every reason to feel happiness and contentment, people who are often tormented by depression. Rather than appreciating what they have, they focus on what they would rather have.

Thinking Turns Events into Problems

Let’s suppose that two of your friends are getting divorced. You had always assumed that if anyone could make it, this couple could. On Wednesday, the couple started divorce proceedings, and a week later your friend called you to tell you the news. ‘Oh no,’ you say and instantly begin to feel bad. Interesting, isn’t it? The event has already taken place, it’s long over. But now, as you think about the event, you start to feel bad. Clearly the event itself didn’t make you feel bad. It happened seven days ago and you didn’t even know about it. Your thoughts about the event are the guilty party, responsible for the way you feel. The event was certainly ‘real’ but it meant nothing to you – it was neutral – until you were able to bring it to life through your thinking. Interestingly enough, had your thinking interpreted the divorce differently, you would have felt differently. You may just as easily have thought to yourself, ‘Oh well, I suppose only they can know what is best for them.’ This thought may have left you with a feeling of compassion and understanding.

Think of a more mundane example – snow. For some people snow means snowballs, sledges, skiing, and snowmen. For these people, snow is cause for great celebration! For others, however, snow means dead batteries, a slushy mess, cold weather, and so on. In short, the snow is cause for a lot of complaining. Take note, however, that the snow itself doesn’t care how you think about it. The snow is neutral. It just exists and goes on being snow. It doesn’t cause the positive or the negative reactions and feelings you may have. Only your thinking can do that for you. I hope this illustrates how you use your thinking to create emotional responses which give you an experience of life. Your thinking, not the events themselves, cause your emotional responses.

Your Thoughts Aren’t Real

If you could understand that your thoughts aren’t real you could stop reading right now, because you would feel a tremendous sense of relief and you would have realized how to create happiness in your life – forever. And even though it is going to take some explanation on my part, the statement is true. Think about it: your thoughts aren’t real. They are real thoughts, but they’re not the same thing as concrete ‘reality’.

When you think, you are using your imagination to create an image or picture in your mind of an event rather than the real thing. If you are driving home from a football match, reviewing the game in your mind, you are merely imagining what the game was like. The game is no longer real, it’s now only in your mind, in your memory. It was real once, but not any longer. Similarly, if you are thinking about how bad your marriage is, you are considering it in your mind. It’s all in your imagination. You are literally ‘making up’ your relationship. The thoughts you are having about your relationship are just thoughts. This is why the old saying, ‘Things aren’t as bad as they seem’ is almost always true. The reason things ‘seem so bad’ is because your mind is able to recreate past events, and preview upcoming events, almost as though they were happening right in front of you, at that moment – even though they’re not. To make matters worse, your mind can add additional drama to any event, thereby making that event seem even worse than it really is, or was, or will be. Even more important, your mind can review the imagined event dozens of times in a matter of seconds! This is very important to understand, because while an actual event such as an argument with a friend can last a minute or two, your mind can recreate that very event, magnify it, and make it last three hours – or an entire lifetime. But that argument is no more real now than an argument you had with your father ten years ago. The point is that now, when your life is really happening, that remembered argument is just a thought, an event being created within your own mind.

If you can begin to see that your thoughts are not the real thing – they’re just thoughts, and as thoughts they can’t hurt you – your entire life will begin to change today. I have witnessed many times this very same realization transform someone from a life of fear and depression into a life of happiness.

What would you say to a nine-year-old child who was convinced that a nasty witch was behind her door? Would you have her come to your home weekly to describe the witch to you in great detail? Would you have her think about it constantly? No, you would probably tell her that the witch wasn’t real, that it was only an imagined witch. With your help, eventually the child will understand that the witch was only real in her mind. Once this happens, she will no longer be frightened.

Taking this same understanding one step further, what would you say to the same child if she said to you, ‘My life is a failure, no one likes me, I never have any fun, I don‘t want to live’? Wouldn’t you also try to teach her that the thoughts she was having about herself were just thoughts? I hope so. There is nothing holding those ideas in place other than her own thinking, her own internal dialogue. If the nine-year-old were able to see what you were trying to teach her, if she were able to establish a different type of relationship with her thinking, wouldn’t she be better off than if she believed that her thoughts were real? She certainly would be. Wouldn’t it be nice if she could relate to all of her thoughts in the same way?

Understanding that You Are the Thinker

You are the thinker of your own thoughts. Sounds obvious enough, but read on and I believe you will discover that, until now, you may have lost sight of this important fact.

Thinking is something that you are doing, moment by moment, to create your experience of life. But because your own thinking is so close to you, it’s easy to forget that you are the one using your own thoughts against yourself. Here is an example. A gentleman came into my stress-management office and said, ‘I’m mad at my boss. I don’t like my job. I don’t like the people that work with me. No one appreciates my work. I’m really angry.’ When I began teaching him about how his own thinking creates his angry feelings he said, ‘With all due respect, Dr Carlson, I’m angry almost all the time, but I almost never think angry thoughts.’ Do you see where he was being fooled? Until that moment, he believed that ‘thinking’ meant the same thing as ‘pondering’. Even though he may not have dwelled on his misery for hours at a time, he was nevertheless continually thinking negatively, a moment here and a moment there. He spent nearly all of his time thinking about the little things that irritated and annoyed him. It was almost as if the unstated goal of his life was to analyse it and to give his opinions on how various things affected him. His negative thoughts were creating his negative feelings and emotions and he didn’t even know he was thinking them. He was a victim of his own thinking.

Because my client didn’t even realize that he was thinking, he had no way of knowing that his feelings were coming from his thinking. He thought his feelings came from his job and from the people he worked with. Until we spoke, my client had never realized that he was the thinker of his own thoughts – and that those thoughts were the source of his unhappiness. He believed that his thoughts were being generated by what was going on around him, rather than from within him. He didn’t realize at a deep enough level that he is the author, the producer, and the creator of his own thinking, that his thinking is something he is doing all day long, and that his doing it is the cause of most of his emotional suffering. Once he realized this he had a very inspiring insight that I have since used over and over again with clients: Being upset by your own thoughts is similar to writing yourself a nasty letter – and then being offended by that letter! This insight came from a man who had spent most of his life depressed.

You are the manufacturer of your own thoughts. You are the one doing the thinking that is upsetting you; you are doing it to yourself. Once you understand this important point, it’s silly to go on being angered, annoyed, frightened, or depressed by your own thinking. If you are thinking negative, pessimistic, sceptical, or angry thoughts and not realizing it, it’s understandable and predictable that you will be depressed. And this will happen each time you lose sight of the fact that you are thinking depressing thoughts.

There is only one way out of this negative loop, and that is to understand that you are the one doing the thinking and that it is your own thinking that is creating your pain. Once you start to see that your thoughts are just thoughts, that they are not ‘reality’, you will be able to dismiss them and not allow them to depress you. Any thought or series of thoughts can be dismissed, but to do so effectively you must first realize that you are the one creating them. All of us will accumulate thousands of thoughts about ourselves throughout our lifetimes. Very few of us, however, remember the fact that these thoughts, regardless of their content, are just thoughts.

Just Like a Dream

One of the easiest ways to understand the harmless nature of your own thinking, and to create some distance between yourself and your thinking, is to compare thinking with dreaming. Almost everyone has had the unfortunate experience of a nightmare. While it’s happening it seems very real, but when you wake up, you realize that it was just a dream. And what is dreaming but thinking while you are asleep. That’s it! While you are asleep you are still producing thoughts. Like daytime thoughts, these night-time thoughts also create an emotional response, and they can also be frightening. Just a few nights ago, one of my children woke up in the middle of the night from a bad dream. It seemed so real to her that she was actually sweating from the experience. Once she woke up, however, she felt very different. Even though she is only three years old, she realized that her dream wasn’t real, that it was just her thinking.

Your wakeful thinking can be looked at with the same perspective and clarity. It seems real, but it’s still just thought. And each time you forget that it’s just thought, it will seem every bit as real as a nightmare. You can frighten or depress yourself with your own thinking in a matter of seconds if you don’t realize that you are doing it. You can be sitting in your living-room relaxing and reading a book when a thought crosses your mind: ‘I’ve been depressed for so long,’ or ‘My marriage is no good.’ Can you see how seductive and tricky it can be? If you understand thought in the way that I have been discussing, you can dismiss those thoughts and others like them – you can let them go. Or, if you choose, you can follow the thoughts, remaining aware of what you are doing to yourself. As long as you know that you are in charge, that you are the one doing the thinking, you are protected. Again, it’s no different than dreaming.

A person not suffering from depression will have thoughts just like yours, but with one major difference. When he has them, he will say to himself, ‘Here I go again,’ or something to that effect. Sooner or later, he’ll remember that he is the thought-producing machine – that he is doing it to himself. As soon as he has this realization, his mind will slow down and begin to clear and he will sigh with relief. He will begin to feel better and will go on with his day.

An unhappy or depressed person, on the other hand, not seeing her thoughts with proper perspective, may follow the train of thought, believe it to be real, and submit herself to ongoing pain. Even if she doesn’t follow this particular train of thought, she will eventually follow some negative thought pattern which will lower her spirits. Without the understanding of how her thinking is creating her negative experience, there is little she can do to prevent her negative thoughts from spiralling downward towards depression. After all, she believes that her thoughts are real.

The solution is to see your own thoughts as thoughts, not as reality. Create some distance from them. Just like your dreams, your thoughts are coming from within your own consciousness. Your thoughts are not real, and they can’t harm you, just as your night-mares are harmless. As you create some distance and perspective from your thinking you will be freed from their effects.

Certainly, everyone has his share of negative and self-defeating thoughts. The question to ask yourself is, ‘How seriously do I really have to take them?’ Your thoughts have no power other than what you give them.

More than Positive Thinking

Even though positive thinking is obviously preferred to negative thinking, positive thinking alone isn’t enough to pull you out of a depressed state for very long. ‘Positive thinkers’ are just as much at the mercy of their own thoughts as negative thinkers – that is, if they believe that thinking is something that is happening to them rather than something that they are doing. This is a subtle but key point.

Positive thoughts are still just thoughts. Granted, they are nicer thoughts to have – but they are still just thoughts. If you believe that you have to think positively all the time, what’s going to happen when a negative thought enters your mind?

You no longer need to feel you have to make yourself think positively – you don’t. If you’ve spent time being depressed (and if you’re reading this book you probably have), you’ve heard hundreds of well-meaning suggestions from all sorts of people to ‘think more positively’. Unfortunately, what most people who have never been depressed don’t realize is that when you’re depressed you can no more think positively than get in a spaceship and fly to the moon! Thinking more positively will happen naturally, without effort, as you pull yourself out of your depression. Thinking more positively is a natural extension of knowing that your thoughts can’t hurt you.

The idea here is to have a different kind of relationship to your thinking – one that allows you to have thoughts of any kind without taking any of them too seriously. You can get to the point in your life where you can have a negative thought (or a series of negative thoughts) and you simply say to yourself, ‘There’s another one.’ It will no longer be ‘front page news’ in your mind! As this happens you will be able to resist the urge of following every negative train of thought that enters your mind.

If you could somehow climb into the mind of a genuinely happy person, you would notice that she isn’t necessarily thinking positive thoughts. Instead, she isn’t thinking about much at all, other than what she is doing. Happy people understand, either instinctually or because they have been taught, that the name of the game is to enjoy life rather than to think about it. Happy people are so immersed in the process of life, absorbed in what they are doing at the moment, that they rarely stop to analyse how they are doing. If you want to verify this concept first-hand, spend some time watching a roomful of preschool children. The reason they’re having such a good time is because all of their energy is directed towards enjoyment. They are immersed in whatever they happen to be doing; they aren’t keeping score.

Please don’t make the mistake of thinking, ‘It’s different with children because they aren’t grown up with real problems.’ To a child, problems are every bit as real as yours are to you. Children deal with very difficult, age-related, problems: parents who fight or who are separated, adults who tell them what to do, people who take away their things, and the need to be included and loved, to name just a few. The difference between adults and children and their level of happiness isn’t tied to how real their problems are, but to how much attention is placed on those problems.

If you are constantly analysing or ‘keeping score’ of your life, you will always be able to find fault in whatever you are doing. After all, who couldn’t improve? Many people even pride themselves on their ability to be on the look-out for ‘what’s wrong’. But if you follow thoughts like ‘Life would be better if …’ you will once again be at the mercy of your own thinking. One thought will lead to another, and then another, and so on. It’s just a matter of how much negativity you can handle. Sooner or later you’ll be down in the dumps. True happiness occurs when you quiet down your analytical mind, when you give it a rest.

Once you realize that your thinking is what creates your experience of life, including your depression, analysing your life will lose its appeal. You’ll prefer simply to do the best that you possibly can in any given moment and pay attention to enjoying what you are doing, knowing that you can always do better.

I’m not suggesting that you shouldn’t improve your life. Your life will inevitably improve as you pay more attention to living and less to how you are doing.

Thoughts Floating Down a River

Have you ever sat next to a river and watched leaves floating peacefully by? It’s a very therapeutic thing to do. Each leaf is independent of the others but is still connected by the river. You can watch any leaf until it disappears out of sight. It’s a very impersonal process. What I mean by ‘impersonal’ is that the leaves just keep on floating. They don’t care if you like them or whether you’d rather they floated differently.

Your thoughts can be looked at in much the same way. Your consciousness produces an ongoing series of thoughts, one right after the other. When you focus on any particular thought, it is present and visible. Once your attention goes elsewhere, the thought disappears from your mind. Your thoughts come and go. You have surprisingly little control over the content of your own thinking unless you are actively trying to control it. Once you understand that you are the thinker of your own thoughts, and that your mind doesn‘t produce ‘reality’, it produces ‘thoughts’, you won’t be as affected by what you think. You’ll see your thinking as something that you are doing – an ability you have that brings your experience of life – rather than as the source of reality. Do you remember the old saying ‘Sticks and stones may break my bones but words can never hurt me’? Thoughts could be substituted for words. Your thoughts can’t hurt or depress you once you understand that they are just thoughts.

When you start to view your own thinking in this more impersonal way (in other words, looking at your thinking instead of being caught in it), you will find yourself becoming free of depression. Your thinking goes on and on, and it will continue to do so for as long as you live. But when you step back from your thinking and simply observe that you are doing it, your mind becomes free, and you open the door to experience.

Attention and Your Thinking

If your thinking determines how you are going to feel, then it’s very important to understand exactly what happens when you focus your attention on your negative thinking.

Use your own common sense to answer the following question. If negative feelings are caused by negative thinking, then what possible good can it do to overanalyse the negative parts of your life? If you spend a great deal of time rehearsing potential problems, dwelling on what’s wrong, and thinking and talking about problems, only two things are certain to happen. First, you will become an expert in your problems! Not an expert at solving your problems, but an expert in describing them. Therapists will love you! Second, you will be depressed – or at least your spirits will be low. This is true because there is a fundamental law at work here: thoughts grow with attention! The more attention you give to what you are thinking, the bigger that thought becomes in your mind and the more important that thought will seem. If I ask you to think of what is bothering you, you can probably provide me with an answer. If I explore your answer with you and ask you to describe it further, and speculate as to what else might go wrong, I draw you deeper into your pain. The more specific and detailed you get, the bigger the problem will become.

Now hold on a moment. A few seconds ago you were fine and you weren’t even thinking about the problem. Now, with my help, you are describing a painful event as if it were really happening! But it’s not happening – except in your mind. I’m the first person to admit that it is important to acknowledge a real problem. But acknowledgement and commitment to solving a problem takes a moment or two, at most. Acknowledgement is very different from dwelling on and rehearsing, or doing endless post-mortems on situations or events.

Remember, the way you feel is determined by your thoughts. So guess what: the more attention you put on anything that is negative, the worse you will feel. Again, I ask that you use your own wisdom and common sense to decide whether or not to believe me. Despite the popular idea that talking about and working through negative emotions is a good idea, I’m suggesting that common sense dictates otherwise. After all, people have been working through endless negative emotions for years now – and very few are much better off than when they started and many are worse off. The questions to ask yourself (and your therapist if you have one) are: when does it (the analysis) stop? When have I had enough? When do I get to feel better?