What is Incessant Thinking? Why it is the Root of All Suffering? How to Think Rightly?

“A man is literally what he thinks, his character being the complete sum of all his thoughts.”

What Are Thoughts & Emotions?

Thoughts and emotions are intricately related and can be experienced together, but they are distinct.

What are thoughts?

Thoughts are mental cognitions—our ideas, opinions, and beliefs about ourselves and the world around us. They include the perspectives we bring to any situation or experience that color our point of view (for better, worse, or neutral).

An example of a long-lived thought is an attitude, which develops as thoughts are repeated over and over and reinforced.

While thoughts are shaped by life experiences, genetics, and education, they are generally under conscious control. In other words, if you are aware of your thoughts and attitudes, you can choose to change them.

What are emotions?

It may be useful to think of emotions as the flow and experience of feelings, for example, joy, sadness, anger, or fear. Emotions can be triggered by something external (from seeing a friend suffer or watching a movie) or something internal (an upsetting memory).

While emotions are universal, each person may experience them and respond to them in a different way. Some people may struggle with understanding what emotion they are experiencing.

Emotions serve to connect us with others and help cultivate strong social bonds.  This may be the evolutionary purpose of emotions—people who were able to form strong bonds and emotional ties become a part of a community and were more likely to find the support and protection necessary for survival.

People the world over have different ideas, beliefs, and opinions—different thoughts—but they have very similar, if not identical, feelings.

What influences emotions?

Researchers have also found that emotions are “contagious.” We have a tendency to mimic each other’s outward states (for example, by smiling when someone smiles at us), and our outward states can affect our internal ones (smiling can actually make you feel happy!).

Emotions can also be influenced by other factors:

Cultural traditions and beliefs can affect the way a group or an individual expresses emotions. There are some cultures in which it is deemed "bad manners" to express emotions in a way that may be considered healthy and appropriate in other cultures.

Genetics (or, more specifically, brain and personality structure, including  self-control) can affect the emotional expression of an individual or family. (While a person’s genetic makeup cannot be altered, the brain is another story, according to neuroscientist Richard Davidson.  He has identified six distinct “emotional styles” that are based upon the structure of our brains but can be re-shaped with practice.)

Physical conditions: Brain tumors, strokes, Parkinson's disease, Multiple Sclerosis, Alzheimer's, and metabolic diseases, such as diabetes and thyroid disorders, can cause a person’s emotional responses to change dramatically.

What we think impacts what we feel

is this dog aggressive or not? Thoughts and emotions have a profound effect on one another. Thoughts can trigger emotions (worrying about an upcoming job interview may cause fear) and also serve as an appraisal of that emotion (“this isn’t a realistic fear”). In addition, how we attend to and appraise our lives has an effect on how we feel. For example, a person with a fear of dogs is likely hyperattentive of the dog across the street and appraises the approach of the dog as threatening, which leads to emotional distress. Another person who appraises the dog’s approach as friendly will have a very different emotional response to the same situation.

Can we change our thoughts and emotions?

We tend to believe that emotions are just “part of us” and can’t be changed.  Research, however, has established that emotions are malleable. They can be changed by:

Altering an external situation (divorcing an abusive spouse)

Shifting our attention (choosing to focus on a more positive aspect of a situation)

Re-appraising a situation (the upcoming test is an opportunity for learning, not an assessment of my personal worth). 

How we choose to live our lives has tremendous power over the way we feel every day.

Some things in life cause people to feel, these are called emotional reactions. Some things in life cause people to think, these are sometimes called logical or intellectual reactions. Thus life is divided between things that make you feel and things that make you think. The question is, if someone is feeling, does that mean that they are thinking less? It probably does. If part of your brain is being occupied by feeling, then it makes sense that you have less capacity for thought. That is obvious if you take emotional extremes, such as crying, where people can barely think at all. This does not mean that emotional people are not intelligent; it just means that they might be dumber during the times in which they are emotional. Emotion goes on and off for everyone, sometimes people cry, and sometimes they are completely serious.

Some things in life can identifiably cause more emotion than other things.

1. Color causes more emotion than black and white. So anything with more color in it is going to be more emotional to look at, whether it is the difference between a gold or silver sword, or a gold or silver computer. In both cases the gold is going to be more emotional.

2. Things that are personal are emotional, personal things that people like and that they feel are “close” to them. Things like home or anything someone likes actually. That is a definition of emotion after all, something that causes feeling. So if you like it, it is probably going to cause more feeling. Other things aside from liking something could cause emotions from it, such as curiosity, but usually like is one of the stronger emotions. You could say that the two are directly proportional, the more you like something, the more it is going to cause feeling.

Now, since you have understood what thoughts and emotions are. Let’s now focus on the types of thoughts and how they influence us.

We are in big trouble because we are never in control of our thoughts. Don’t believe me? Try this simple experiment:

Whatever you do, don’t think of a tsunami. Go on, close your eyes, relax, but don’t think of a tsunami.

So, what happened? Most likely, you were overwhelmed by thoughts of a tsunami.

The tsunami paradox is just one example of how little control we have over our minds. If thoughts define our character and we have no control over what thought arises next, does it mean that we have no control over who we become?

Until recently answers to such questions remained under the umbrella of philosophy or religion. However, recent advances in neuroimaging technologies has changed the paradigm.

Three Types of Thinking

“While it sometimes feels that all of our thoughts are an incessant stream of useless blabber, the reality is that our most useful thoughts are usually silent.

There are three types of thought that our brains produce: insightful (used for problem solving), experiential (focused on the task at hand), and incessant (chatter).

Those types are so distinctively different from each other that they occur in different parts of our brain.

Insightful thinking helps us to do long range planning and problem solving. Experiential thinking brings our attention onto our senses such as our sight, sound and feel. Both these types of thinking are crucial in navigating the real-world.

Incessant thinking, however, serves no utility. It creates unnecessary suffering. When we engage in incessant thinking attention will be attracted to whatever is most problematic at the moment. It will focus on some real or imaginary pain, on recent grudges or long-term frustrations. Incessant thinking is also correlated with mental disorders like depression, anxiety, and schizophrenia.

To function well in the modern world we need to distinguish between what’s working for us from what’s working against us. Experiential and insightful thinking are working for us. Incessant thinking is working against us.

“Your brain produces thoughts, as a biological function, to serve you. And discovering that each of those types of thoughts happens in completely separate brain regions means that we can be trained to use one type more than the other.

We need a lot of attention to the present when we perform tasks, and we also need problem solving. Those are very useful functions.

What we don’t really need is the narrative component of thought, the useless, endless chatter — the part that makes us feel a bit crazy and keeps us trapped in suffering.

Specific elements may differ, but the endless stream of chatter is something we all share. It worries us about what is yet to come; it belittles us; it disciplines us; it argues, fights, debates, criticizes, compares, and rarely ever stops to take a breath. Day after day we listen as it talks and talks.

The reality is that if you walk down the street almost everyone you see are talking to themselves in their head. They’re constantly judging everything that they see. They’re playing back movies of things that happened to them yesterday. They’re living in fantasy worlds of what’s going to happen tomorrow. They’re just pulled out of base reality.

If we can learn to interrupt mindless thinking, we can break out of the shackles of negative loop. The problem is not thinking. It is thinking without knowing that your thinking. The problem is incessant thinking. It is mindlessness.

A-B-C approach was created by Dr. Albert Ellis to help patients break out of incessant thinking. It was then adapted by Dr. Martin Seligman who is considered as the father of positive psychology. According to Seligman, negative loop has 3 components

Adversity: We encounter Adversity when we face an unfavorable event.

Beliefs: We then create narratives about the adversity which becomes our Beliefs.

Consequences: These beliefs then influence what we do next, so they become Consequences.

Here’s an example — you yell at your assistant because she forgot to print a key report before your meeting (Adversity). You then think, “I’m a really lousy boss” (Belief). You then perform poorly during your meeting, because your self confidence has plummeted (Consequences).

The key point occurs between adversity and belief. When you encounter adversity, the narrative you create drives your beliefs. If you let incessant thinking drive the narrative it will always drift towards negativity, it is just the way our minds are wired. The key for breaking the negative loop is to interrupt the mechanism of belief formation. There are two ways to interrupt our habitual incessant thinking:

Switch to insightful thinking

Research recommends “disputation” as a tool to switch to insightful mode of thinking. When you encounter an adversity and notice negative beliefs forming, you need to argue with yourself. In particular, you look for the mistaken assumptions. Here is an example:

Adversity: A colleague criticized my product idea in front of the team during our weekly meeting.

Belief: She’s right; it was a dumb idea. I don’t have much of an imagination, and now the entire team can see how uncreative I am. I should never have spoken up!

Consequences: I felt stupid and didn’t speak up for the rest of the meeting. I don’t want to attend any of the other team meetings this week, and have already made an excuse to avoid tomorrow’s meeting.

Disputation: I’m blowing this out of proportion. My colleague had every right to criticize my idea; it was nothing personal, and her critique was spot on. She even commended my creative thinking once the meeting was over. All I need to do is think my ideas through a bit better next time.

Switch to experiential thinking

However, reasoning with incessant thoughts often just leads to digging a deeper hole of negativity.

Switching your mind into experiential mode of thinking is a more powerful alternative. By focussing on our senses, our breath, smell, touch, sound and sight we turn off the incessant thinking.

Dr. Ellen Langer, a social psychologist at Harvard University, is regarded as the pioneer of mindfulness in the West. According to her research, we can shift our focus by flooding the mind with things that it can’t evaluate, or judge — things it can only observe. Here’s how she describes it:

Direct your attention outside yourself. Observe the light in the room, pay attention to whatever is on your desk, catch that smell of coffee percolating in the kitchen, notice the wood grain on the table, or listen to the distant sounds of cars in the street. Don’t let anything go unobserved. Notice every tiny detail around you. This is what you used to do as a newborn child. Just observe.

I sometimes use a modified version of this approach where I start naming objects in my mind as I notice them:

Desk, coffee, kitchen, wood, table, car, air conditioner, cool air….

And before you know it, the incessant thought vanishes. Because the brain is terrible at multitasking, it needs to stop all previous thinking to absorb new information. If the new information is processed in a different area of the brain, it is unlikely you will fall back into incessant thinking.

When you first start training your mind in this manner, it may seem difficult to get rid of incessant thought. The moment you stop noticing things, your brain brings back the previous thought. However, with enough practice, you can train yourself to break out of incessant thinking. You can eventually stare at incessant thoughts and say, “That sounds irrational and harmful! Go away and bring me something worthwhile to think about.”

The ability to break the loop of incessant thinking is not simply a technique for stress reduction. It can transform your life.

“Our minds are all we have. They are all we have ever had. And they are all we can offer others. This might not be obvious, especially when there are aspects of your life that seem in need of improvement — when your goals are unrealized, or you are struggling to find a career, or you have relationships that need repairing.

But it’s the truth. Every experience you have ever had has been shaped by your mind. Every relationship is as good or as bad as it is because of the minds involved.

If you are perpetually angry, depressed, confused, and unloving, or your attention is elsewhere, it won’t matter how successful you become or who is in your life — you won’t enjoy any of it.

Anticipating awful things in the future or ruminating about moments from the past is neither useful nor instructive. This prolonged extension of pain is a serious bug in our system. Left unchecked it will consume our minds, shape our character and turn us into someone we would never want to become. Before long there it will open up a humiliating gap between our actual self and our desired self.

Upgrading our character starts with upgrading our thinking. Don’t give incessant thinking the power to control you and define who you are. Our mind should be a servant and a tool, not our master.