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Mental health illustration
Mental health illustration. Character with mental disorder fight against stress, depression, emotional burnout and other psychological problems. Psychotherapy concept. Vector illustration.
On any given day, many of us pour much of our precious time and energy down the mental rat hole called “mindless thinking.” Even when we are working, socializing, driving, walking, in meetings or whatever, idle thoughts often keep rattling around like hundreds of pebbles trapped in one’s mental hubcaps.
The average person cranks out countless snippets of inner dialogue (i.e., thinking) each day. Most of them come in one or more of these packages:
- Worrying: “What will happen if?” or “How am I going to ever?” and similar anxiety-stoking phrases.
- Self-appraisal: Mental dialogue spoken from oneself to oneself, riddled with criticism or praise, such as “How could you be so stupid!” or “You’re looking hot today.”
- Rehearsals: Memorizing lines or imagining behaviors for one’s next on-stage performance at home or work, on the ball field, at the committee meeting or wherever others will be watching.
- Reviews: Looking back at past events and replaying them, not so much in a contemplative fashion but just as “filler” to take up mental space.
- Inner space junk: Meaningless, non-productive drivel (sound bites, snippets of songs, quotations, old mental tapes, etc.) that tumbles endlessly in the mix master of one’s psyche.
For many of us, idle thinking has become like TV. We flip it on and then go puttering around, leaving it running as background noise, perhaps just to keep ourselves company. Others use disjointed thinking as a distraction, a way to avoid taking action or facing painful emotions. We call this “keeping my mind occupied.”
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Chronic Cogitating
But even when we don’t pay attention to it, chronic cogitating has an impact. “It’s never quiet in my head,” more than a few clients have told me, and this incessant mental noise can leave us feeling ill at ease or even agitated.
That was true for Charles, who first sought my assistance for what his physician diagnosed as stress-induced tension headaches. After a bit of assessment, I offered an alternative theory.
“Maybe you don’t have headaches so much as you have thought-aches,” I told him.
Like many of us, Charles spent huge chunks of his day grinding out pointless, cat-chasing-its-own-tail ruminations. After some training in meditation and mindfulness, he managed to reduce the amount of useless cognition in his noggin, not to mention his headaches
Don’t get me wrong. Focused and engaged thinking that is creative, productive and even just fun (as in fantasies) can yield many positive benefits. The human capacity for plausible inference, analogical and deductive reasoning, and rational contemplation have generated wondrous advances in technology, science and knowledge.
So, mental jabbering needs to be distinguished from fantasy, creative imagination focused problem-solving, analysis and decision-making, which often give birth to art, invention and novel solutions to perplexing problems. But for many of us, I suspect the ratio of productive thoughts to aimless ones is incredibly lopsided.
As you might expect, one of the culprits here is information technology. In ways never before experienced in human history, our brains are bombarded with visual and auditory inputs that distract, undermine focus and induce hurry sickness. The static on the outside too often becomes the static on the inside.
Humans function in three primary ways. We think, we feel and we act. When one’s thinking contributes to worthwhile and productive action, or to balanced, constructive feelings, then it is fulfilling a vital role. But when thinking becomes circuitous, dead-ended, disjointed or self-defeating, the mind would be far better off without it.
We still embrace the adage, “I think, therefore, I am.”
But today, for many, the situation is closer to, “I think, therefore, I just think.”
For more, visit philipchard.com.
