You Are Not Your Thoughts
Clear Thinking #5: How to Stop Letting Your Inner Voice Run Your Life
This is a Wise & Wealthy Academy post. Every week, I publish a new training that focuses on a single idea from one of four areas: Clear thinking, personal execution, career antifragility, and investing psychology.
It’s now 11 years since I seriously started applying Stoicism and Eastern Philosophy to deal with overthinking.
You see, the reason I got obsessed with philosophy is because I had a NEED for it. I’ve always been an overthinker.
Eckhart Tolle, the author of The Power of Now, wrote about a story in one of his books. It goes something like this:
A guy is walking down the street and he sees an acquaintance walking on the other side. He waives at him but the other person ignores him.
The guy starts thinking, “Why did he ignore me? Did I say something bad to him last time? Maybe he has a problem with me? Should I text him? No.”
And he goes on and on like that until he sees him again a few weeks later. Turns out the other guy was in such a hurry that he didn’t even see him. All that thinking was just a waste of energy.
To be honest, I’m not sure if Tolle wrote all of that but I remember reading a story like that once and thinking, “How does this guy know something so personal about me?”
Because I’m that guy. I had an experience like that.
At some point I knew I had to get a handle on my thoughts. And it all starts with realizing that you are not your thoughts:
The Voice You Mistake for Yourself
There is a voice in your head.
It comments on everything. Your work, your face in the mirror, the way that last conversation went, the thing you said five years ago that you still remember. It compares you to other people. It tells you what kind of person you are.
Most people treat that voice as the truth. They hear it say “I’m bad at this” and conclude, “I’m bad at this.”
They hear it say “they don’t like me” and conclude, “they don’t like me.” Then they spend their days making decisions based on the verdicts of a narrator that is wrong most of the time.
The voice is not you.
It is a stream of thoughts. Some of them are useful. Most are recycled. A large percentage are wrong.
A 2010 Harvard study tracked the mental wandering of 2,250 people in real time and found that the human mind drifts away from what it is doing about 47% of the time.
And it doesn’t drift to happy places. It drifts to old arguments, future worries, social comparison, and self-criticism.
Half of your waking life is spent listening to a narrator that wasn’t asked for an opinion.
