why you shouldn’t identify so strongly with your thoughts or take them all that seriously:
1) Many prominent Eastern thinkers, as well as entire cultures, and have considered the mind a sensory organ, like the ears, with thoughts being akin to birdsong or the sound of a passing train.
2) It isn’t clear that “you” have any core essence, so to say that thoughts are “yours” may not even make sense. If you lack an essential self, there would be no unchanging thing to which thoughts could belong.
3) The boundary between you and the rest of the world is nebulous and porous, so it isn’t clear whether it’s more accurate to say that you generate your thoughts, or that they’re generated by this reality, by nature itself.
4) With some scientific context, we can easily see that most of what goes on within us originated outside of us, in the process of evolution or in the natural and cultural environments in which we were raised.
5) Even if your thoughts are entirely yours in some solid way, there’s no way forward other than acceptance. If something can’t be changed, resistance solves nothing and only leads to suffering.
6) Most of our core personality and thought content are assembled deterministically by processes beyond our control, so there’s certainly no reason to feel guilty about the content of our thoughts.
7) Even if our thoughts do reveal something about us, it’s probably often just some obsolete biological or cultural program that found its way into our minds and doesn’t say anything deep or meaningful about us. We can just override these programs and let their corresponding thoughts go.
8) One of the core tenets of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy is that sometimes thoughts are just thoughts and need not say anything significant about Who We Are. And we don’t have to act upon them.
9) Thoughts might even be manifestations of some kind of super-consciousness we’re all tapping into. We don’t ultimately know precisely where they come from.
10) It’s important not to entirely disown dark thoughts and pretend they’re not part of your experience. Doing so can result in a dense Jungian shadow that manifests in ugly, self-sabotaging ways. Accept and befriend the monster within in order to tame it and harness its power in a healthy way.
11) At the end of the day, regardless of what thoughts are, it’s how you respond to them that really matters. How you act reveals who you are. Though, remember: mistakes are inevitable, so please, practice self-compassion and self-forgiveness.
It is my sincere hope that these considerations can help you, like they helped me, to give far fewer fucks about the content of your thoughts.
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