Thoughts: A Different Perspective

Because we live in an internal world of conscious thought, we assume that through thinking we are in control of what we do. I would like to put it to you that the reality is we live primarily at the mercy of our emotions and thinking, is in many cases just an afterthought.

Two Types of Thoughts

I like to divide thoughts into two types – thoughts in reaction and thoughts in awareness. Unfortunately, we tend to live in the former and not the later. This is natural and is one of the main reasons that we have survived as a species. Our physiology has developed to take notice of threat and to operate substantially in automatic mode. The mid unconscious area of the brain is activated more quickly than the conscious upper neocortex part of the brain. The mid brain area brings into our attention system, that which needs to be processed. When thrust into consciousness, our neocortex or thinking part of the brain then contributes to making action decisions. That is, the emotion part of the brain awakens the thinking part of the brain and delivers messages that are laden with feelings (positive and negative).

Our attention system has a limited band width and research has shown that negatively loaded stimuli have a higher priority than positive perceptions. Genetically we are biased towards processing negative stimuli. And then we have the learning system.

Life Experiences

Our life experiences are represented in the brain by networks of learnings that are triggered incoming stimuli. This creates biases in the information we process and how we process it. A person bitten by a dog, when seeing a dog will react negatively towards any dog and will be warry. A person who has a many happy dealings with dogs will be more likely to approach a dog. Both are behavioural biases created from learned experience.

Thinking in Awareness

Thinking in awareness occurs when our automatic response is examined before action is taken. I will talk more about his in another post, but what is important about thinking in awareness is that it gives us an opportunity to make choices, to choose the action that we will take. This is a process of not having the attention system swamped by the immediate event but being able to bring to our attention desires and other learnings that may influence actions to be taken.

A goal of therapy is to create awareness of our automatic thinking and to develop the ability to be with the emotions and thoughts that arise while moving towards who we want to be and how we want to be living our lives.

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