What are thoughts?

Most of us pay very little attention to the content and origin of our thoughts. We rarely question whether they’re true or why we think the way we do and how much control we actually have over them.

Science doesn’t fully understand where thoughts come from or how they form. They seem to appear from nowhere and dissolve back into nowhere, but what we do know is most of our thoughts aren’t new, they’re recycled patterns from childhood; conditioned responses shaped by early experiences, inherited beliefs and what your nervous system learned about safety and threat before you had language to describe it.

We’re conditioned from a young age to believe that thoughts are our own creation and that they reflect reality and should be trusted. But there is an important part we are missing –  thoughts aren’t the beginning of the process, they’re the translation.

How thoughts are created

Your nervous system responds to experience first, via the senses –  tightening, activating, settling and then thought arrives to narrate / interpret what just happened in your body. The anxiety you feel isn’t caused by the worried thought. The thought is your mind’s attempt to make sense of the activation that’s already occurring within the body. Therefore, thoughts are retroactive.

By the time you think ‘something’s wrong’ or ‘you shouldn’t have said that’ your body has already registered a threat and responded. The thinking comes after, like subtitles trying to explain a film that’s already playing.  That is why trying to change your thoughts by replacing ‘negative’ ones with ‘positive’ ones so rarely works. You’re working at the wrong level. The activation is still there and you’ve just tried to change the story you’re telling yourself about it.

Some thoughts you find repeating throughout your life, perhaps within different scenarios, but the content is usually the same – the same worry, the same regret, the same anger trigger and it’s usually a sign that something in your body wants to move but hasn’t been allowed to.  The underlying emotion got interrupted or a response got suppressed, but the  nervous system is still trying to complete something.  The mind steps in with thinking, trying to solve the problem conceptually, but the ‘problem’ isn’t conceptual, it’s physiological. The loop of thinking continues and distracts our attention away from the body, so the energy in the nervous system can never complete or discharge. 

You don’t have original thoughts about whether you’re good enough, whether you’re safe, whether you belong. You have your parents’ thoughts, your culture’s thoughts, the thoughts you needed to keep you feeling safe (or tried to) when you were small and dependent and because we rarely question them, we mistake these old, conditioned patterns for truth.

Our whole identity is created through unquestioned thoughts; ‘I’m not ______ enough’ ‘People can’t be trusted’  ‘I have to work hard to get love’  ‘Good things don’t happen to me’ ‘Life is hard’ etc, but these types of thoughts don’t describe reality, they create your interpretation and therefore experience of reality.  Two people can be in the same situation and have completely different experiences because their nervous systems are running different patterns, generating different thoughts, constructing different meanings.

This is how wars can happen, how relationships end and how people can suffer over circumstances that might not be inherently painful, but become painful through the story being told about them.

Interestingly most of our thoughts are limiting and fear based and oriented around past regrets or future threats and almost always quite negative. When seen through the lens of the nervous system, this makes sense as the whole purpose of the system is to try and keep the organism (us)  safe. But through this type of thinking, we can cause an immense amount of ‘suffering’ as the thoughts create a story about your life and say  ‘this shouldn’t be happening’, ‘why does this always happen to me’ ‘my life shouldn’t be like this’ – you know the type. That is just a reflection of the nervous system not feeling safe (due to its configuration during your early life) and not a reflection of reality – when questioned, it can be seen that there is nothing actually wrong with the situation. 

Much of the spiritual world tells us to quiet the mind, to transcend thought, to achieve some thoughtless state of ‘pure presence’, but this is both impossible and unnecessary. Thoughts will come and go whether you want them to or not. Trying to stop them just gives them more energy (Ironically, the one who thinks they are trying to silence the mind is also just a thought).  What can be possible and far more useful, is questioning the thoughts for their truth and then learning to recognise thoughts as thoughts, not as truth. 

When you see a thought pattern clearly ‘i.e the ‘I’m not good enough’ flavour of thought – you can let it rise, without believing it or arguing with it and it therefore can’t hook you in.  This doesn’t require effort, it just requires seeing the pattern. The more you see thoughts in this way, the less power they have. Their intensity fades and their frequency drops. It’s not because you’re controlling them, but it’s because you’ve stopped feeding them with belief. Thoughts can be very hypnotic and are constantly trying to lure our attention away – if you can just sit for 5 minutes and try not to attach to any thought, you will see what I mean! 

Not all thinking is bad. 

Thinking in moderation can be useful for planning, creating, problem-solving and these definitely have their place, but most of us are trapped in excessive, compulsive thinking which we didn’t choose, because we were never taught about what was happening within the body at the somatic level.  We live in our heads, narrating everything, analysing situations and trying to think our way to safety. We cling to our thoughts for safety not realising safety can never be found in the mind.