How to observe your own thoughts

Sometimes, when life gets a little too ‘soap opera’, it can be useful to step back and observe your thoughts and emotions.

At this point, how my life starts to feel is like I’m acting in a soap opera being watched by people on a soap opera being watched by people on a soap opera being watched by real people, somewhere.

Chuck Palahniuk. Choke

‘Once you’re relaxed, imagine yourself sitting in a movie theater. This is your own private theater. It’s safe and no one else is in it. You’re sitting several rows back from the screen, and it’s comfortably dark. Up on the screen you begin to see the thoughts, emotions, memories, and sensations that pass through your awareness.

Just sit and watch. Don’t follow any particular thought or emotion into the screen, just as you wouldn’t try to jump into the screen during a movie. Just watch without judgment, reaction, or distraction

As you observe your big deal mind, simply take note of what it presents; simply watch and name. Notice which thoughts have a pull on your attention and emotions. And also note any physical sensations you experience. Stay with this for a few minutes before moving on to the next part of the practice.

Now imagine that there’s another ‘you’ in this theater, sitting all the way in the back of the theater, in the very last row directly behind the first you. This second you is just sitting there watching the you up front, who is still just watching the screen.

Stay with this for a few minutes and notice what happens, paying particular attention to your emotional, physical, and mental reactions.

Now imagine that there is a third you, standing back the door of the theater. This third you is simply watching the second you, seated in the back row of the theater, who is still watching the you in the front, who is still watching all that is passing across the screen.’

Thomas Roberts. The Mindfulness Workbook: A Beginner’s Guide to Overcoming Fear and Embracing Compassion (New Harbinger Self-Help Workbook)

Memory isn’t a video

Memory doesn’t record life like a video camera. Instead, it adds associated details and becomes, like Arthur C. Clarke said, ‘a story-telling machine’.

“What is human memory?” Manning asked. He gazed at the air as he spoke, as if lecturing an invisible audience – as perhaps he was. “It certainly is not a passive recording mechanism, like a digital disc or a tape. It is more like a story-telling machine. Sensory information is broken down into shards of perception, which are broken down again to be stored as memory fragments. And at night, as the body rests, these fragments are brought out from storage, reassembled and replayed. Each run-through etches them deeper into the brain’s neural structure. And each time a memory is rehearsed or recalled it is elaborated. We may add a little, lose a little, tinker with the logic, fill in sections that have faded, perhaps even conflate disparate events.

“In extreme cases, we refer to this as confabulation. The brain creates and recreates the past, producing, in the end, a version of events that may bear little resemblance to what actually occurred. To first order, I believe it’s true to say that everything I remember is false.”

Arthur C. Clarke and Stephen Baxter. The Light of Other Days

‘Memory doesn’t store everything we perceive, but instead takes what we have seen or heard and associates it with what we already know. These associations help us to discern what is important and to recall details about what we’ve seen. They provide “retrieval cues” that make our memories more fluent. In most cases, such cues are helpful. But these associations can also lead us astray, precisely because they lead to an inflated sense of the precision of memory. We cannot easily distinguish between what we recall verbatim and what we construct based on associations and knowledge.’

Christopher Chabris and Daniel Simons. The Invisible Gorilla: How Our Intuitions Deceive Us

ACT on life’s hard choices

We have to make choices in life, and we learn from acceptance and commitment therapy that the freedom to choose is liberating. The failure to choose, says poet Diane Wakoski, is greed.

But pick and choose.
Robot or Man. Machine- or hand-made,
You cannot have both.
Greed, I keep reminding you,
is the failure to choose. The unwillingness to pick one thing over
another. Wealth or simplicity; you cannot have both.

Diane Wakoski. Greed: Pt. 8, 9, 11

‘Life is hard. Life is also many other things. Ultimately your life is what you choose to make it. When the word-machine dominates, life works one way. When the verbal evaluative side of you is but one source of input, life works differently. The choices themselves aren’t always easy, but finding the freedom to choose is a liberating experience. It’s your life. It is not the word-machine’s—even though (of course) it tells you otherwise.’

Steven C. Hayes and Spencer Smith. Get Out of Your Mind and Into Your Life: The New Acceptance and Commitment Therapy

The self-fulfilling prophesy of failure

How our own thoughts of failure can lead to a self-fulfilling prophesy.

Your teacher did not want to be a teacher. He wanted to be a meter reader at the electric utility. Meter readers do not have to put up with children, work comparatively little. And what is more important, have greater opportunity for corruption and are hence both better off and held in higher regard by society. Nor was becoming a meter reader out of your teachers reach. His uncle worked for the electric utility. But the one position as meter reader this uncle was able to facilitate went, as all things most desirable in life invariably went, to your teacher s elder brother.

So your teacher, who narrowly failed his secondary school final examination but was able to have the results falsified, and with his false results, a bribe equivalent to sixty percent of one years prospective salary, and a good low-level connection in the education bureaucracy in the form of a cousin, secured only the post he currently occupies. He is not exactly a man who lives to teach. In fact he hates to teach. It shames him. Nonetheless he retains a small but not non-existent fear of losing his job, of somehow being found out, or if not losing his job then at least being put in a position where he will be forced to pay yet another, and indeed larger bribe in order to retain it, and this fear, augmented by his sense of abiding disappointment and his not unfounded conviction that the world is profoundly unfair, manifests itself in the steady dose of violence he visits upon his charges. With each blow, he tells himself, he helps education penetrate another thick skull.’

By Mohsin Hamid – How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia (1st Edition) (2.3.2013)

‘Narrative therapy listens to the ways in which people tell their story or, in other words, construct narratives about themselves and the lives they live. Even the simplest narratives have underlying principles of construction: in telling a friend about what I did at the weekend, I make decisions, often without being fully aware of it, about what I should include and what I should leave out, which aspects I emphasise, the effect that I want the story to have on the listener.

‘Like certain habits of thinking, narrative constructions become habitual and automatic. To take a simple example: suppose during my life I have done a number of things that I consider to be failures, then I might start to see my life as a story about failure. I begin to give more emphasis to moments of failure and less to those times when I succeeded or when success and failure were not important. I start to see myself as a failure and I come to expect that what I do in the future will also fail. The narrative that I have constructed as a way of understanding my experience becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.’

David Wakely, M.A. Counselling and psychotherapy, my approach.