Stop Thinking, Start Living. Richard Carlson

going to happen when a negative thought enters your mind?

      You no longer need to feel you have to make yourself think positively – you don’t. If you’ve spent time being depressed (and if you’re reading this book you probably have), you’ve heard hundreds of well-meaning suggestions from all sorts of people to ‘think more positively’. Unfortunately, what most people who have never been depressed don’t realize is that when you’re depressed you can no more think positively than get in a spaceship and fly to the moon! Thinking more positively will happen naturally, without effort, as you pull yourself out of your depression. Thinking more positively is a natural extension of knowing that your thoughts can’t hurt you.

      The idea here is to have a different kind of relationship to your thinking – one that allows you to have thoughts of any kind without taking any of them too seriously. You can get to the point in your life where you can have a negative thought (or a series of negative thoughts) and you simply say to yourself, ‘There’s another one.’ It will no longer be ‘front page news’ in your mind! As this happens you will be able to resist the urge of following every negative train of thought that enters your mind.

      If you could somehow climb into the mind of a genuinely happy person, you would notice that she isn’t necessarily thinking positive thoughts. Instead, she isn’t thinking about much at all, other than what she is doing. Happy people understand, either instinctually or because they have been taught, that the name of the game is to enjoy life rather than to think about it. Happy people are so immersed in the process of life, absorbed in what they are doing at the moment, that they rarely stop to analyse how they are doing. If you want to verify this concept first-hand, spend some time watching a roomful of preschool children. The reason they’re having such a good time is because all of their energy is directed towards enjoyment. They are immersed in whatever they happen to be doing; they aren’t keeping score.

      Please don’t make the mistake of thinking, ‘It’s different with children because they aren’t grown up with real problems.’ To a child, problems are every bit as real as yours are to you. Children deal with very difficult, age-related, problems: parents who fight or who are separated, adults who tell them what to do, people who take away their things, and the need to be included and loved, to name just a few. The difference between adults and children and their level of happiness isn’t tied to how real their problems are, but to how much attention is placed on those problems.

      If you are constantly analysing or ‘keeping score’ of your life, you will always be able to find fault in whatever you are doing. After all, who couldn’t improve? Many people even pride themselves on their ability to be on the look-out for ‘what’s wrong’. But if you follow thoughts like ‘Life would be better if …’ you will once again be at the mercy of your own thinking. One thought will lead to another, and then another, and so on. It’s just a matter of how much negativity you can handle. Sooner or later you’ll be down in the dumps. True happiness occurs when you quiet down your analytical mind, when you give it a rest.

      Once you realize that your thinking is what creates your experience of life, including your depression, analysing your life will lose its appeal. You’ll prefer simply to do the best that you possibly can in any given moment and pay attention to enjoying what you are doing, knowing that you can always do better.

      I’m not suggesting that you shouldn’t improve your life. Your life will inevitably improve as you pay more attention to living and less to how you are doing.

      Thoughts Floating Down a River

      Have you ever sat next to a river and watched leaves floating peacefully by? It’s a very therapeutic thing to do. Each leaf is independent of the others but is still connected by the river. You can watch any leaf until it disappears out of sight. It’s a very impersonal process. What I mean by ‘impersonal’ is that the leaves just keep on floating. They don’t care if you like them or whether you’d rather they floated differently.

      Your thoughts can be looked at in much the same way. Your consciousness produces an ongoing series of thoughts, one right after the other. When you focus on any particular thought, it is present and visible. Once your attention goes elsewhere, the thought disappears from your mind. Your thoughts come and go. You have surprisingly little control over the content of your own thinking unless you are actively trying to control it. Once you understand that you are the thinker of your own thoughts, and that your mind doesn‘t produce ‘reality’, it produces ‘thoughts’, you won’t be as affected by what you think. You’ll see your thinking as something that you are doing – an ability you have that brings your experience of life – rather than as the source of reality. Do you remember the old saying ‘Sticks and stones may break my bones but words can never hurt me’? Thoughts could be substituted for words. Your thoughts can’t hurt or depress you once you understand that they are just thoughts.

      When you start to view your own thinking in this more impersonal way (in other words, looking at your thinking instead of being caught in it), you will find yourself becoming free of depression. Your thinking goes on and on, and it will continue to do so for as long as you live. But when you step back from your thinking and simply observe that you are doing it, your mind becomes free, and you open the door to experience.

      Attention and Your Thinking

      If your thinking determines how you are going to feel, then it’s very important to understand exactly what happens when you focus your attention on your negative thinking.

      Use your own common sense to answer the following question. If negative feelings are caused by negative thinking, then what possible good can it do to overanalyse the negative parts of your life? If you spend a great deal of time rehearsing potential problems, dwelling on what’s wrong, and thinking and talking about problems, only two things are certain to happen. First, you will become an expert in your problems! Not an expert at solving your problems, but an expert in describing them. Therapists will love you! Second, you will be depressed – or at least your spirits will be low. This is true because there is a fundamental law at work here: thoughts grow with attention! The more attention you give to what you are thinking, the bigger that thought becomes in your mind and the more important that thought will seem. If I ask you to think of what is bothering you, you can probably provide me with an answer. If I explore your answer with you and ask you to describe it further, and speculate as to what else might go wrong, I draw you deeper into your pain. The more specific and detailed you get, the bigger the problem will become.

      Now hold on a moment. A few seconds ago you were fine and you weren’t even thinking about the problem. Now, with my help, you are describing a painful event as if it were really happening! But it’s not happening – except in your mind. I’m the first person to admit that it is important to acknowledge a real problem. But acknowledgement and commitment to solving a problem takes a moment or two, at most. Acknowledgement is very different from dwelling on and rehearsing, or doing endless post-mortems on situations or events.

      Remember, the way you feel is determined by your thoughts. So guess what: the more attention you put on anything that is negative, the worse you will feel. Again, I ask that you use your own wisdom and common sense to decide whether or not to believe me. Despite the popular idea that talking about and working through negative emotions is a good idea, I’m suggesting that common sense dictates otherwise. After all, people have been working through endless negative emotions for years now – and very few are much better off than when they started and many are worse off. The questions to ask yourself (and your therapist if you have one) are: when does it (the analysis) stop? When have I had enough? When do I get to feel better?

      If you believe that your thoughts are real – and you are encouraged to work through the worst of them – you will end up with even more to contend with. The more you think, the bigger and more important the thoughts will seem and the more of them there will be to deal with. Because your feelings are determined by what you think, you will, by necessity, sink even lower. And, unfortunately, because you are lower, you will think even worse thoughts, which you now have to ‘work through’. This endless negative spiral never takes you upwards towards the place you want to be. The spiral will end when you decide that ‘enough is enough’,