How Your Thoughts — and Only Your Thoughts — Create Your Entire Reality (Seriously.)
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So we’ve talked about why your thoughts feel so true (but actually aren’t).
Just to recap what’s happening in your brain all the time:
Facts are all around you in the world. Things happen. People say things. You see words and pictures on screens. You see numbers in your bank account, your scale, and on the clock. Etc.
Your automatic brain makes automatic interpretations of these facts. You can’t turn this off. It operates without conscious intention and without conscious effort. Oh, and it’s completely confident in itself.
Your deliberate brain becomes aware of an judgment your automatic brain has made. It feels like it “just pops up.” It feels obvious. To you, it feels like you’re just making an observation, not making a judgment.
You always have a choice with these automatic assessments. One of your normal deliberate brain operations is to ask: Do I accept the interpretation I just got from the automatic brain? This is the holding tank. 99.9% of the time, you rush through this step. “Yes, obviously! This assessment is true!”
Once you’ve accepted an interpretation as true, you start problem-solving. You make plans, you do things, you start making more interpretations of other facts, you start finding patterns and stories — all premised on the assumption that the original interpretation was true.
In visual form:
What’s the big deal though? Like sure, maybe some of your automatic interpretations are wrong or unhelpful. But that should become obvious pretty fast, right? Surely you’ll just adjust your assessment as needed and keep going.
Unfortunately, this isn’t what happens.
This is because once you accept a thought as true, your automatic brain starts doing even more work. It does 3 things:
It goes into your memory and it activates things that align with your thought and it suppresses things that don’t align with your thought. It creates a coherent set of evidence supporting your theory (and conveniently papers over any doubt or ambiguity).
It starts prepping for the future based on the assumption that your thought is true. It starts forming scenarios and planning for those scenarios.
It interprets anything it sees (including the actions that you start taking!) to further confirm that thought. Even seemingly contradictory evidence gets twisted around to support the original theory.
Past, future, and present — everything is primed and ready to be interpreted by your automatic brain to confirm the theory that you approved.
There’s a bonkers study from the UK that demonstrates the truth of this. Richard Wiseman, a researcher and author, recruited two groups of people — one that thought of themselves as “lucky” and another that thought of themselves as “unlucky.” Both groups were given a newspaper and told to count the number of photographs inside. Simple enough.
This wasn’t an ordinary newspaper though. On the second page, in large type that took up half the page, Wiseman had written, “Stop counting. There are 43 photographs in this newspaper.”
Further on in the newspaper, he wrote a second large message: “Stop counting. Tell the experimenter you have seen this and win £150.”
Most of the people who thought of themselves as “lucky” saw the messages, stopped counting within a few seconds, and collected their money. Most of the people who thought of themselves as “unlucky” didn’t see the messages.
Same facts. Same circumstances. Different thoughts. Completely different realities.
This is how hard your automatic brain works to confirm the theories you have decided to believe. This is how you end up with two people having radically different experiences of the same job. And this is why your beliefs become self-fulfilling prophecies.
Your facts are not creating your experiences. Your circumstances are not the source of your pain. The only thing creating your reality — the only thing that can create your reality — is your thoughts.
Interpretations, assessments, theories, stories, beliefs, judgments, perspectives — call them whatever you want. Your own thoughts are what rule and create your entire life.
And if you’re not loving your life — if you’re not loving your experiences — this cycle is so insanely simple to break. (Not always easy. But definitely simple.)
All you have to do is put the automatic thinking in the holding tank for a minute and go into deliberate thinking mode.
Break down where you are right now.
What are the facts?
What are you thinking about the facts?
How does that make you feel?
What do you do and not do when you feel that way?
What is the result of your actions on you? How does your thought become your reality?
Build up where you want to be. Start with any question and build up or down from there.
How do you want to think?
How do you want to feel?
What do you want to do?
What reality do you want to be living in?
Figure out how you will start thinking and believing something new. There are so many ways.
This is simpler than 99% of the things you have already done. It is simpler than physics and accounting and making decks and raising kids.
All you have to do is go slowly, step by step. Just like three-digit multiplication.
Watch where your brain goes and don’t take it too seriously.
Your automatic brain takes itself seriously, 100% of the time.
You don’t have to take it seriously at all, until you decide that you want to.
You always have a choice.