Today, I’m offering a quick corollary to my previous post, Don’t Believe Everything You Think. The message here is simple:
You are not your thoughts.
Our inner experience is largely composed of thoughts. We create and listen to a running narrative of our life. We think about the past. We think about the future. We react. We judge. We wonder. We ponder. We remember. We plan. We predict.
It’s easy to get wrapped up in all that thinking and mistakenly believe it’s who we really are. But we are not our thoughts. Perhaps our thoughts are part of who we are, along with our feelings, our inclinations, and our personality. But the self is surely something greater than the sum of its parts.
So, if you’re not your thoughts, who are you?
One answer is that you are the observer of your thoughts. You are the entity that listens to your thoughts. Another answer is that you are the director of your thoughts. This feels better because it puts you in the driver’s seat. However, your thoughts frequently arise automatically without any direction from you at all. Sometimes you get to be the director, but often you are just the observer.
You are also the observer of your emotions and the director of your actions. But again, you are more than the sum of your parts. You are also not your feelings, so emotions like jealousy and rage don’t make you a bad person. And you are not your actions, so making a mistake doesn’t mean you’re an idiot, and doing something selfish doesn’t mean you’re immoral.
Maybe one day psychologists and neuroscientists will solve the riddle of consciousness. Maybe one day we’ll have a better answer to this question. For now, you can rest assured that you are not your thoughts.
Automatic Thoughts
Your automatic thoughts are a product of human nature interacting with your current environment along with all your past experiences, your upbringing, your culture, and your beliefs. Your thoughts tend to reflect your current feelings, and your feelings change pretty often. Your thoughts are often simple, short-sighted reactions to events and situations. But you are a complicated, dynamic person with long-term goals. You are not your thoughts.
We all have thoughts we’re not proud of. And we often feel ashamed of ourselves for having those thoughts because we mistakenly believe they are a reflection of our true selves. But the very fact that we don’t like those thoughts means we’re not those thoughts. We are the observer of those thoughts. We are the entity noticing that those thoughts don’t fit with who we want to be.
If you have a thought that doesn’t align with your values, you can choose to reject that thought. You can argue against it and assert yourself. You can replace it with a better thought. You can work to cultivate helpful mindsets in order to improve the character of your habitual thoughts.
Likewise, if your thoughts encourage you to behave like someone you don’t want to be, you can choose to behave in other ways. Your behavior is a stronger reflection of who you really are because your behavior is easier for you to control and because actions speak louder than thoughts. So try to make sure your automatic thoughts don’t immediately trigger regrettable behaviors. Take time to pause and deliberately choose your actions.
Becoming a Better Observer
Through practice, you can increasingly become a better observer of your thoughts. Doing so will make you a more powerful director of your thoughts, giving you, the real you, greater control over both your inner experience and your behavior.
Here’s an example. When someone is rude to you, you might have a thought like, He’s such a jerk! Instead of simply believing it, you can notice the thought for what it is and then say to yourself, I’m having the thought that he’s a jerk. Doing this allows you to take a step back from your thought, which gives you an opportunity to consider it dispassionately. Maybe he didn’t mean to be rude. Maybe he’s been having a very difficult week, and he’s not normally like this. Maybe you’re sometimes like that yourself. Or maybe he really is a jerk.
If you don’t notice that your thoughts are thoughts, then you’ll probably just believe them and then embody them with your emotions and your behaviors, so it’s important to deliberately practice being a conscious observer of your thoughts. Mindfulness meditation is an excellent way to do that, which is why one of the key benefits of mindfulness is increased free will.
The point here is that when you allow yourself to be your thoughts, you lose much of your agency over how you respond to life. If you want to approach life proactively, and I hope you do, then you’ll need to remember that you are not your thoughts.