What do you think about your thinking?

Nobody ever taught us how to think or how to think about our thinking. It’s all very meta and seems so far out there and unimportant.  But it turns out, our thinking is the source of all of our emotions and feelings.  Our thinking is also the result of our life and the choices that we make.

What we feel explains our actions, good or bad.  And when we act and do certain things, we get the results of our situations, or on a grander scale, our life.  When we were in high school, nobody ever pulled us aside and said, “hey, the little things that pop in your head to tell you your ugly, fat and not popular, did you know those are your just your thoughts and you don’t have to believe them?” Nobody did that for me, I’m sure nobody did that for you.

I've said it before, our brains are like a 2-yr old with a knife and we have to remind our brain and say, “what a minute, who’s in charge here.”  Our brains job is to make life easy for us and preserve our energy for survival.  It does this through patterns and repitition.  It’s easy and efficient, and its comfortable for us to be thinking the same thing because it's what we’ve always done and sometimes we don’t know how to do any different.  We don’t know how to stop the cycle.  

Learning to question what we think and learning to think about our thinking is a life changing skill.  Most of us go throughout our adult life living out the subconscious thoughts that play over and over in our minds.

The ability to think about our thinking is called metacognition.  Rarely do we catch ourselves thinking about our thinking because it is something that we have to do intentionally.  It doesn’t just happen.

We have a brain that is capable of thinking about itself.

We are capable of noticing what we are thinking. Rarely do we catch ourselves thinking about our thinking because it is something that we have to do intentionally.  It doesn’t just happen.

Learning to stop and pause and question that old brain of yours is a skill. As with all skills, we have to stop and pause and think, "do I want to believe what my brain is telling me?".