Thoughts Create Your Reality

The importance of recognising that we feel our thinking - and how to manage it

Our eldest daughter was getting ready for bed a couple of night’s ago when she noticed a tiny gnat on the floor of her bedroom. It was so small that it was unable to even make the slightest buzzing noise as it limply jumped about. Still, this harmless bug was not a welcome visitor and our nine year old begged me to get it out of her room.

I tried to do as she asked without hurting the tiny insect, but my attempts to shoo it out failed, and it found a hiding place somewhere amid her toys. I attempted to reassure our daughter that it was nothing to worry about and that she could safely go to sleep.

About 30 minutes later, she came downstairs looking panicked. She was terrified about the prospect of this bug emerging from its hiding place and deciding to attack her in the night.

And so, I went upstairs and sought to explain that it wasn’t the gnat that was causing her stress and worry: it was her thoughts about the gnat. This finally seemed to do the trick, and she soon nodded off to sleep.

As we get older, we may not be terrified about the prospect of being attacked by a gnat the size of a pin head. However, the same mental mechanism is still at play, albeit in a different form, and we continue to fall for it, and suffer as a result.

Photo by Aubree Herrick on Unsplash

Our brains are continually scanning for danger, which makes sense as its primary purpose is to keep us alive. But seeing as the classic sabre toothed tiger is no longer a danger, lots of other seeming threats rise up to fill the gap. From saying the wrong thing socially, to getting in trouble at work or falling ill; there is a visually limitless amount of scenarios the mind can come up with to keep us in a state of high anxiety.

But have you noticed that the mind is particularly bad at predicting the future?

Of all the worries I’ve had in my life, very few of them have come to pass. And even the ones that have transpired have never been as bad in reality as I imagined they would be. All those anxieties that I entertained over the years served little purpose but to rob me of peace in the present.

So how do we escape this trap?

Firstly, simply recognise that it is happening. It is not the event, person, or gnat that is causing us to feel bad. It is our thoughts about them. Once we can recognise that this is happening, we don’t need to keep falling for it.

But we can go further - right to the root of the problem.