I was doing some thinking today about thoughts. It’s interesting that I used Augusta Rodin’s, The Thinker, as my picture above. You see, he originally intended to call his piece, The Poet. Weird for us today and one of his inspirations for this creation came from Dante’s The Divine Comedy. The Poet was to represent Dante.
Back to my original message here. For years we’ve heard that human have between 50,000 and 80,000 thoughts per day. As a member of UCLA’s Laboratory of Neuro Imaging (LONI), I was able to ascertain from their studies in which they stated that it’s approximately 70,000 thoughts per day we have. Going further, about 80% of our thoughts were of the previous day. And a great majority of those are negative. I would add that probably many of our thoughts are not really thinking thoughts as much as suggestions from the world around us. Most people tend to think of what they could of or should have done. They feel anxiety (which is due to worries of the future from things that started in the past).
It was Zig Ziglar that called it “stinkin’ thinkin’.” Since most of our thoughts come from the previous day, it would then be important to learn how make changes in how we think and simply start engaging in mindfulness to do that. If you don’t start taking control of those 70,000 thoughts, many of them will have an affect on your overall well-being. Heck, you may even start to engage in self-destructive habits.
The art and science of mindfulness training will help you to start eliminating those thoughts that don’t serve you very well. Unless some of those negative thoughts are educational in nature, then isn’t it time to dump them? I would suggest that you also use the techniques from Albert Ellis’ Rational Emotive Behavioral Therapy (REBT) regarding negative thoughts. You see, most of them are not based in reality. We’ve all experienced negative thoughts and may even have a handle of how they’ve affected us. I know I have, even recently.
In essence, REBT uses what is known as the ABC model. A is the Activating Event. B is the Beliefs we have. C are the Consequences or outcomes. Most people will believe that A causes C. This is simply not true and it’s irrational thinking. It is the beliefs we have of an event or trigger that leads to a consequence or feeling. All have to do is to change what we believe about it in order to change the outcome. Or we can simply get rid of the trigger.
Regarding the negative thoughts we have about the myriad of things around us, it’s time to combine mindfulness with REBT in order to understand from a distance and simply change our beliefs. Most of the time we’ll come across the trigger. We may not be able to run away from it and it’s simply not healthy anyway. Change your beliefs. We have 70,000 thoughts each day. We can sort through them and start tossing out the negative ones as well as deal with the things we need to right away. When you do that, you’ll start chiseling down your thoughts and help create less anxiety and stress, which leads to better mental, emotional and physical health.
Here’s to a good thought!
Cheers,
Bob
America’s #1 Mind-Body Transformation Expert and author of Mind Your Own Fitness
