Don't Believe Everything You Think: Why Your Thinking Is The Beginning & End Of Suffering (Beyond Suffering Book 1)

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For example, a Democrat might have the thought, Republicans don’t care about poor people. Now, there is evidence to support this viewpoint: the gutting of social programs that benefit lower-income individuals, the sabotaging of the Affordable Care Act, big tax breaks for the rich, and so on. But there is counter-evidence as well. Many Republicans genuinely believe that free-market capitalism and private enterprise will improve the economic prospects of poor people more than government support will. Plus, a lot of poor people vote Republican, and it’s probably safe to assume they care about themselves. You might feel insistent that this thought is true! If it really does feels true at first glance, inquire again. Can you really know that it’s true? Be honest with yourself. Consider what it would be like if you let go of this thought that brings you down. How would you feel? When you stop believing everything you think, you give yourself the opportunity to be more proactive, and live the life you want to live.

While it’s true that you experience each of your thoughts, they don’t always represent what’s true about the world. But thoughts are also important, and we do have some control over them. So it’s time to start exploring the topic of developing better thoughts. Regular doses of wisdom can help! Every other week, I publish an article with actionable tips and strategies that you can use immediately to make your life better. But entertaining this thought doesn’t do me any good. Since I can’t do anything to make Comcast better, it just makes me feel like a passive victim. So this thought, although valid, serves only to make me less happy. I would be better off thinking about something else. Replacement Thoughts The human mind is constantly processing the world around it. Each day is a non-stop barrage of thoughts, questions, and observations.The Work” of Byron Katie is a process of inquiry that helps you identify and question the thoughts that cause you the most suffering. Seeing that the thoughts which cause you suffering are not the truth helps you let go of them, so you can focus instead on loving what is. See Your Thoughts for What They Are That’s it. Don’t believe everything you think. Our default setting is to simultaneously believe and embody the thoughts that we have. But the thoughts that we have are sometimes wrong, unwise, or unhelpful. So we should not automatically buy into them, and we should not automatically use them to guide our behavior. Is it Valid? Noting what arises in your mind has a host of benefits. It helps you stay present and see the contents of your consciousness more clearly. This creates space between you and the thoughts you experience, which gives you more power to act with intention. But when you hold on to your thoughts as if they are the utmost truth, unpleasant feelings are sure to follow.

The irony of this situation is that everyone talks to themselves all day long. You just don’t verbalize this dialogue, so it isn’t heard by others.

Oftentimes, these are “should” thoughts. (e.g. “The world should be different,” or “My significant other should act in a different way.”)

Start by locating a thought that is causing you suffering in some way. If you’re having troubles with another person in your life, Katie’s “Judge Your Neighbor” worksheet is a good way to locate these thoughts. Now, turning that statement around in three ways, consider how the following are as true, or truer. One is that we like being right. It’s uncomfortable to discover that one of your thoughts is, in fact, wrong. So rather than open-mindedly examining the validity of our thoughts, we usually prefer to just assume we’re right and move on. But if our habitual thoughts routinely lead to unhappy outcomes, then we need to do the uncomfortable work of examining those thoughts. When you’ve identified a thought that creates suffering for you, proceed with the following four questions:

Joseph Nguyen is the author of the #1 international bestselling book, Don't Believe Everything You Think, which has been translated into 31+ languages. For the sake of example, let’s say you were feeling upset with your friend Jane, and had the thought “Jane should be nicer to me.”

I discovered that when I believed my thoughts, I suffered, but that when I didn’t believe them, I didn’t suffer, and that this is true for every human being. Freedom is as simple as that. I found that suffering is optional. I found a joy within me that has never disappeared, not for a single moment. That joy is in everyone, always.”Most of the time, your thoughts are just a story you tell yourself to make sense of the world. It’s all based on your interpretation of the world around you. Not some universal truth about reality.