Master Your Thinking

by Alexander Parker

  Identify your thinking trap—what might be the most important step to controlling your impulses and thinking more positively is identifying why you think negatively the way you do. In other words, one of your first and most important steps has to be finding out which of the thinking traps you most identify with. This process can take quite a while before you can definitively say which of the thinking traps you believe is the one you most suffer from, but an easy way to come to the most accurate conclusion is to write down your thoughts as you have them when dealing with a particular stress or emotionally strenuous situations. When you can better understand which of your thought processes is the most frequent and most prevalent to you—or, in most cases, which spiral is most problematic in your life—you can compare that thought process to the thinking traps listed in previous chapters, and see which one you most identify with. Also, consider where you came from. If you can understand what in your past, if anything, made you feel negatively in the specific way you do, you can better understand how those negative experiences as a youth or in your past would have repercussions in your adulthood which correlate to your specific thinking trap. For example, someone who grew up in an especially competitive or otherwise cutthroat household where you were pushed to succeed and excel, those qualities may come back in the form of harsh pragmatism in your adult life, which might manifest negatively in the form of a “black and white thinking” mentality. Remember that no two people are the exact same, so it’s highly unlikely that you experience a thinking trap the same way that others might. One person who has a specific affinity for a negative way of thinking may not fit the typical pattern for most people who share that particular thinking trap. This does not make any particular person who shares a thinking trap less or more valid in their thinking trap or in their struggles with that thinking trap.

  Challenge your thinking trap—this sounds a bit too obvious for many people, but it’s overwhelmingly important to challenge whatever thinking trap you believe you suffer the most from or have the most trouble combating in your life. While this is rather obvious, what’s the most important about challenging your thinking traps is to stay committed to fighting it. Something many people gloss over when talking about thinking traps is that the most tempting vice known to man is perhaps sloth, to be lazy. Why would you put forth an effort to fighting something when a part of you is so insistent that no matter what, you’ll never be able to truly get rid of it? If part of you knows deep down, that the negative part of you will never really leave you, what’s the point in even trying in the first place? Those are exactly the kinds of thoughts that you have to learn how to separate from reality before you can begin to combat your thinking trap. One of the simplest ways to combat your thinking trap is to simply work in the opposite direction. For instance, if you’re a “mind reader” type, someone who always assumes that everyone you have experience with dislikes you, in order to fuel your self-loathing, combat that trend in your thoughts by constantly casting doubt on that assumption. Although this might seem counter-intuitive, and it is for many of the other types, it’s important to try and invalidate those negative thoughts as soon as they appear in your mind. That way, after doing it for long enough, doubting those thoughts will become second nature just as much as the assumptions in the first place were. Once it becomes that much easier to cast doubt on those thoughts once they pop up in your mind, the next step would be to fight and debate against the negative assumption. Often, casting doubt just isn’t enough if the person is suffering from that kind of thinking severely enough. If this is the case, and no matter the thinking trap, it’s important to fight and fight and fight as much as possible against your negative thoughts, working in the opposite direction to weaken those thoughts. Here are some other things to try when combating your thinking traps;

  Examination: take a harsher eye to the things you think, negatively. The more negative the thought that pops up in your head, the more scrutiny it should fall under. The idea here is to make it emotionally more taxing on you to have a negative thought than it is to have a positive one, whereas before often people who have those kinds of thoughts would simply let them pass as normal. The goal is to make the association between mental scrutinies and having those negative thoughts in the first place so that having those thoughts becomes more trouble than its worth, and the thought becomes less and less frequent.

  Scrutinizing your double-standard: ask yourself whether you would think the things about others who are similar to you that you do about yourself. Understand that the negative thoughts you have about yourself and your worth are abnormal and harmful to yourself and your mental state. Compare yourself to others in a way that would make you empathize with yourself instead of blindly attacking yourself out of habit. This method is made mainly for those who suffer most with a thinking trap that involves very harsh self-criticism, such as the “black and white” thinker or the “mind reader” type. Learning to separate the thoughts you have about yourself from reality will help you to be able to empathize with yourself and be just a bit kinder to yourself in the future.

  Surveying peers and equals—this type works well especially for the “should have, could have, would have” type of thinking trap. This method involves noting whenever you have an intrusive thought as to whether or not your thoughts and actions are good enough for you. Then, after noting the thought, going around to those who you feel don’t have your problems and asking them about what you’re having trouble with. For example, if someone is having trouble with a child or with a particular type of assignment for work, they might think to themselves “good parents/better workers can’t have this kind of problem! Because I have this problem, I’m not a good worker/parent.” However, it’s very often that the opposite entirely is true. Usually, when you ask others who you view as the epitome of what you strive to be, or feel you are lacking in comparison to, what they actually think of your situation or how they really stack up compared to you, you’ll likely be surprised by the results—because, more often than not, you’re the one who’s deluded into thinking that you don’t stand a chance against others, or that you pale in comparison to them. Understand that everyone undergoes almost the exact same struggles. Everyone is different, but most people are able to connect through the experiences they have to endure. Keep this in mind when you have a thought that sounds something like “I’m not as good as this person or that person”, because it’s highly likely that they are actually the ones who struggle, just like you. You have much more in common with your peers than you probably figure.

  Conduct your own experiment—often when we have these negative thoughts, we think of them as a rule of law. We don’t consider the likelihood that these thoughts we have are unrealistic. So, the next time you experience a string of thoughts that surround the same topic, test it for yourself. For instance, many people have ongoing paranoia that their friends only really hand out with them out of pity, or that they feel bad for them. They don’t feel like those friends really care about them. So, they put those thoughts to the test and call up as many friends as possible to try and make plans. As they were probably of the assumption that most, if not all, of the friends, would decline the invitation or make an excuse not to follow up, they would probably be pleasantly surprised when more of the friends returned the extended invite than what they probably thought.

  Getting out of a thinking trap is a formidable task in and of itself. However, it’s certainly not impossible. Not for you or for anyone else. When addressing your thinking traps, make sure that you’re actually connecting your problems back to you. Sometimes, when we just can’t seem to deal with our issues or concerns in our lives, we dissociate from them and instead apply those issues to a hypothetical “someone else”. This can help a lot in some situations, and it can especially help when you need to make sure your perspective is objective, or you need a second opinion. However, we often find that this isn’t the case when we need to re-ground ourselves and own up to our own problems. Thi
s coping mechanism can quickly become a cowardly crutch that allows us to disconnect from our problems easily. So, when you sit down and try to come up with a way out of your thinking traps, understand that, although you aren’t alone, no one can understand your trouble better than you can. You have to be the one who identifies what you need as a person. The skills you learn while taking a deeper look at yourself will most certainly come into play and help you later on.

  Chapter 7

  How These Thoughts come to be

  We get so caught up in talking about what these thinking traps and unhealthy thoughts are by definition, and how to get rid of them, but we scarcely think deeper on them—where do these thoughts even come from, to begin with? How can such an unhealthy pattern of thoughts and actions exist for so long in a person while going totally unnoticed, often until it’s at an extreme level?

  That answer may, in fact, lie in how we raise our children. Allow me to explain a little further:

  While many people are aware that one of the several things you just “simply don’t talk about” with others is how to raise a child “properly”. While there’s definitely massive controversy surrounding that subject, and while it’s such a touchy subject for a very good reason, there’s something to be said, perhaps, about how deeply uncomfortable that subject makes many of us feel to discuss.

  Raising a child is hard—one of the few universally agreed upon facts of being a parent. Not only is it hard, but there’s no real solid particular way that you can raise a child the right way. To even assert that there is a right way at all, to many, is ludicrous. But, there are many ways that the majority agrees are bad ways to raise a child. One of those is allowing the bias of a parent to affect the child harshly.

  To put it more simply, my mother strives toward a state of her children where they lack her flaws—she hoped to raise children who understood what she did wrong, her shortcomings and learned from them. Many parents think this way, trying to improve their children’s lives by teaching them somehow, to both follow in their footsteps and avoid them altogether. “Do as I say, not as I do,” to be more concise. In other words, where a lot of parents “go wrong”, by many other parent’s standards, is when they allow their own vices to find root in their children.

  For example, many children are raised in a very competitive environment. Not only can this be abnormal with a specific kind of parenting, but it can be harmful and even dangerous to the child. Children often fail to understand the intention behind something that a parent inflicts on them—young children, mostly, only understand the reality and the action. They don’t really care about or even register the reason that a parent treats them a certain way, they only register the way they were treated and make assumptions about themselves, others, and the world as a whole, based on that. The assumptions they make as such young children impact the way they mature and behave as adolescents, and as adults later in their life. So, if they make an assumption that’s negative about them based on the way they were treated at home, and the way the environment, the climate, of their home, are the negative habits that form as a result still entirely at the fault of that child? If that’s what happens to that child, does the intention behind that upbringing even matter? In my personal experience, the answer to that question is “no”, but that’s up for debate.

  So, now we must ask, is a dysfunctional child dysfunctional solely because of their upbringing? Is it only and always the fault of the guardian that a child is the way that they are? And, perhaps more importantly, why do children make those harmful assumptions, and why do they later form what we now understand as thinking traps and unhealthy thinking?

  To go back to that example, let’s say for the sake of example that you have a friend named Elijah, who was raised his entire life in a very competitive environment. Not only was his home life simply competitive—it was nothing short of cutthroat. He was made to feel devalued and worthless when he didn’t succeed and achieve up to the standards of his parents. Because of such a harsh focus on success in all fields, your friend Elijah was very rarely allowed to run around and play outside. They weren’t allowed to hang out with their friends, play games, or really have much of what we now would consider a normal childhood or much of a childhood at all.

  Now, to take a step back and think about that example for a moment: how do you think that kind of environment would affect your friend in the long run of their life? How would that childhood—or lack thereof—have an impact on their adulthood, and how they functioned socially after that kind of upbringing?

  Jumping back into the fray of that example, your friend Elijah has now developed into something of an introvert, although he tries hard to interact and make friends with his peers. It just doesn’t seem to work out for him, and he can’t seem to figure out why. It makes him upset that he can’t seem to get in touch with people who he wants to get along with and make plans with him. On another note, Elijah struggles a lot in his adulthood with praise and competition. He has a major competitive streak, one that mainly came from his parents and from his earlier years. This competitive streak, however, can quickly evolve from a fun but harsh personality into someone who genuinely can’t physically take losing to someone else. When he does lose at something he tries at—which is to say, everything—Elijah becomes evidently upset and feels dejected. Even the most meaningless of losses, he takes as a personal slight against him and he feels rejected by the people around him because of it. On top of that, he thrives off of praise that comes to him from any direction, especially people he looks up to and respects. His undying need for that validation is more or less what drives him to be successful, although he knows that this way of thinking is incredibly unhealthy for him and for his friends. Even though he wants to be better and have more self-esteem, he feels his self-worth tethered to his performance. He knows that isn’t healthy at all, but can’t seem to find any other way to measure his worth as a person. His competitive job doesn’t help, either—it just ties him further and further down to the idea that everything he does is for the sake of pleasing some higher authority figure. Every time he indulges those urges, he goes further and further down the rabbit hole. He knows he wants to stop feeling this way, because he gets little to no satisfaction out of it, even when he does succeed at someone. The wave of pleasure he feels from pleasing someone is a fleeting high, soon to be replaced by the desire for more, higher, better. Often, he pushes himself much too hard and suffers physical consequences because of his reckless actions.

  If any of that sounds like either yourself or like someone you know, it’s likely either you or a loved one is suffering from an incredibly common pattern of thinking, one that’s emerged more and more in the last decade or so. Many parents adopt some kind of a cross between a helicopter parent and a Drill Sergeant Type parent: a kind of parent who watches over their child but only in the way that a teacher oversees their student. This kind of parent takes the methodology of erasing your faults in your child to an entirely new level, to an extreme. By attempting to teach and instruct their child to be the best and to be better versions of their parents, they’ve given their child an entirely new set of issues and problems that they’ll have to deal with later in life. When all you know throughout your childhood is studying and grades and you know that achieving high grades and studying a lot makes your parents or guardian happy and proud, you learn quickly to associate those two things together. When you’re used to only feeling like a good child when you’re being productive academically, what chance do you really have of growing up into a well-rounded adult? None, really. Your chances of growing up and being able to recognize your flaws and your mistakes without becoming upset with yourself and with others is slim to none. Of course, the fault for that lies with the guardian who—sometimes unintentionally, but nevertheless—instilled in you as a young child that to be worth someone as a person is to be productive for them. This kind of thinking transfers over well into their education, as most education systems follow a sim
ilar outline of thinking. Those exact same kids who lived their lives in fear of being unproductive and therefore being unloved thrived in that education system. This relationship between them and their education only strengthened the relationship between their worth and their academic achievements further. In a way, we must draw the line and ask ourselves whether or not this productivity in our children is really worth it, both from a practical standpoint and a moral one.

  On one hand, those children who are pushed so hard their entire lives often burn out quickly. They’re often used to being treated as special cases, children who exceed when compared to some of their more “average peers”. Because of this special treatment, a lot of those children have the idea in their heads that not only are they better in some intrinsic way than those peers, but they also are indoctrinated into thinking that this hierarchy between them and the rest of the world will exist indefinitely. When this idea they have comes crashing down around them as they get older, it can have terrible effects on their mental health, as well as their performance. Looking at it even from the perspective of someone who wants to raise a child who is, above all else, intelligent and productive, wouldn’t it be much better—both for the parent and for the child in question—to raise a child who can pace themselves and take good care of their health, both physically and emotionally? It’s been proven time and time again that individuals who know how to pace themselves work-wise and in all other areas of their lives are shown across all areas to be more productive and more likely to be successful and happy at the same time, a feat that becomes much harder to achieve when you’re so focused on your work that you disregard happiness entirely. So, even considering the selfish goals of this kind of parent, it works in both their favor and the favor of the youth to raise a child who is well-rounded enough to take care of themselves and understand how to balance the importance of their happiness and how much they’re working, and to also understand the importance of self-gratification instead of existing off the praise of authority figures, as many of those children so often do.