I often go with my friend and her chihuahua Abby to Abby’s favorite place in the world, which is a large open prairie field at Beaudry Park. It’s the only place she can run around all she wants without encountering her least favorite things: other dogs, and human children.
Sometimes there’s a line of cylindrical haybales at the edge of the big field. One time, my friend stuffed a chicken treat into one of the haybales, low to the ground so Abby would find it. After retrieving it, Abby went straight to the same spot on the next haybale, looking for the chicken that all haybales apparently contain.
We laughed, but humans are the same. Every time I go near the Assiniboine Park neighborhood, I’m helpless not to think of a nearby ice cream parlor called Sargent Sundae. In fact, I can’t even think about that area of the city without entertaining the possibility of working an ice cream sortie into my day. I suppose that’s natural; remembering food locations is undoubtedly one of the main reasons our minds developed the tendency to make such quick associations.
The human mind is a high-horsepower free-association machine. Walk down a street you lived on as a child and notice the memories flood in, in astonishing detail — not just what grade you were in, who your friends were, and what you did on Saturday mornings, but the threadbare armrest on the basement easy chair, the sun-discolored cassettes that lived on your sister’s windowsill, and your pink-and-turquoise bouncy ball – the one with teeth marks in it — that ended up in the eavestrough.
Your memory banks contain millions of such details, and they shoot to the surface at the slightest provocation, each with their own emotional signature. The crunch of gravel driveway summons an image of the old grey Buick and its pungent air freshener. By just glancing at the old aluminum screen door, you can almost hear how it groaned when you opened it too wide.
With a hair-trigger, the mind connects what’s happening in the present to anything in its vast archives that might be relevant. It’s doing this virtually all the time, which is what allows us to remember where we live, what a ripe avocado feels like, and other important predictive information.
This free-association process seems to be pretty haphazard, however. For example, when I hear the song Kokomo I always think of the show Full House, because I saw the 1988 episode in which the Beach Boys made a brief guest appearance. This particular mental association isn’t very useful, but others are — I do think to duck when I go down certain flights of stairs so that I only hit my head once instead of every time.
Thankfully, I don’t find it all that distressing to remember Full House, so it isn’t a big problem that my mind makes me think about it. Sometimes, though, the mind’s suggestions aren’t just useless, but upsetting. They trigger emotions such as fear or resentment, feeding the momentum of reactive thinking, triggering more thoughts and more emotions, and eventually landing on something you can’t stop thinking about even though you want to. We call this rumination, a word originally used to refer to cows chewing regurgitated grass over and over.
When the Mind Gets Stuck
The thinking mind has no master plan, just ideas. You’re buttoning up your shirt in the mirror, and the mind says, “Hey remember that time you ran that entire meeting without knowing you had buttoned up your shirt with all the wrong buttonholes?”
The mind supposes this might be relevant information, given that you are buttoning a shirt right now, but it only triggers tangential worries that are harder to let go of. A moment later you’re thinking of a colleague who was that meeting and doesn’t like you, and probably would love it if you got fired. Now you’re thinking about all the various unpredictable ways you might get fired – are you sure you checked over the mockup you submitted Friday? Remember the time you went camping with that file still in your trunk, and your boss was calling you but you were out of cell phone range? Did you make a mistake like that last week? Are you sure?
Perhaps you don’t get hung up on shirt-buttoning tangents today, but you did check Instagram on the bus, encountered your uncle’s caustic political opinions, and now you can’t stop arguing with him in your head. Or you read something awful in the paper, or you thought you saw a mouse in the basement this morning, or maybe Peter hates the paint you chose but would never say so — there are a million ways into the tar-pits of rumination, and no reliable ways out. The advice from well-meaning friends to “stop thinking about it” is as absurd as being told that the cure for insomnia is to get some sleep.
The truth is we have little direct control over whether we have ruminative thoughts or not. The mind makes its associations without our consent, and gathers momentum easily. We can’t turn that feature off, and probably wouldn’t want to.
What we can do is make our thoughts less sticky, less magnetic, by learning to see them for what they are.
Practice treating thoughts like a TV in the other room
Thoughts depict real things — people, events, situations – and real things matter to us. But thoughts aren’t the things they depict. They’re hallucinations of those things. They’re sensations that happen only here and now, just like itches, sounds, and smells, but instead of itching or smelling they give an impression of something happening somewhere or sometime else.
To the degree you’re able to see thoughts as the hallucinations they are, you won’t be perturbed by them. As soon as you can see a thought as a thought even a little bit, the grip of rumination loosens.
It helps immensely to recognize that there are really only two kinds of thought: mental image and mental talk. Examine your thoughts and you will find pictures or visual impressions you can see, and language or sound impressions you can hear, and not much else. Thought is only ever made of those two ingredients, regardless of the subject matter, and those ingredients are never themselves upsetting.
This is almost perfectly analogous to a TV show or movie. No matter what horrors unfold on the screen, all that’s ever present are moving arrangements of pixelated light, and sounds coming out of a speaker. There are no monsters in the room. I’ve written before about taking advantage of this fact as a little kid, while watching scary movies other people picked – I would slightly cross my eyes during the bad parts, to blur the content of the movie back into raw light and sound, dispelling the hallucination.
We can do this with thinking too. We can loosen the emotional grip of our thoughts by learning to see them as raw mental image and mental talk, tuning out of the content in the process.
It’s not difficult but it takes some practice. Whenever you notice you’re starting to dwell pointlessly on something – the new coffee-break policy at work, the state of the Yankee’s bullpen – or really any time you notice you’re thinking a lot, try tuning into the stream of mental chatter as though it’s coming out of a TV in the next room. Notice that the mind is saying stuff, and let that stuff become the same undifferentiated blah-blah that any TV or radio show sounds like you’re a room or two away.
Do this practice now and then throughout the day, for ten or twenty seconds at a time. It might seem like a weird thing to try at first, to “hear” your thoughts rather than listen to them. There is a distinct difference which you can develop a sense for.
It may surprise you that the words keep coming even if you’re not entertaining them, just as a TV program keeps showing itself to an empty room. You can always hear it carrying on, but it’s up to you whether to go in and sit on the couch.
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Photo by Neora Aylon
I'm David, and Raptitude is a blog about getting better at being human -- things we can do to improve our lives today.
I’ve encountered this concept before but you’ve expressed it beautifully here. Very clear, thank you. As usual, it’s remembering to implement the strategy that is the hard part.
It got me thinking though – are thoughts always only mental sounds and images? Isn’t there also mental sensation? For example, I can remember distinctly how cold my head felt when I swam in the ocean last week, or the weird feeling of a COVID test swab up my nose. Come to think of it, I can also envision the taste of chocolate or the smell of coffee. I’m curious as to what you think about this – is the “tv in the other room” a futuristic one that is able to project smell, taste and sensation?
There is a lot of interesting research that psychologists have done on this topic. The best answer I’ve found so far is that it varies from person to person though there are noteworthy trends.
Most people can summon mental images. Some can envision things so vividly that it is almost like seeing them. Others can only conjure up a shadow of an image, more like recalling the contour of a thing, without being able to clearly envision color or texture. I’m part of the latter group and we’re relatively rare – if you’re looking for an interesting Google binge I recommend looking it up; the word to look for is ‘aphantasia.’ One particularly interesting story was recorded by Oliver Sachs, a neurologist. For most of his life one particular person Sachs knew was aphantasic (or at least hypophantasic) but found that on certain drugs he could suddenly recall mental images with incredible clarity. I think Sachs later admitted that he was actually talking about himself.
Buy to answer your broader question, yes; it’s possible to recall physical sensations, sounds, kinesthetic positions (like that feeling right before you lose your balance and tumble). I personally recall all of these things and can imagine them, or “think” them, with much more clarity than visual images. I think that an informal poll of a lot of the readers here would find that there’s a lot of variation in our internal experiences.
A lot of my internal thoughts when meditating, for example, aren’t really even fully formed thoughts. Many are more like urges, or half-formed wants, often with a sound attached. Some spill over into narratives and those feel more like being engrossed in a book for a moment before I catch them and snap out of it. I seem to think in terms of dialogue or monologue often. I’m a research psychologist so things like this are intriguing to me naturally; I probably pay more attention to them than many. And I think David’s principle of treating them like distant events still applies regardless of the core sensation.
This is a really good question. Here’s the way I think about what thought is. I use a system of categorizing thought and inner experience that I learned from Shinzen Young:
Thought is made up of two categories of inner experience: Mental Image and Mental Talk/sound. However, thought is not the only type of inner experience — there’s also a third category: “Body Emotion,” which includes present-moment feelings created by viscerally-related memories such as those you mention above. Body emotion is present-moment experience, often triggered by thought, and it can give impressions of physical experiences we’ve had before.
I’ve been studying my own inner experience for a long time, and I’m still doubtful we can actually recall physical experiences like taste or tactile sensation the way we can recall a sound or sight we’ve experienced before. I believe the sense that you are remembering a taste or a bodily sensation from the past is a secondary emotional construction created in the present by visual and auditory memories of that thing. For example, it seems like I can remember the sourness of a lemon if I think about it. But on closer examination, I believe it is the visual concept of a lemon that is creating the emotional response I associate with tasting lemon (which even triggers my salivary glands). This gives a convincing inner experience of recalling the taste of lemon but I am not actually mentally “tasting” the lemon the same way I can mentally “hear” a Beatles song by thinking about it. In reality it is more of an emotional association with the concept, and the taste is not actually present in the experience. Emotion is largely bodily experience, so it can create a strong feeling about a past experience, even triggering actual physical responses to it, such as salivation from a lemon, or the sense of spatial confusion/wooziness created by being tossed by the ocean. Body emotion is a kind of bodily memory, while mental image and mental talk are thinking. And of course all three interact.
Does that make sense? If I get a chance to ask Shinzen what he thinks about this distinction I will.
This is hard to do and takes a lot of practice. But it is worth all the effort as this can ruin or better anyone’s life.
It does seem really out of left field when you first try it. The upside is that it doesn’t take very much of it to start to loosen up rumination, and break its vacuum-seal on the self.
David, I just want to tell you how insightful and helpful I find your blog. I am still reeling at the power of ‘imagining I’m already gone, but able, for a brief time to be back in my life.’ A game changer! And now this wise bombshell…with your humour and a twist of lime. ☺️ Thank you so very much. Di
Thanks Di. There are so many tools for reshaping and reframing our inner experience. They’re hard to describe, but I do my best :)
Excellent post exactly what I was thinking about. I have tried distracting my mind from persistent negative thoughts or, trying to think positive thoughts but, it rarely works. This idea looks very practical and doable – in effect, it is not giving much importance to my negative thoughts. I am going to practice this. Thanks a lot.
Distraction is a legitimate technique, but it has its limits, and can have unintended consequences.
An alternative to the TV analogy is to regard your thoughts as being produced by someone else. You can notice that “Bob” or whoever is thinking again, and you may or may not want to listen to what he’s saying.
“‘Hear’ your thoughts rather than listen to them”. Brilliant insight. I’ve never thought of it like that before. I’m a natural listener – almost always listen to people consciously and mindfully, without deliberate effort. It’s a valuable gift, though sometimes a demanding one, especially as I’m strongly introvert. I’m also driven crazy at times by rumination, often the recall of embarrassing episodes, accompanied by all the distressing emotions I felt at the time, with an extra helping of berating myself for being so stupid, careless, clumsy etc etc. Even if said episode happened 50 years ago. Reading that sentence from the end of your article, I realise that I’m sometimes listening to my ruminations as carefully as I would to a companion. Really helpful. Thankyou.
Listening involves identification and empathy, which is a godsend for social interaction, but can also be a liability. Thoughts are really just sensory information coming to awareness. Just like something you see or hear, you can decide whether to respond. However, we tend to be completely in the habit of identification with thought, so we need to practice disidentification, and this is one way to get some.
Great article. There’s another way of breaking an endless cycle of unhelpful thoughts by rolling your eyes around a few times while tracing a figure of eight. It can break a repetitive thinking pattern. I learned this in an NLP course and often works. Something to do with our optical nerve briefly scrambling the neural pathways.
Ah, that sounds similar to my blurry-eyes scary-movie method. There must be a lot of bodily things we can do to interrupt mental processes that we can get caught in
Very interesting thought experiment! It has happened to me so many times where my “mind connects what’s happening in the present to anything in its vast archives that might be relevant.” It is trying to predict the future with information it has gathered from the past.
I find myself having a hard time thinking about the good thoughts versus the bad ones. Why does it always seem like the mind recalls the negative experiences in the past rather than the positive ones?
This is something called negativity bias.
Basically, we’ve evolved to dwell on negative possibilities, because we only have to overlook one dangerous thing to get ourselves killed, while we can overlook many positive possibilities and still be okay.
I highly recommend The Untethered Soul by Michael Singer if you are interested in the multiple layers of the mind, why it creates the thoughts it does and how that relates to your emotions and past experiences. I just finished reading it and here you are writing about the same topic! You have discovered what he talks about in the book except it goes much farther beyond this. I thought I’d mention it in case you find it as helpful as I have.
I have received a number of recommendations for this one, but I didn’t know what it was about. I’ll put it on the list!
I love this. One more tool in the box to help stop the rumination and catastrophizing.
As the Buddhists say, thoughts are empty ;-) Great breakdown for the layperson!
I am writing to Thankyou for this blog. I was gripping so tightly to an annoyance that was simply a trigger to something else (my partner invited the mother in law over for the evening without discussing with me!). But when I thought of my anger and annoyance as a tv in the other room chattering away, I actually felt my whole body relax and let go. Sheesh! Feeling so much better. X
I needed this today. There are several heavy things weighing on me right now that are taking my mind to a negative place. I find myself ruminating way too often. I’m going to start practicing this and hopefully it will bring me a little peace. Your blog has gotten me through more than one difficult period in my life – thank you!
Another excellent piece David, thank you. I have absorbed this advice so many times over the years from numerous sources, but struggle to bring it to consciousness when I am in the midst of rumination. Just like the mindfulness practice of seeing your numerous thoughts as leaves floating down the river, or as clouds passing in the sky, how do you trigger the process to step back and rationalise what is ongoing per this advice when you are already sucked into the maelstrom of your mind? I always remember too late, when I am exhausted and low, if I remember at all.
I’d recommend doing this practice when you’re not ruminating. I should have said this in the post, but if you only try to do it only at the most challenging times, you probably won’t do it. Like right now…. can you stop and hear your thoughts for a few seconds?
This “TV in the other room” trick is very powerful for me. I’ve used something like it for years when I get stuck in rumination, imagining that my mental dramas are playing out on a small TV in the corner of the room. The feeling of space around the drama and between the drama and my witnessing self offers calm and useful perspective.
That’s great. There is a similar exercise the ancient Stoics used called the view from above, where they would imagine looking down on themselves from a high place like a tower.
Buddhism speaks of 6 senses, sight, hearing, touch, taste, smell…and thinking.
A thought is just a thought. Like an itch is just an itch.
Thank you David, this was so helpful to me today. xxx
Like a TV show in the next room! Amazing. Amazing. It works instantly too. I’ll have to practice. Thank you.
I’ve never heard the whole thing described so well. It is framed well too. Amazing article. This could be life-changing, I mean that.
I love that the neuroscience backs up this kind of analysis. Free association is what the hippocampus does – multimodal sensory sensations in, correlated sensory & emotional representations out (where over time this may migrate to the sensory cortex / cerebellum itself as short cut if-then rules). The awareness of the free association requires an online frontal cortex (something that only is really mature from 25+). The brain can also be thought of as a muscle, we can “exercise” the strength of the frontal control by practicing not to be caught up in the associations. This is much like how you can put your foot down on the clutch to disengage the engine in a car. Many studies back up the fact that inner talking activates the same cortical loops as outer talking (just not the muscle parts fully), and the talking/language loops actually closely mirror the planning-hippocampal loops; talking to ourselves fools our brain into thinking we are experiencing what we are thinking.
I do worry how much in modern life a multitude of input associations are forced upon us – the news, social media, TV, the Internet – that our loops of association begin to spin out of control – it takes effort (physical resources) to dampen the loops and the wells of this effort can be easily and quickly depleted. We thus have to be careful with the information diet we consume and leave space and silence to recharge.
I had to giggle because Kokomo always reminds me of that Full House episode as well. I even heard them perform it live several years ago and this still remains the association. It’s satisfying to know that I’m not the only one with that quirk.
Thanks for this explanation!
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