Danger! Dark thoughts in sight

How do we explain the things that happen to us in everyday life? Well, that depends on a multiplicity of factors, the recipe has a few ingredients.

First of all we have our genetic endowment, which functions as a floor and a ceiling for all our possibilities. Genes are an inheritance that cannot be modified, but there is something over which we do have power: our thoughts and, by extension, the way we think about what happens to us.

Genes: the fixed part of us

Genes, of course, condition us, they are at the base of all our virtues, but also of our defects. For practical purposes, they function as a set of guidelines or instructions that predispose us to develop in one sense or another.

But of course, the thing does not end there. Genes are permanently influenced and shaped by the environment. Within it, we have the culture in which we are immersed, the type and quality of parenting we have received, as well as the personality characteristics and the relational style of our own parents.

The school we attend, our childhood companions and friends, each of the different experiences, both good and bad, that we we had to live as we grew up, they interact with our genes and contribute their bit so that we finally become who are.

How we feel, how we behave and relate to the world, depends on the cocktail end of all these different elements that are mixed together.

The ones that can't be changed

There is certainly not much we can do about these factors.. The biological parents who were our luck are unchangeable, this means that we cannot change them for others, nor can we do anything to improve them, if that were our wish.

The same applies to the genes that hit us in the lottery of life and to every event that we experience during our childhood and adolescence; The time machine that allows us to travel to the past to make the changes that are convenient for us has not been invented and it seems that it will not be invented either.

But there are other variables on which we have a greater influence, such as our thinking, in the here and now, in the present moment, and I assure you who is reading these lines right now, what thoughts play a crucial role in the way we see and interpret the world.

Confusing thoughts with reality

Most of the time we make the mistake of believing that our thoughts are reality itself, and it's easy to make such a mistake for a couple of reasons.

First, thoughts are an invisible process. They cannot be seen, they cannot be touched and many times we are not even aware that we are thinking. But we do it; in fact, we think all the time, and although we are not aware of it, everything that passes through our brain has a direct influence on how we feel, and consequently, how we act.

We must also bear in mind that our thoughts occur precisely within our brain, they are ours, are our own, they are trapped inside our head, therefore, we cannot compare them with the thoughts of the rest. Being isolated, it is easy for them to end up becoming our most absolute truth for us..

The invisible thought process

Everything that we think is erected in our reality without our realizing it; we end up matching what happens inside our minds with what happens outside.

But what we think happens is one thing, and what actually happens is quite another. And the irony of this whole thing is that what we think happens is the only thing that really matters when we have to make a decision. From this idea, let's imagine a couple of situations.

The case of the plane

We are flying in a commercial airplane at 10,000 meters above sea level when, suddenly, the plane enters a zone of turbulence. As we do not have much experience traveling, the first thing we think is: “My God, the plane is going to crash and we will all die. Oh no… I'm going to die, I'm going to die!!! ”.

Under that thought (and I insist, it is just a thought, which does not necessarily have to adjust to reality) fear is highly likely to take hold of us. We will experience tachycardia, trembling throughout the body, possibly irrepressible anguish and the feeling that we are going to pass out at any moment. In short, the experience will be extremely unpleasant.

On the other hand, if in the same context we think: “Well, we entered into turbulence. I hope it happens soon and that is how they serve dinner ”; I think it is not necessary to explain how much our emotions as the consequent physiological response will be very different.

The following graph is intended to show the sequence of steps that you can go through both in one case and the other:

Objective fact: Zone of turbulence	Thought Interpretation: "The plane is going to fall"	Emotion Feeling: Fear Panic	Behavior Response: Nervous breakdown
Objective fact: Zone of turbulence	Thought Interpretation: "This is normal"	Emotion Sensation: Indifference Resignation	Behavior Response: Read a magazine

The case of the appointment

Another case: A woman meets in a cafeteria with a man she has just met on a social network. The boy in question seems handsome, and the times they exchanged messages from her, he was cordial and intelligent, just the way she likes them. A good game, without a doubt.

However, 20 minutes after she occupies a table, at the agreed time, there is no news or sign of him. She then she thinks: "I should have imagined it, he didn't like me, and clearly he didn't dare when I invited him to see us."

Another option could be: “What a guy, he turned out to be disrespectful after all. But who does he think he is to make me wait like this??? "

In the first case, the woman will undoubtedly feel depressed, hopeless, or both. She may even cry for several days, and her thoughts will continue for a long time in the same direction: "I'm horrible, I'm worth nothing as a person, no one will ever love me." In the second case, she will feel upset, angry, and probably have outbursts of bad temper when she talks to other people.

But the truth is that the woman on the date, faced with the delay of her potential prince charming, could also think: “It is a fact: she is going to be late. Maybe it would have been better to meet him in a cafeteria closer to her house, to get here he has to cross half the city. " This is what lawyers call a "presumption of innocence." In other words, it is desirable that we always try to guide our thoughts under the premise that no one is guilty, until proven otherwise.

The case of the wallet

An old man forgets his wallet on the counter of a pharmacy where he went to buy a medicine for hypertension. The next day he loses his glasses and to make matters worse, his wife comments to him as she passes by, that she has seen him very distracted lately. The man then remembers that his mother suffered from Alzheimer's disease.

“I have Alzheimer's. I have inherited it… ”, he thinks. "These are the first symptoms, that's how she started," he recalls.

That night he can't sleep. He keeps thinking over and over about the dire and inexorable fate that he believes he awaits. Obsessed with the idea, he begins to interpret as a symptom of the disease every little forgetfulness that he has in his daily life. Preoccupied, engrossed by his own gloomy musings, he stops paying attention to what other people they tell him, which leads, in turn, to some telling him that they see him lost in thought, lost, disconnected from the world. And that's when the protagonist of this hypothetical case goes into crisis and, desperate, calls his doctor to ask for an urgent interview.

Of course, if the old man had thought: “Lately I have been very stressed and that makes me not put the proper pay attention to the things I do, I'd better find a way to relax a little ”, surely another would be the epilogue.

One last example

Another illustrative example: the new office colleague who joined the company last week, walking past him in one of the hallways of the enclosure on any given morning greet him. You have two options:

1. He may think that he is rude.
2. He may think that he may not have seen it, or that he was engrossed in his own concerns.

The transformative power of thought

There is a common denominator between all the situations: you are thinking. And what you are thinking may or may not coincide with reality.

If we think our partner is rude, then we probably feel ignored and upset, and henceforth, badly predisposed towards him, which in turn will make this partner begin to show unfriendly. I insist once more: a characteristic mistake of human beings is to confuse their own thoughts with reality.

What we are thinking is just that, a thought. But reality is something that happens beyond our brain. And this is vitally important, because what we think can determine how we feel and what you will do accordingly.