PART III THINK

CHAPTER 8 That Voice in Your Head

Soooo, thinking. Let’s just be honest – this is a HUGE topic! The goal here isn’t to take a deep dive into the complexities of human thought. Instead, we’re going to attend to how we experience our thoughts, as well as the ways we influence them. Before exploring how thinking is related to feeling and choosing, I have a few questions I’d like you to consider:

Are you kinder to strangers than you are to yourself?
Do you make allowances for others you don’t make for yourself?
Do you sometimes chastise yourself for some of the things you think or feel?

If you answered yes to any of those questions, how aware are you when you’re doing it? In previous posts we learned what it means to disengage and recalibrate our mental “autopilot”. Slowwwwing down mental processing is an important prerequisite to making healthier choices. In other words, let’s spend some time thinking about thinking (metacognition)!

Let’s get better acquainted with the voice in your head. Yep, the voice in your head. We all have one, though our experience of it may differ. Not exactly sure what I mean? Try the following exercise: set a timer for one minute. Turn it on, close your eyes, and simply remain quiet. After the minute passes, take a second to recall what you were thinking while the timer was running. Perhaps you thought: how in the world is this helpful? Why am I doing this? I feel silly. I need to go to the grocery store. You get the idea.

So what was it? What were you thinking? If you have an answer to this question, anything at all to report, you just “heard” the figurative voice in your head.