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, of course, condition us, they are the basis of all our virtues, but also our defects For practical purposes, they function as a set of guidelines or instructions that predispose us to develop in one direction or another.
But of course, it doesn’t 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 relational style of our own parents.
The school we attend, our classmates and childhood friends, each of the different experiences, both good and bad, that we had to live as we grew up, interact with our genes and contribute their grain of sand to help us. Let’s become who we finally are.
How we feel, how we behave and relate to the world, depends on the cocktail end of all these different elements that mix together.
Those that cannot be changed
Of course, there is not much we can do about these factors The biological parents that we were given 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 we won in the lottery of life and to every event that we experienced 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 over which we have greater influence, such as, for example, our thinking, in the here and now, in the present moment, and I assure anyone who is reading these lines at this moment, that Thoughts play a crucial role in the way we see and interpret the world
Most of the time we make the mistake of believing that our thoughts are reality itself, and it is easy to make such a mistake for a couple of reasons.
First of all, 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 do not realize it, everything that goes through our brain has a direct influence on how we feel, and consequently, how we act.
We must also keep in mind that our thoughts occur precisely within our brain, they are ours, they are our own, they are trapped inside our head, therefore, we cannot compare them with the thoughts of others. Being isolated, it is easy for them to end up becoming our most absolute truth for us
The invisible thought process
Everything we think becomes our reality without us realizing it; We end up homologizing what happens inside our mind with what happens outside
But what we think happens is one thing, and what really happens is another very different thing. 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. Starting from this idea, let’s imagine a couple of situations.
The airplane case
We are flying on a commercial plane at 10,000 meters above sea level when, suddenly, the ship enters a zone of turbulence. Since we don’t have much experience traveling, the first thing we think is: “My God, the plane is going to fall 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) it is highly likely that fear takes over us We will experience tachycardia, trembling throughout the body, possibly uncontrollable anguish and the feeling that we are going to faint at any moment. In short, the experience will be extremely unpleasant.
On the other hand, if in the same context we think: “Well, we are entering turbulence. I hope it happens soon and that’s how they serve dinner”; I think it is not necessary to explain that both our emotions and the consequent physiological response will be very different.
The following graphic aims to show the sequence of steps that you may experience in both cases:
Objective fact: Turbulence zone
Thought Interpretation: “The plane is going to fall”
Emotion Sensation: Fear Panic
Behavior Response: Nervous breakdown
Objective fact: Turbulence zone
Thought Interpretation: “This is normal”
Emotion Sensation: Indifference Resignation
Behavior Answer: Read a magazine
The case of the quote
Another case: A woman agrees to meet in a cafeteria with a man she just met on a social network. The boy in question seems good-looking, and the times they exchanged messages, he seemed cordial and intelligent, just the way she likes them. A good game, without a doubt.
However, 20 minutes after she takes a table, at the agreed time, there is no news or sign of him. She then thinks: “I should have imagined, he doesn’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 do you think you are 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 along the same path: “I’m horrible, I’m worthless as a person, no one will ever love me.” In the second case, she will feel upset, angry, and she will probably have outbursts of bad mood 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’s a fact: he’s going to be late. Maybe it would have been better to meet him at a cafeteria closer to his house, to get here he has to cross half of the city.” This is what lawyers call the “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 wallet case
An elderly man forgets his wallet on the counter of a pharmacy where he went to buy medication 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 sees him very distracted lately. The man then remembers that his mother suffered from Alzheimer’s Disease.
“I have Alzheimer’s. I have inherited it…” she thinks. “These are the first symptoms, that’s how she started,” she remembers.
That night he can’t sleep. She keeps thinking over and over again about the dire and inexorable fate she believes awaits her. Obsessed with the idea, he begins to interpret every little forgetfulness he has in his daily life as a symptom of the disease. Worried, absorbed in his own dark musings, he stops paying attention to what other people tell him, which leads, in turn, to some telling him that they see him as absorbed, as 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: “I’m very stressed lately and that makes me not pay enough attention to the things I do, I’d better find a way to relax a little,” surely the epilogue would be different.
One last example
Another illustrative example: the new office colleague who joined the company last week, walks past you in one of the halls of the premises during a random morning and fails to greet you. You have two options:
You may think you are rude.
You may think that perhaps you didn’t see it, or that you were absorbed in your own worries.
The transformative power of thought
There is a common denominator between all situations: you are thinking And what you are thinking may or may not coincide with reality.
If we think that our partner is rude, then we will probably feel ignored and annoyed, and from then on, ill-disposed toward him, which in turn will make this partner begin to seem unfriendly. I insist once again: A characteristic error of human beings is confusing 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 we do as a result.
