00:01.75 Priscilla Horton Welcome everyone. I'm so glad you're joining me again for another episode of the Journey Tribe podcast. um Today's episode is inspired by a book that I recently read and it completely shifted the way that I view my mind and my relationships with my thoughts. 00:22.89 Priscilla Horton You all know I'm huge into mindset, anything that has to do with the brain and rewiring it, reframing it. All the things. and this book was such an easy read, very quick, and it is called Don't Believe Everything That You Think by Joseph Nguyen. He pronounces it Nguyen and it's N-G-U-Y-E-N. 00:54.28 Priscilla Horton If you've ever felt trapped by your overthinking or weighted down by a constant stream of thoughts, This episode is for you. i think we've all kind of been there and one point of our life or another. 01:11.12 Priscilla Horton Maybe you're you're there right now and this may help you. No matter what, I encourage you to go and either listen to the book or read it yourself. 01:25.98 Priscilla Horton He really does do a very good job writing. breaking things down and helping you to understand the difference between your thoughts and thinking. So we're going to dive into a pretty powerful distinction that the author makes. 01:51.85 Priscilla Horton So I'm going go over a little bit about the differences that he shares between thoughts and thinking. And we're going to explore how understanding this can bring more clarity and peace into your own life as it did mine. 02:15.69 Priscilla Horton The book's core idea is 02:19.91 Priscilla Horton pretty simple when you think about it, but so profound. Most of our suffering comes not from our circumstances, but from our thoughts. 02:33.09 Priscilla Horton And not just our thoughts, our thoughts about them. So the author, Joseph Wynn, really invites us to question the validity of our thoughts and detach from overthinking. 02:52.96 Priscilla Horton One of the quotes that he shares in the book is that you are not your thoughts, but the awareness behind them. Isn't that crazy? Like if we think about our thoughts, basically they're like these little clouds and we can just let them float by or we can focus all of our attention our awareness on the one cloud that's there. 03:19.39 Priscilla Horton There can be these white clouds everywhere, but we see the one dark cloud and we want to hone in on it. We want to we want to focus on it. 03:33.06 Priscilla Horton So let's talk a little bit about the difference between the thoughts and thinking. And I actually had to read through this a couple times because it was so fascinating when he was sharing it that a thought is just one single mental event. 03:53.28 Priscilla Horton It's spontaneous and it's neutral nature. It doesn't really come with any feelings, no nothing, right? But thinking is the active process of attaching your meaning, your stories, and your emotions to that thought. 04:11.58 Priscilla Horton So there's a whole slew of things that create this thinking, right? This is when it typically becomes a problem in our life because we're attaching our value. We're attaching the meaning. 04:28.56 Priscilla Horton We're attaching a belief to it, a story, intense emotions. But the thought itself is just neutral. 04:41.85 Priscilla Horton It's one single mental event that happens. 04:51.67 Priscilla Horton I don't know. Somebody mentioned years ago, our thoughts are kind of like those clouds just like passing by and stuff. And so I can't ever think of it differently now. I'm like, i see the image as these thoughts being these, these clouds and you know, they come and they go and they, they are there and then they're not. 05:13.88 Priscilla Horton But sometimes we can keep them around much longer by focusing all our attention on it. 05:24.34 Priscilla Horton So 05:35.27 Priscilla Horton so let's just keep that that visual of the thoughts being like a cloud. Because those clouds are going pass along in the sky. 05:48.16 Priscilla Horton they They rise naturally, right? Without effort. 05:55.75 Priscilla Horton Thinking is when we grab onto that cloud and we start spinning stories about it. 06:08.51 Priscilla Horton Like maybe a thought could be, have a lot to do today. But then thinking is, I'll never finish it all. I'm so behind. 06:19.32 Priscilla Horton Why can't I be more productive? And let's just keep going on and on and on and on and on. And our thinking won't stop until we choose to stop it. 06:38.35 Priscilla Horton So the author, Joseph, when he teaches that suffering doesn't come from the thought itself, which kind of blew my mind actually. 06:51.08 Priscilla Horton But it actually comes from ah habit of overthinking and believing the stories that we create about it. 07:07.77 Priscilla Horton I know that my thinking over the years has caused a lot of suffering in my own life. It has caused suffering in my relationships. 07:20.34 Priscilla Horton When i i just kind of lasso one of those, those thoughts and I start creating stories about it in my head. 07:31.74 Priscilla Horton And i did this a lot with, you know, my own sense of belonging and relationships with people. I did this in my own marriage, 07:43.26 Priscilla Horton And when you allow yourself, like I did, to create these stories over and over and over again and keep building on them, 08:03.98 Priscilla Horton it just begins to spiral out of control. 08:10.58 Priscilla Horton because the actual thought itself had no deeper meaning than the thought itself, right? But we put the depth in it, because we we create all of the emotions that come with that. And so you may be able to think of, you know, scenarios that you've played out in your head. 08:29.40 Priscilla Horton And it just continues to spiral over and over and over until you like, you know, got your fists clenched up and, and, you know, you're wearing the anger on your face and your blood is boiling and your heart is pounding. 08:45.83 Priscilla Horton This is what we can do when we think too much about the single thought that is in our head. 08:58.04 Priscilla Horton And now we can do the same thing with positive thoughts as well. 09:05.04 Priscilla Horton That's why meditation is so great and so important because it causes us to to visualize the life that we want, visualize the person that we desire to be, visualize what success looks like for us, what a healthy relationship looks like for us, what a healthy lifestyle looks like for us. 09:23.18 Priscilla Horton And we can create these stories which create the feelings and the emotions when we think about it a lot. 09:43.56 Priscilla Horton So after I listened to this book, I and did it on Audible, which I love. I was actually snowblowing and got through quite a bit of it. 09:58.70 Priscilla Horton But as i was even listening to this book, these thoughts were popping into my head. And I would pause and ask myself, is this a thought? or Am I thinking? 10:15.77 Priscilla Horton Am I overthinking? 10:18.95 Priscilla Horton I hear people say all the time, I'm i'm an overthinker. I'm an overthinker. Well, let's be careful about what you're speaking on your life. 10:30.95 Priscilla Horton Because when you attach an I am to the front of anything, you live up to that standard. So I want to remind you how powerful your words are. 10:44.54 Priscilla Horton So I was, ever since I read it or listened to it, i have been trying to be very aware in my mind of identifying, am i am i dwelling? Like, am i am i actually 11:03.34 Priscilla Horton thinking too much about this? And it actually happened to me over the weekend. I started to kind of get into my head about some things and I had to, um it took me a little bit to realize it and what was happening. And then I was reminded of this book again. And I'm like, I have so much more power than even realize. 11:25.94 Priscilla Horton So I identified it and I was, I started to shift that story that I was telling myself because we have the power to do that. 11:44.48 Priscilla Horton The author also suggests that treating, if you continue to three, they all 12:06.11 Priscilla Horton we can notice the thoughts, but don't hold onto them. 12:12.31 Priscilla Horton And like I said, meditation or mindfulness can help in this area. My daughter even came up to me the other night and she was asking about meditation. And I was telling her, this is a time where we get to really see our thoughts as those clouds. 12:32.75 Priscilla Horton And we get to have that control and learn how to master our thoughts and our thinking. 12:46.64 Priscilla Horton Something that you might be able to practice um in the weeks to come and the days to come is is that awareness. Instead of engaging with your thoughts, practice being ah an observer. 13:00.87 Priscilla Horton You know, how many of you like to people watch, right? We're the observer. at restaurants, sometimes we just sit and we'll kind of people watch. Or when we're at theme parks or whatever. Sometimes it's just we watch, right? 13:19.17 Priscilla Horton But we can do the same, we can have the same awareness and we can be observers of our own thoughts. 13:35.12 Priscilla Horton It is your true self that is noticing a thought, not the thought itself. 13:48.69 Priscilla Horton And this is something that was also in the book that I have spoke about ah ah couple years ago, maybe three years ago, about the power of questioning the thoughts that come into your head. 14:05.12 Priscilla Horton Is it true? 14:11.64 Priscilla Horton More often than not, and this is what was cool that he described, is that it's really just a passing perspective. Isn't that cool like to think about? It's all these little thought clouds going by. They're just passing perspectives. 14:34.19 Priscilla Horton It's not an ultimate truth. 14:37
