Mental Traps_ The Overthinker's Guide to a Happier Life - Andre Kukla [52]
Let’s see how the simplest trap, persistence, arises in the course of thought-watching. Having begun to watch, we may at first observe our ideas coming and going by themselves, just as the exercise requires. We’re aware of the ticking of a clock. A scene from the past flashes before our eyes. Our nose itches. And that’s that. Ideas of this kind arise and fall away without leaving a trace, “like birds flying across a cloudless sky.” They’re self-contained in the sense that they carry with them no requirement for further thinking. But it isn’t long before we try to lasso one of our mental birds and use it for a mount. Having heard the ticking of a clock, we wonder what time it is; a scene from the past having flashed before us, we ask ourselves whether it really happened that way. And immediately we set to work on the problem. The project that grabs hold of us may be entirely inane—we think of Snow White and start to reconstruct the list of the seven dwarfs. At this time, the quality of our mental functioning changes completely. We are interfering in the flow of ideas with a definite purpose of our own. We’re no longer thought-watching.
Of course, we can choose to find out what time it is, or reconstruct the past, or name the dwarfs instead of watching our thoughts. But let’s assume that we don’t really want to be counting dwarfs—that, in fact, we want to be thought-watching. Let’s assume that it’s entirely clear to us that we’ll be none the worse for abandoning the dwarf project altogether. Nevertheless, having inadvertently begun the dwarf project, we find ourselves impelled to continue with it. Having thought of five of the dwarfs’ names, it’s hard for us to return to thought-watching until we come up with the missing two. That is to say, it’s difficult not to persist. We had intended to sit down and just watch our thoughts; but instead we engage in a vigorous and pointed search through our stock of personal adjectives ending in y.
The topics we get stuck on when we are watching our thoughts are not uniformly pointless. Often we begin to think about issues that do have relevance to our life, but that can safely be postponed until after the thought-watching session is over. In this case, we fall into the trap of anticipation. We designate a period of time for doing nothing but watching our thoughts; we clear the mental boards of all outstanding and pressing business, satisfying ourselves that there’s no issue in our life that would suffer from a quarter-hour’s postponement; and then we start. But it isn’t long before one of these future issues lays hold of our attention. We begin to think about the dinner plans that we will have to make before the day is out, or the momentous vocational decision that we’ll have to face within the month, or the perfect holiday that we’re going to take some day. It may be clear beyond a shadow of a doubt that we don’t stand to benefit by taking up these issues now, in the middle of thought-watching, rather than fifteen minutes later. And yet we do it anyway.
In these examples of persistence and anticipation, the content of our trapped thinking is indistinguishable from what might occur in daily life. The only difference is that we’re likelier to detect the trap because we aren’t busy doing anything else. We’re like naturalists sitting quietly behind a bush, field glasses in hand. If we wait patiently enough, all the traps of daily life will make their appearance. We will persist, anticipate, revert to past grievances, formulate attitudes toward issues that don’t concern us, accelerate breathlessly toward conclusions for which there is no pressing need … In daily life, we can only cast a sideward glance at these fabulous beasts as we pass them by, for we’re always on one mission or another. But when we’re thought-watching, we can observe them