How To Learn Not To Think

Meditation saved me from a mental breakdown caused by overthinking.

Photo by Max

Thinking makes us human. Thinking propelled us up the food chain at lightning speed until we established ourselves as masters of all that we could master.

Thinking is always with us. Thinking well makes us successful. When we have a problem, we turn to thinking. When we need something, when we want something, when we feel something… thinking is the answer.

If we’re good enough, we can even get paid for thinking, for thinking for others. And so it would be stupid to reject thinking, thinking more should always make things better, since it made them good in the first place.

I’m a particular bad case for this. For as long as I can remember, not only have I thought my way out of trouble and into success, but I have always been extremely aware of my thinking. What I mean is, even as a kid, I often played a game of tracking my thoughts as far back as I could and then assessed how I had got to the apparently random thought I happened to be entertaining. Nothing random about it. So then I could trigger certain thoughts and see where they would take me.

As I grew up, I took it further, and I was often on two or three trains of thought at once. I’d be playing a video game, listening to a podcast…