So out of my own short comings I’ve identified my current bottleneck. I get overly self conscious even trying to predict conversations. I could use some advice and help trying to just get over that. It happens both in person and online, it keeps me from interacting with a lot of things.

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  1. What I just discovered at prime age of 39 is that I over-think things. And for most of my life I always assumed that thinking was who I was and it was very important that I think and analyze things into oblivion. This over-thinking made me believe I could predict people, predict conversations, and events. It was as if I ran a simulation of the universe in my head, and sometimes it turned out the same as my prediction so I felt really smart about it. And of course when it didn’t turn out the way I had imagined, well then the person or event was flawed in my mind, not me, because I was so smart.

    Skip decades of drinking and overthinking things, leading to alcoholism, and finally 4 years of learning to control or disengage from the thinking part of the brain.

    One day I joined a zoom meditation group during pandemic. And it was for the first time where I felt the quiet. I was no longer thinking about anything, including myself, my wife, my job, the world, politics, movies, music, art….nothing. It was like putting a reality tv show on mute and finally taking a breath that felt liberating.

    My verdict is that my thoughts are a part of the processing part of the brain. It’s part of me and it likes to affect how I feel about things and myself, but it isn’t really the core me. Learning to how to pause and disengage the clutch from that processor is how I find the quiet. Learning to identify thoughts and patterns and acknowledging them allows me to assess if these thoughts will lead to an experience that I need, instead of just experiencing it all as if I am forced to watch a shitty movie.

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