Have you ever heard the saying, “Your thoughts become your reality”?
This is true. If you think something often enough, it will in fact take root in the psyche of your neurology and become a belief that affects how you perceive and govern your life.
You can also take this understanding one step further by recognizing that your thoughts do not simply become your reality, they in fact already ARE your reality.
What is the distinction between these two statements?
- “Thoughts become your reality” indicates a sequential order – a thought occurs, and a follow up result ensues.
- “Thoughts are your reality” describes a more intimate correlation and parallel or simultaneous processing.
Of course, you may say, “Well, I’ve had thoughts about things that have been wrong or inaccurate and that did not make them real.” That is correct. They may not be factual in the world. However, for the time frame that you believed those thoughts or associated with them, they were dictating your choices and actions. So, they were in fact, part of your reality.
Common inaccurate thinking…
Many people tend to believe that their thoughts are fleeting occurrences that do not have much of an impact on their lives unless they are acted upon. Because of this, they do not bother paying attention to the quality and frequency of certain thoughts, which may in fact, be running their lives.
In contrast, neuroscience has proven that your thoughts can be described as ‘electro-chemical’ events that create a whole cascade of immediate physiological changes – for better or for worse.
This is extra significant when we realize that it has been proven that people have thousands of thoughts per day. That means you do too!
Researchers have developed a new way to determine the beginning and end of each thought, and they call them “thought worms”. This has allowed scientists to calculate exactly how many we have per day. The average was a staggering 6,200!
“We had our breakthrough by giving up trying to understand what a person is thinking about, and instead focusing on when they have moved on… Our methods help us detect when a person is thinking something new, without regard to what the new thought is. You could say that we’ve skipped over vocabulary in an effort to understand the punctuation of the language of the mind… When a person moves onto a new thought, they create a new thought worm that we can detect with our methods” explains Dr Poppenk, Canada Research Chair in Cognitive Neuroscience.
Frequency or context, what is most important?
While the content of your thoughts affects you in profound ways, for example it can cause or reduce stress and elevate or weaken your immune system. When it comes to your counting thoughts, the actual content is not relevant but the accuracy of how many thoughts occurring is.
Prior to this new way of scientifically ‘counting thoughts’, the general belief was that humans had about 70,000 thought per day. Changing that number to 6,000 per day may seem far less significant, because we are having far less thoughts than we realized.
However, if you do the math, at 6,000 thoughts per day, this means you are having a new thought approximately every 14 seconds. If there is one thing you do over and over again, it is thinking!
Clearly due to the sheer volume of thinking power that occurs in your daily life, your thoughts have an immediate and cumulative effect.
We first become our thoughts, then our thoughts become our reality.
But guess what? It gets even more fascinating. Did you know that the majority of your thoughts are actually re-runs from the day before?
You would think that each new day would be like an empty canvas, and you would have fresh new thoughts to greet it. However, that is not the case.
Thoughts are patterns that become tangible through the repeated use of certain neural networks in your brain. Over time they become ingrained into habit, and habits, as we all know, run our lives and can be hard to break.
That is why the saying, “We see the world, not as it is, but as we are.” is so accurate and compliments the understanding that our thoughts do not only create our reality – they in fact, have become the reality that we build upon.
So how do we interrupt thoughts that are not serving us, and change limiting thought patterns that are impacting and ruling our lives?
As with anything, its starts with awareness.
When you understand how many thoughts you think each day, and you get real about the impact they are having on your health, relationships, career, and daily functioning; an exciting journey begins to unfold.
You have the option of no longer being limited by your past, living at the mercy of outdated mental habits, or influenced by thoughts that capture your attention and negatively alter your neurochemistry.
Instead, you can use your thoughts effectively, to empower yourself and create a more powerful reality!
To your Fit Brain & Fit Life,
Jill