Your Thoughts are Not as Real as You Think

By Pamela O'Connor

It can be easy to panic when we have negative thoughts, but we never realize that these thoughts are not actually real. We may look around to see if others can tell what is going on in our minds, but of course no one can. The key to getting rid of unpleasant thoughts is to not pay them any attention- it’s that simple.

If we entertain a thought or play out a conversation in our heads between us and another person, that other person will never know about it. We may look at them differently because of this, but it is our own private world inside our minds. Our thoughts speak loudly to ourselves, but no one else can hear them, and that is forgotten quickly when we over think situations. These thoughts are in a sense real, because we are real people having our own thoughts. But these thoughts do not exist outside of our awareness, so they are only real to the people thinking.

These thoughts feel so real to us because we relate each thought to a solid, real object. In doing this, our mind perceives this as something that is actually happening, and so our body reacts to that depending on whether the thought is negative or positive. Our thoughts do not actually affect the object unless we believe that it does.

It can be upsetting to know that these thoughts and feelings we have are unreal and the shared connections we make in our minds do not exist in real life. However we cannot choose which thoughts will appear and then disappear from our minds, and we can never know where these thoughts really come from. If we choose to ignore them and give these thoughts no time or energy, they will disappear in an instant.

Source: http://www.psychologytoday.com/collections/201308/weeks-top-posts-2/why-our-thoughts-are-not-real