Most of us believe that we are always thinking; it’s not true. The bulk of what we consider thought is just the mind going through its normal process, drifting past our consciousness like a river, full of debris that has been dumped there in the past. Much of this debris will have come from powerful figures such as parents, teachers, religious advisors and our early peer groups. Little of this will have been thought about at the time; rather it will have been assimilated as ‘truth’ with little or no investigation as to its value. This flowing river will be generating memories spurred by current input through the five senses and there will probably be some sort of intuitive linking occurring because of all this bumping together. This intuitive response is often accepted as another version of ‘truth’; but it is at least as likely to be wrong as right, and is one of the ways that many people with anxiety disorders maintain their inability to cope with life.
This is all mental activity but it isn’t thought. Thinking is a logical process that considers all the provable facts of any situation, not the biases, hopes and fears. To work it has to call on the part of the mind that looks at things rationally and logically. Unfortunately, most people with anxiety disorders lock into their emotions when the feared situations occur. This activates the part of the mind that deals with hunches, preconceptions and the willingness to swallow ideas whole and makes logical thought next to impossible. But the luckless person still believes that he or she is ‘thinking’ and equates this activity with the rest of his or her life where thinking actually does take place. This results in the situation where such a person believes, quite reasonably, that he or she is a perfectly and provably adequate thinker in many areas, so the anxiety-driven process has just as much value as the rest. Sometimes, the more successful a person is in the outside world, where his or her thinking is valued or makes this person a good living, the more difficult it is for him or her to accept that the anxiety-driven process not only has no value but is actively working against life-values.
