The Human Brain Has 60,000 Thoughts Each Day: Here’s How to Generate Thoughts that Matter
This mind of ours never stops. Research shows that we humans produce some 60,000 thoughts each day. That extensive number of thoughts is an irrefutable consequence of our society’s obsessive need to be busy and distracted.
Many of our thoughts are anything but productive, and we do very little to regulate our rapacious mind’s activity. We allow our minds to be “future chasers” or “past dwellers.” They take us everywhere except for where it matters most — the present moment.
We all have the ability to become more present, aware and awake. The challenge is training our minds to stop — really stop. The mind is prone to wander out of the present but we can train it to move away from the busyness in our heads through practicing Mindfulness.
Practicing Mindfulness reins in our random thoughts and holds us in the present moment. We all have the inherent ability to utilize Mindfulness by going inward and focusing on our breath. As we stay focused on the breath, we connect to the present and are able to look more deeply into what we’re actually feeling in the moment.
Mindfulness reminds us that we’re here in this moment of “now.” It’s a state in which we’re observing our life unfold and becoming better able to experience it with clarity and acceptance. It allows us to intentionally bring our wandering mind into the present, liberates us from our emotional baggage and gives us a more balanced perspective.
With a Mindfulness approach to every moment, we find ourselves eating more slowly and really tasting our food without rushing. We make time for a leisurely walk while paying close attention to the sights, sounds and smells of nature around us. Taking the time to simply observe, we see so much more than when we’re busy thinking about what we have to do next. We open up to what resides in our hearts.
Explore these ways to transcend limited thoughts and become more awake, present and aware.
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From the article:
“Stop the brain’s busyness. The mind likes to be busy. It thrives on activity and distraction.”
Indeed, which often leads to “cognitive overload.” As author Christine Carter puts it, we’ve gotten really bad at just doing *nothing*.
The only problem I have with some of the mindfulness teachings is that they tend to overdo it. Yes, we should spend most of our time in the present moment, but it’s very important to have *balance*. The past and future do still matter. You don’t want to focus so much on the present that the past and future become totally nonexistent. 😉 I mean, it’s possible to overdo almost anything.
I’d like to see a percentage recommendation or something. In other words, maybe spend about 75% (just a guess) of your time focusing on the the present moment. You know—something that’s both reasonable and doable.
This is from a Psychology Today article. I think it makes some excellent points:
“A balanced time perspective is one where an individual has moderate-to-high levels in the past-positive, present-hedonistic, and future dimensions (Zimbardo & Boyd, 2008).
“Time balance means a person can think about the ‘good old times’ and then switch to leisurely activity and know when to work hard to ensure future success. Maciej Stolarski and Joanna Witowska from Warsaw University formulated the idea of temporal metacognition, which is defined as the ability to consciously self-regulate the focus on the past, present, or future (Stolarski & Witowska, 2017). They identified three dimensions of temporal metacognition, namely: (1) the capacity to control a maladaptive time perspective in a given situation and to switch to another (what all three above-mentioned characters lack), (2) the ability to reinterpret past events using present experiences (what the man left by his wife could not do), and (3) tthe ability to connect the three time dimensions to make conscious, purposeful decisions.”