TRY, if you can, to imagine a life without thought. For a human being it wouldn’t be much of an existence. Thoughts fill our every waking moment, and whether they are insightful, banal, playful or bizarre, there is no denying that thinking comes naturally to us. We might say that thought is to human beings what flight is to eagles and swimming is to dolphins.
But it is one thing to think and quite another to understand the nature of thought. Just as eagles fly without any grasp of aerodynamics and dolphins swim without understanding fluid mechanics, so most of us think without having any insight into its nature. Thinking may be commonplace, but it is quite rare to think about thought itself.
So what is thought? That is a surprisingly difficult question to answer. Neuroscience, psychology, philosophy and other disciplines have approached it from their various perspectives, but thought has not received as much sustained attention as it deserves.
Perhaps part of the explanation for this is that thought is an extremely varied and complex phenomenon. We can think about an incredible variety of things: objects, people, places, relationships, abstract concepts, the past, the future, real things and imaginary things. We can think about nothing at all, and even think about thought itself.
There’s a ‘secret’ that all great historical and present thinkers, philosophers, and high achievers have agreed to be a universal truth.
This secret revolves around this simple idea: You are what you think.
English philosopher James Allen wrote: “As a man thinks, so he is; as he continues to think, so he remains.” Stoic and Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius wrote: “A man’s life is what his thoughts make of it.” Poet and philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote: “A man is what he thinks about all day long.” Author Earl Nightingale said: “We become what we think about,” and Mark Twain wrote: “Life consists mainly of the storm of thoughts that is forever flowing through one's head.”
So we go about transforming our environment believing that doing so will create the necessary change we hope to see. We buy things for a materialistic boost of happiness. We travel to escape our problems. We seek substances to numb the mind and help us forget.
But of course, we fall back to where we had started: unhappy with where we are today. And so the cycle repeats itself. We buy, we travel, we forget—always focusing on the external factors we need to alter in order to create better circumstances.
This happens because we falsely assume that change begins from the outside. In truth, the environment does play a role in changing your circumstances, but it doesn’t address the root of the cause (your thinking) that is the driver behind why you feel the way you do.
Here’s what you need to realize:
If you want to change the outside, you must first change the inside. You must change the attention of your thoughts because what you think directly influences how you feel, and how you feel directly influences how your body reacts, and how your body reactions directly influence how you behave, and how you behave comes to define who you are and what you experience in life.
“If you get the inside right, the outside will fall into place.”—Eckhart Tolle
It all begins with your thoughts—our life experiences spring from the thoughts we actively engage in: You are what you think. And to comprehend the essence of this statement, you first need to understand the link between your thoughts, emotions, and behavior.
The Link Between Thoughts, Emotions, and Behavior
Thoughts, in and of themselves, have no power—it’s only when we actively invest our attention into them that they begin to seem real. And when we engage with specific thoughts, we begin to feel the emotions that were triggered by these thoughts—we enter a new emotional state which then influences how we act.
For example, if you regularly engage with the thought that you’re a failure and feed more attention to it, you’ll start to feel down, worthless, discouraged and perhaps even depressed.
How does your body react to this? You sulk down, slump your shoulders, and project no confidence.
But if you engage with more empowering thoughts, they would boost your confidence and thus trigger a more positive emotional state which will then be reflected in how your body reacts: standing up straight, upbeat and energized.
Thoughts trigger emotions, and the vibrational frequency of these emotions then feed back into the original thought. And as we continue to give mental attention to the initial though, it reaffirms the emotion, which then energizes the thought. And so we experience a continuous cycle of think, feel, think, feel, think, feel.
This results in the emotional state you come to experience: stressed, depressed, discouraged, happy, energized, confident, etc…
How you think and how you feel directly impact how your body reacts, and all three influence how you behave and what actions you take.
This is how your thoughts create your reality. It’s in the way you behave and act that you define who you are and what you experience in life—and the way you behave and act is simply a construction of how you think, feel, and do.
Our problems are nothing more than our emotional and body reactions to our thoughts about the problem. So if we can observe and change our attention or perception, we can change our emotional reaction, which then changes our body reaction, which ultimately changes how we act and experience our reality.
And that’s exactly why true change begins from the inside, not the outside.
“We spend all our time and money and energy trying to change our experience on the outside, not realizing that the whole thing is being projected from the inside out.”—Michael Neill, Author
So if you think you’re a failure, you’ll feel like a failure, and then you’ll act like a failure. As long as you give attention to the thought that you’re a failure, you’ll continue to experience this reality, which then reinforces your belief that you must be a failure. This is called a though pattern and it has the power to destroy your life.
Your Thought Patterns Reinforce Your Beliefs
A thought pattern is “a habit of thinking in a particular way.“
In his book, Rewire Your Brain, psychologist John Arden writes:
“The more you do something, the more likely it is that you will do it again in the future. Repetition rewires the brain and breeds habits. The more the neurons fire together, the more likely it is that they will fire together in the future.”
Every thought we experience creates a chemical reaction in the brain which then triggers an emotion. As we engage with this thought, it creates a new circuit that sends a signal to the body and we react a certain way. The more we repeat this pattern, the more it seeps into our mind and becomes a habit. This is why neuroscientists say “cells that fire together wire together.”
As you keep thinking the same thoughts, producing the same emotions and performing the same actions, you continue to live by the same experiences.
As we repeatedly engage in the same thought patterns of think, feel, do, these patterns encode as a blueprint in our subconscious mind. And what does our subconscious mind do? It runs 95% of our life on automation.
