Why we have to stop believing all of the things we think

I had a friend over at my office the other day, mainly to hang out but just as well for talking about some things we’d been texting about in the past couple of days. One of the main things I picked up on was how much she seemed to believe the things she thought.

When we believe the things we think, they become our reality.

I read about a study a couple of years ago stating that our brains construct our reality. The study showed that when we’re moving our hand down to touch a table, our brain is showing the signals for touching the table before our hand reaches there. That is, our mind constructs the table itself before we have a haptic sense of it.

From that, we can draw conclusions regarding all of our reality. One of which is that our mind can create realities for us. Another one is that there’s no need to believe our minds at all times.

Imagine you hook up to an immersive VR experience. In there, you can see your hands and your surroundings. It’s so good it feels real, but it really isn’t. It’s a construct. The same way our mind can play tricks on us.

The problem is that when we’re doing the VR, we can consciously remind ourselves of it being a VR experience. But when it’s in our mind, we might not be aware.

That’s when we need to remind ourselves to not believe every single thought. Because we don’t know which ones portray reality and which ones don’t.