Have you ever noticed how one tiny thought can suddenly become the most important thing in the world?
You can be getting on with your day perfectly normally and then a thought pops into your head.
What if this feeling gets worse?
What if I can't cope with that meeting?
What if I've made the wrong decision?
What if this means something is actually wrong?
Ten minutes later, you're not just having the thought anymore. You're analysing it, checking it, looking for evidence, predicting what might happen next and generally having a lovely old time disappearing down a rabbit hole you hadn't planned on visiting.
I know this one very well.
For years I took my thinking incredibly seriously, particularly when I was anxious. I thought that because something had appeared in my mind, especially if it came with a strong feeling, it deserved my attention.
What I understand now is that a thought can feel incredibly convincing without actually requiring me to do anything with it.
And that changed a lot for me.
Why do we take our thoughts so seriously?
Thought is happening all day long. Most of it comes and goes without us paying much attention to it at all.
Imagine somebody gives you a PIN number and asks you to remember it for five minutes. Let's say it's 4455.
What do you do?
If you're anything like me, you probably start repeating it.
4455
4455
4455
You repeat it because somewhere you already understand that if you leave that thought alone, there's a very good chance it will disappear. That's what thoughts do.
The interesting bit is that we can inadvertently do exactly the same thing with anxious thinking.
You wake up feeling a bit anxious.
How anxious am I?
Then perhaps half an hour later...
Is it getting any better?
By lunchtime...
I normally feel better by now. Why am I still feeling like this?
Then...
What if I'm like this tomorrow?
The original thought didn't necessarily stick around by itself. We kept returning to it, picking it back up and adding a little bit more.
I used to do this constantly without realising I was doing it. I thought I was trying to solve the anxiety. In reality, I was spending an awful lot of time thinking about being anxious.
Anxious thoughts are a bit like taxis
One of my favourite ways of explaining this is with taxis.
Imagine you're walking through a busy city centre. Taxis are everywhere. One pulls up beside you and hovers for a moment to see if you want a lift.
If you don't want to go anywhere, you don't need to fight with the taxi. You don't need to chase it down the road demanding to know why it approached you. You don't need to investigate where it came from.
You simply don't get in.
Eventually it moves on.
Our thoughts can be a bit like those taxis.
They appear. They hover. Some are completely uninteresting. Others get our attention immediately because they're connected to something we care about or something we're frightened of.
The difference comes when we climb in.
We start analysing the thought, trying to work it out, following it into another thought and another one.
Before we know it, we've travelled halfway across town with it.
And because the whole experience now feels very real, we can forget that it started with a thought pulling up alongside us in the first place.
A serious thought doesn't always need a serious response
Dr Bill Pettit once said something to me that has stayed with me:
If you haven't laughed out loud by midday, you're taking your life way too seriously.
I remember that landing for me because I had spent so much of my life doing exactly that.
And of course there are serious things in life.
I've had cancer. I've had businesses to run, bills to pay, children to look after and genuinely difficult things to navigate. Understanding thought doesn't mean pretending those things don't matter or walking around laughing when life feels really bloody hard.
What I've started to see is that the seriousness I create around my thinking doesn't necessarily help me deal with any of it.
I noticed this again recently.
I was waiting for some scan results and, although I didn't particularly feel like I was in my head that morning, my body was clearly telling me there was some adrenaline knocking around.
As I was leaving the house, I remembered I needed to take my medication. My brain immediately offered me something along the lines of, You haven't got the capacity for that now. Deal with the tablets later when you've got this out of the way.
These are tablets I need to take.
Yet for a moment my thinking had made worrying about the scan results feel like the priority.
Then I saw it.
Hang on. That's not true. I can just take my tablets.
So I did.
Nothing magical happened. I hadn't mastered my mind or stopped myself having an anxious thought.
I'd simply stopped treating that particular thought as though it was an instruction I needed to follow.
What happens when we stop believing every thought?
For me, understanding this has never been about controlling what pops into my head.
Good luck with that.
I've spent enough years trying to control my mind to know how exhausting that can become.
Thoughts will appear. Weird ones. Scary ones. Funny ones. Completely pointless ones. Sometimes very convincing ones.
Understanding how thought works gives us a little more space around them.
When I was at my most anxious, I thought the answer was to understand every thought, work everything out and somehow think my way back to peace of mind.
I see that very differently now.
Thought is temporary. It moves.
And I don't have to climb into every taxi that pulls up beside me.
Sometimes I still do, obviously. I'm human.
The difference is that these days I'm much more likely to notice I've ended up halfway across Manchester in a taxi I never wanted to get into and think, Oh for God's sake, I've done it again.
And get out.
Sometimes a metaphor helps us see what more thinking can't
This is one of the reasons I love metaphors so much.
On a recent call inside my membership, we were talking about why metaphors can be so helpful when we're exploring anxiety, overthinking and how our minds work.
I can explain something to ten people and they'll naturally hear it through their own experience. Give those same ten people a metaphor and something interesting happens. Each person can see something slightly different in it.
There's space to get curious.
I'm not telling you what you should think about your thinking. I'm just showing you a taxi and asking whether you really want to get in.
And you get to see what you see.
That's exactly what A Metaphor a Day is about.
It's 30 metaphors exploring thought, anxiety, fear and our human experience, with one to explore each day. They're not another set of strategies to memorise or things you have to get right.
They're simply different ways of looking.
And sometimes one little picture shows us something that another hour of thinking never could.
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