The Quicksand of Your Own Mind

In the quiet spaces between our daily routines, an unseen force is at work, shaping every facet of our experience. This force is thought. We live in a world constructed not of pure reality, but of thought, and understanding this distinction is the first step toward genuine peace. The journey begins with a simple, yet profound, separation: thoughts and thinking are not the same. Thoughts are the raw material, nouns we possess, the mental events that arise and pass like clouds in a sky. Thinking, however, is the active process of engaging with those thoughts, wrestling with them, and building stories upon their foundations. For instance, you might suddenly recall an old friend, this is a thought. If you then begin to wonder why you lost touch, whether you should reach out, or if they still remember you, that is thinking. The initial thought is neutral, but the thinking that follows can stir up a host of emotions.

This act of thinking, often mistaken for problem-solving or preparation, is in fact the root of our emotional and psychological suffering. We cannot experience anything without thought, it is the lens through which all life is filtered. Yet the moment we begin to think about our thoughts, we step onto an emotional rollercoaster. We judge, we criticise, we compare. We cast upon a simple thought the heavy weight of our past conditioning, our limiting beliefs, and our fears. What might have been a neutral mental event becomes a catalyst for anxiety, regret, or anger. Imagine seeing a colleague receive praise at work. The event itself is neutral, but if you start thinking, ‘I never get recognised,’ or ‘They must be better than me,’ negative emotions like jealousy or inadequacy can quickly take hold. We may believe thinking aids us, but more often it simply invents reasons why we cannot or should not move forward, weaving a web of negative emotion out of mere possibility

The evidence is direct and personal. If you are feeling a surge of negative emotion, it is because you are thinking. There is a direct correlation between the volume of our thinking and the weight of our stress. It is not necessarily what we are thinking about that causes the suffering, but the very act of thinking itself. The mind, in its tireless duty to protect us, scans not only our immediate surroundings but also the archives of our past, projecting hypothetical futures filled with potential danger. This useful survival mechanism, when left unchecked, becomes a source of endless, unnecessary distress.

Thinking operates much like quicksand. The more we struggle against it, the more we fight our own minds, the deeper we sink. The negative emotions intensify, and the thinking grows more frantic. Imagine your mind has a speedometer, measuring not speed but ‘thinking per minute.’ The higher the needle climbs, the further we drift from the calm of the present moment. In that present, when thinking subsides, positive emotions naturally surface, and we feel contentment, quiet joy, a sense of ease. They are not manufactured; they are uncovered when the noise fades. Consider the difference between a peaceful stroll in the park, where your mind is quiet, and lying awake at night, your thoughts racing about tomorrow’s worries. The higher your ‘thinking per minute,’ the more restless you become.

The pivotal realisation is this: our feelings do not come from external events, but from our own thinking about those events. We only ever feel what we are thinking. The meaning we assign to an event, the filter of our personal judgment, determines how we experience it. That meaning is ours to assign, which means our experience of life is crafted from the inside out. We live through a perception of reality, not in reality itself. This is both our prison and our key to freedom.

We cannot change what we are not aware of, but once aware, it would be foolish not to change. The goal is not to stop thinking, an impossible task, but to change our relationship to it. By becoming aware that our thinking is the source of our suffering, we see that we need not follow every thought down every dark alley. We can observe the thought without boarding the train of thinking that follows it. Recognising this is insight, and such insight here represents genuine wisdom. Suppose a critical thought arises about your appearance. Instead of engaging with it and spiralling into self-doubt, you can notice it, let it pass, and refocus your attention on what you are doing in the present moment.

This understanding is profoundly practical. It means that at any moment, we are only ever one thought away from a different experience. We can transform our entire lives not by changing the world, but by noticing the space between the thought and our engagement with it. For example, when faced with a stressful commute, you can choose to dwell on the frustration or simply notice the discomfort and instead focus on an audiobook, turning the experience into an opportunity for enjoyment or learning. When we see that we are the authors of our own emotional world, we regain control over our inner experiences.

We begin to disentangle ourselves from the endless commentary and discover that beneath the turbulent surface of our thinking lies a deep and enduring calm. The peace we seek was never out there in the world of events; it was always here, in the quiet understanding of our own minds.