I Was Wrong — Here Is Why You Do NOT Want To Capture Thoughts Non-Stop (Barbell #9)

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I mentioned here that you should capture every recurring thought, idea, and negative feeling as soon as they happen.

However, I have radically changed my mind since then. After a thorough examination of myself, I discovered the following side-effects of capturing your thoughts all the time:

• Capturing has a cost. The more often you do it, the more you realize that the benefits are diminishing.
• Rumination about doing it right. When you are doing your normal activities and receive a stream of thoughts, you have to decide whether to stop or forget it, which causes unnecessary stress.
• You become too jittery, fidget too much, and cannot truly relax (certainly the case for me).

In addition, you become fragile. For a long time, I believed that you could only reach the present state by removing all recurring thoughts. However, by trying to remove them, I actually created more recurring thoughts sounding like this: “Am I in the present state now? Why not? What is bothering me?”

As you can see, believing in the present state as an absence of thoughts is truly fragile…