Thoughts vs. Thinking: Lessons from Don't Believe Everything You Think

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Priscilla Horton
Welcome everyone. I'm so glad you're joining me again for another episode of the Journey Tribe podcast. um Today's episode is inspired by a book that I recently read and it completely shifted the way that I view my mind and my relationships with my thoughts.

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Priscilla Horton
You all know I'm huge into mindset, anything that has to do with the brain and rewiring it, reframing it. All the things. and this book was such an easy read, very quick, and it is called Don't Believe Everything That You Think by Joseph Nguyen. He pronounces it Nguyen and it's N-G-U-Y-E-N.

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Priscilla Horton
If you've ever felt trapped by your overthinking or weighted down by a constant stream of thoughts, This episode is for you. i think we've all kind of been there and one point of our life or another.

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Priscilla Horton
Maybe you're you're there right now and this may help you. No matter what, I encourage you to go and either listen to the book or read it yourself.

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Priscilla Horton
He really does do a very good job writing. breaking things down and helping you to understand the difference between your thoughts and thinking. So we're going to dive into a pretty powerful distinction that the author makes.

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Priscilla Horton
So I'm going go over a little bit about the differences that he shares between thoughts and thinking. And we're going to explore how understanding this can bring more clarity and peace into your own life as it did mine.

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Priscilla Horton
The book's core idea is

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Priscilla Horton
pretty simple when you think about it, but so profound. Most of our suffering comes not from our circumstances, but from our thoughts.

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Priscilla Horton
And not just our thoughts, our thoughts about them. So the author, Joseph Wynn, really invites us to question the validity of our thoughts and detach from overthinking.

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Priscilla Horton
One of the quotes that he shares in the book is that you are not your thoughts, but the awareness behind them. Isn't that crazy? Like if we think about our thoughts, basically they're like these little clouds and we can just let them float by or we can focus all of our attention our awareness on the one cloud that's there.

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Priscilla Horton
There can be these white clouds everywhere, but we see the one dark cloud and we want to hone in on it. We want to we want to focus on it.

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Priscilla Horton
So let's talk a little bit about the difference between the thoughts and thinking. And I actually had to read through this a couple times because it was so fascinating when he was sharing it that a thought is just one single mental event.

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Priscilla Horton
It's spontaneous and it's neutral nature. It doesn't really come with any feelings, no nothing, right? But thinking is the active process of attaching your meaning, your stories, and your emotions to that thought.

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Priscilla Horton
So there's a whole slew of things that create this thinking, right? This is when it typically becomes a problem in our life because we're attaching our value. We're attaching the meaning.

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Priscilla Horton
We're attaching a belief to it, a story, intense emotions. But the thought itself is just neutral.

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Priscilla Horton
It's one single mental event that happens.

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Priscilla Horton
I don't know. Somebody mentioned years ago, our thoughts are kind of like those clouds just like passing by and stuff. And so I can't ever think of it differently now. I'm like, i see the image as these thoughts being these, these clouds and you know, they come and they go and they, they are there and then they're not.

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Priscilla Horton
But sometimes we can keep them around much longer by focusing all our attention on it.

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Priscilla Horton
So

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Priscilla Horton
so let's just keep that that visual of the thoughts being like a cloud. Because those clouds are going pass along in the sky.

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Priscilla Horton
they They rise naturally, right? Without effort.

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Priscilla Horton
Thinking is when we grab onto that cloud and we start spinning stories about it.

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Priscilla Horton
Like maybe a thought could be, have a lot to do today. But then thinking is, I'll never finish it all. I'm so behind.

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Priscilla Horton
Why can't I be more productive? And let's just keep going on and on and on and on and on. And our thinking won't stop until we choose to stop it.

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Priscilla Horton
So the author, Joseph, when he teaches that suffering doesn't come from the thought itself, which kind of blew my mind actually.

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Priscilla Horton
But it actually comes from ah habit of overthinking and believing the stories that we create about it.

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Priscilla Horton
I know that my thinking over the years has caused a lot of suffering in my own life. It has caused suffering in my relationships.

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Priscilla Horton
When i i just kind of lasso one of those, those thoughts and I start creating stories about it in my head.

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Priscilla Horton
And i did this a lot with, you know, my own sense of belonging and relationships with people. I did this in my own marriage,

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Priscilla Horton
And when you allow yourself, like I did, to create these stories over and over and over again and keep building on them,

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Priscilla Horton
it just begins to spiral out of control.

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Priscilla Horton
because the actual thought itself had no deeper meaning than the thought itself, right? But we put the depth in it, because we we create all of the emotions that come with that. And so you may be able to think of, you know, scenarios that you've played out in your head.

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Priscilla Horton
And it just continues to spiral over and over and over until you like, you know, got your fists clenched up and, and, you know, you're wearing the anger on your face and your blood is boiling and your heart is pounding.

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Priscilla Horton
This is what we can do when we think too much about the single thought that is in our head.

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Priscilla Horton
And now we can do the same thing with positive thoughts as well.

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Priscilla Horton
That's why meditation is so great and so important because it causes us to to visualize the life that we want, visualize the person that we desire to be, visualize what success looks like for us, what a healthy relationship looks like for us, what a healthy lifestyle looks like for us.

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Priscilla Horton
And we can create these stories which create the feelings and the emotions when we think about it a lot.

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Priscilla Horton
So after I listened to this book, I and did it on Audible, which I love. I was actually snowblowing and got through quite a bit of it.

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Priscilla Horton
But as i was even listening to this book, these thoughts were popping into my head. And I would pause and ask myself, is this a thought? or Am I thinking?

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Priscilla Horton
Am I overthinking?

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Priscilla Horton
I hear people say all the time, I'm i'm an overthinker. I'm an overthinker. Well, let's be careful about what you're speaking on your life.

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Priscilla Horton
Because when you attach an I am to the front of anything, you live up to that standard. So I want to remind you how powerful your words are.

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Priscilla Horton
So I was, ever since I read it or listened to it, i have been trying to be very aware in my mind of identifying, am i am i dwelling? Like, am i am i actually

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Priscilla Horton
thinking too much about this? And it actually happened to me over the weekend. I started to kind of get into my head about some things and I had to, um it took me a little bit to realize it and what was happening. And then I was reminded of this book again. And I'm like, I have so much more power than even realize.

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Priscilla Horton
So I identified it and I was, I started to shift that story that I was telling myself because we have the power to do that.

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Priscilla Horton
The author also suggests that treating, if you continue to three, they all

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Priscilla Horton
we can notice the thoughts, but don't hold onto them.

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Priscilla Horton
And like I said, meditation or mindfulness can help in this area. My daughter even came up to me the other night and she was asking about meditation. And I was telling her, this is a time where we get to really see our thoughts as those clouds.

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Priscilla Horton
And we get to have that control and learn how to master our thoughts and our thinking.

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Priscilla Horton
Something that you might be able to practice um in the weeks to come and the days to come is is that awareness. Instead of engaging with your thoughts, practice being ah an observer.

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Priscilla Horton
You know, how many of you like to people watch, right? We're the observer. at restaurants, sometimes we just sit and we'll kind of people watch. Or when we're at theme parks or whatever. Sometimes it's just we watch, right?

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Priscilla Horton
But we can do the same, we can have the same awareness and we can be observers of our own thoughts.

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Priscilla Horton
It is your true self that is noticing a thought, not the thought itself.

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Priscilla Horton
And this is something that was also in the book that I have spoke about ah ah couple years ago, maybe three years ago, about the power of questioning the thoughts that come into your head.

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Priscilla Horton
Is it true?

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Priscilla Horton
More often than not, and this is what was cool that he described, is that it's really just a passing perspective. Isn't that cool like to think about? It's all these little thought clouds going by. They're just passing perspectives.

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Priscilla Horton
It's not an ultimate truth.

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Priscilla Horton
And that is a very, very helpful way to see our thoughts.

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Priscilla Horton
So next time you're caught up in overthinking, write down the original thought. Where did it stem from? What was it?

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Priscilla Horton
And then write down the story that your mind created around it. How long did that take? Because oftentimes it doesn't take very long.

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Priscilla Horton
And then challenge yourself to really let go the story And return back to that neutral thought. This was pretty cool for me to practice this past week.

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Priscilla Horton
I'm actually quite fascinated by it. I'm fascinated by anything mind related. um i think it's just so incredible that our brain has so much power.

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Priscilla Horton
And we can use it for our advantage.

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Priscilla Horton
But oftentimes people don't.

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Priscilla Horton
So maybe practice this a little bit.

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Priscilla Horton
Three of my favorite takeaways from the book that just really stood out to me were that your thoughts are not reality. They're just fleeting events in the mind.

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Priscilla Horton
They are not facts. They are not your truth.

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Priscilla Horton
They are one single thought. We are the ones that make the stories.

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Priscilla Horton
You are not your thoughts. You are the awareness behind them and the observer of your mind. I thought that was so cool.

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Priscilla Horton
An inner peace comes from detachment. I have worked on detaching myself from people and things and ideas and beliefs and all kinds of stuff for the past handful of years.

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Priscilla Horton
And This is a cool new concept of doing this with our thoughts. The less that we engage with those thoughts and the less that we believe those thoughts, the more peaceful that our minds become.

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Priscilla Horton
And who wants a peaceful mind? i do. i want to be at peace. I want to sleep in peace.

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Priscilla Horton
i want to rest when I'm home. i'm home I want to be detached from things that are out of my control. i want to stop doing a job of making up stories that aren't even true.

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Priscilla Horton
So I wanted to offer a reflective journaling prompt.

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Priscilla Horton
for all of you. um Journaling prompts have kind of been ah fun, like more recent thing that I've been doing just because it's, if you want to get some thoughts out, sometimes we need a little something to help spark that creativity in our minds. And so I've just really appreciated journaling prompts. So if you would like to do this,

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Priscilla Horton
The journaling prompt would be what's one reoccurring thought that you have been overthinking. Take some time to write it down and then even ask yourself, what's the story I've been telling myself about this thought?

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Priscilla Horton
And how would it feel to let that story go? remember remember everything that you've learned here about it, go back, go and listen to the audio book, read it. It's just a real short listen, short read, wonderful, wonderfully written.

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Priscilla Horton
And so helpful. It's such a great guide to help us to overcome a lot of our own mental suffering.

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Priscilla Horton
So just a quick recap here. The difference between a thought and thinking

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Priscilla Horton
is pretty subtle, but powerful. But by learning to observe your thoughts instead of identifying with them, you can free yourself from unnecessary suffering and live with more peace and clarity in your life. Can I get an amen? We all desire that.

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Priscilla Horton
We all want to be at peace.

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Priscilla Horton
We all want to not have any more unnecessary suffering in our life.

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Priscilla Horton
I would love to hear what your biggest takeaway was. And if you decide to read the book, also let me know, like, what was it that really stood out to you? I think the whole thing is fascinating.

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Priscilla Horton
i would love to hear your thoughts on it. You can DM me ah or share in the comments.

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Priscilla Horton
You can DM me on Instagram. You can email me at PriscillaHortonCoaching.com.

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Priscilla Horton
No.

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Priscilla Horton
Priscilla Horton Coaching at Gmail.

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Priscilla Horton
I invite you to go deeper with this.

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Priscilla Horton
Explore ideas

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Priscilla Horton
on how you can improve this, how you can

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Priscilla Horton
Utilize this in your own life. How you can challenge those thoughts.

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Priscilla Horton
How you can challenge your thinking.

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Priscilla Horton
I know this was a quicker episode, but I wanted to share this book so bad with you. this was supposed to go out last week. So there will be two episodes this week.

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Priscilla Horton
So stay tuned

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Priscilla Horton
for the next one And remember, you're not your thoughts. You are the winner awareness behind it. You are infinite and free.

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Priscilla Horton
Free to think what you desire to think.

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Priscilla Horton
And believe what you desire to believe.

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Priscilla Horton
Have a beautiful week, everyone. We'll catch you next time.