Who Thinks Your Thoughts?
We impose our ‘shoulds’ on what we perceive as ‘the world out there’, and then when it fails to live up to our arbitrary and abstract standards, we pout, mope, grumble and complain that it ‘should’ have been different. Rather than tweaking our perception, we demand that the thing we perceive should tweak itself!
When people fail to conform to our whimsy, we often then fall into yet another error: we replay upsetting events (events that we perceived as upsetting) and our emotional response to them in our heads over and over, further upsetting ourselves! Many people like to imagine how they would have responded differently to an unpleasant scenario: perhaps some pithy and scathing repartee to put the aggressor in their place, or some supremely composed nonchalance in the face of adversity. But these mental re-hashings and rehearsals may have several negative effects including: further encouraging of counter-productive thinking; distracting us from the present, wasting our time and energy; and the internally generated fight-or-flight stress response that releases more cortisol into our blood, ageing us even faster (and
