To quote Steve, “Change Your Thoughts is a place to visit to help you try and change your thinking patterns, behaviours, beliefs and thought processes to live the life you were truly born to live…” My guest post is about the organism between the sea of thoughts and the consequence behaviour – the human body.

Where do thoughts come from? If you say “your mind,” you speak a tautology. In a physical sense, in a neural, biochemical sense, what gives rise to thinking?

Changes to your body are the essence of experience. And in the right context, specifically with the right kind of central nervous system and brain, the changes are the raw material for experience. Body changes are the precursors feelings, thoughts, consciousness and the persist sense of self we think of as our essence.

Hold your breathe.

What happens?

You start turning blue. Your body’s oxygen meter registers a decline in available oxygen and triggers various reactions designed to get you to breathe. If you hold your breathe long enough, you pass out. Then your body resumes breathing.

Don’t blink.

What happens?

I tried several times while watching the timer on my iPhone. The longest I lasted before blinking was 23 seconds. Even then, tears welled in my eyes after just a few seconds as if I were crying. My body strove to take care of its eyes even as I wilfully caused distress.

Our bodies are filled with the equivalent of thermostats for every conceivable system of internal regulation. Readings of “too hot” generate body changes much as the expansion of the thermostat spring turns on the air conditioner. The systems or our bodies respond whenever we push the meter outside a prefigured comfort zone.

We can screech, pinch our skin, lick our dirty feet, frown for a long time, and spin around until we puke. Each action sets off some regulatory response. We cower, yelp, feel disgust, become sad, or throw up.

(Twirling around affects the inner ear and creates a sensation similar to the disorientation cause by many natural poisons. We vomit after spinning to expel possible poison.)

If each body-regulation system was pixel on a screen, these systems would display an image of amazing size, complexity and color depth. The screen for this giant image is called a neural map.

When our body perceives an object (which could be physical, like a snake, or mental, like the notion of snakes on a plane), the neural-map image changes. The more salient the object, the more significant the change in the imagery. But how do we have a mental experience of these neural, biochemical changes?

(I am going to speak about prominent, well studied, neuro-scientific theories of consciousness as if they were fact. A fascinating book, by a leading neuroscientist in this field, is Looking for Spinoza: Joy, Sorrow, and the Feeling Brain, by Antonio Damasio.)

We have a sixth sensory “organ,” a sixth way to perceive information, a ghost sense if you will. We have a second neural map which records the changes to a small and varied portion of the comprehensive neural map of the body. It is the mental equivalent of a physical eye ball, optic nerve and associated brain systems. Like eyesight, this second neural map notices only a few things, a small range of ‘color,’ fixates on change, and is given to significant distortion and bias.

This second map records an ongoing sequence of body-state changes from the point of view of the body. It’s like a mirror for a mirror. The second mirror/map reflects (with all its distortions and biases) the content of the first mirror/map. The first mirror/map in turn reflects the content of the second.

These two reflections are highly combinatorial and recursive, the necessary ingredients for infinite experience and infinite expression. Together, the comprise a system of one body, one point of view, one emerging collection of feelings and thoughts, one mind. These maps detail a ghost for each body.

What do we do to care for our ghost? When we intentionally change our thoughts, we are tending to its mind, much as a therapist attends to the mental life of a client.

The client has a real body, and our phenomenal ghost has a real body. Change the body, change the ghost. The neuroscience of emotion invariably highlights the significant of the body-mind connection.

Thoughts are mental objects. When we think them, our body changes (see the NYTimes article about embodied emotion).

Think about a moment when you felt intense despair. What specific event or circumstance would give rise to the belief, “I should have known better!”

How did your body change? Try the imagery again and pay attention. What are the body sensations of: “I should have known better!”

For me, I frown. My heart is in my throat. My eyes feel like they want to cry. If I add voice, I might wail, “why me!?” I feel a tinge of nausea as if my chest were hollow. My skin crawls around my shoulders and feels chilled. These sensations are unnerving.

If we change our thoughts at this moment, we block changes to the body. We simply turn off the experience. We avoid pain rather than provide healing.

What heals?

How does your body feel when you are at peace with the unpredictability and unknowability of life? Try to evoke body sensations for this idea. It’s a lot harder, and the sensations are fleeting. These are the sensations of homeostasis, of wellness, of – from the body’s perspective – finding home.

I believe our sixth sense is much more sensitized to threats, problems and the experience of our own failings. These cognitions are ‘visceral,’ because they change the body. After a shocking thought, we might hold our breathe and stare in alarm. The red lights flash on the first neural map, and are second neural map is vigilant to this color.

Like a fish not noticing water, we have a hard time noticing the sensations of healthy regulation. When a body-system is well regulated, it might generate a neural image hardly noticed by the second map. This sixth sense notices distress rather than wellness.

Monks practice compassion-mediations for years to develop the capacity to the access this state by choice. From the perspective of our sixth sense, compassion is a wispy, ghosty sensation spoilt by the interruption of almost any other emotion. Cultivating the ability to evoke emotions of well being and peace are not just elements of personal development, but rather they are (in a strong, neurological sense) significant sources of comfort and healing.

If we can re-mind our body of such positive sensations before or after moments of torment, we are reminding it how to get home. The body’s journey home often takes time, as healing does, but on the way, our thoughts get better too.

Change your body*, change your thoughts, change your life.

*Thoughts, of course, can change the body.

1. ‘Life is shit’ Thinking pattern –Everything in life is bad, everybody is not to be trusted and nothing good will ever happen to them e.g. “I won’t get that job, the interviewer didn’t like me, I didn’t particularly like them anyway.”
2. ‘Unsubstantiated conclusive’ Thinking pattern– You tend to make a lot of conclusions without any evidence to back up your conclusions. This can be a really destructive pattern as it can limit you in seeing reality for what it is e.g. “He walks a bit funny, he must be gay.” (I actually heard someone saying this about a colleague last week).
3. ‘Never to me’ Thinking pattern – This is when you think nothing good will ever happen to you. This can be a deep seated way of thinking and it is a deep down inability to believe you are worthy of anything good happening to you e.g. “I’ll never have money, I’ve never had it before so I’ll never have it in the future, might as well carry on with this shitty job, at least it pays the mortgage.”
4. ‘The negative psychic’ Thinking pattern – Presuming you know what people are thinking about you and it’s all bad. e.g. “She thinks I’m an idiot, I’ll try to avoid talking to her.”
5. ‘Should, would, could’ Thinking pattern – This type of person knows what they have to do to change their life, they are capable and they know it and they would do it if only……… e.g. “I know I could go to university and I would, but I’m just to busy with other things right now, I’ll apply next year.”
6. ‘Emotion based’ Thinking pattern – Your emotions control what you are thinking and therefore your vision of what reality is e.g. “I feel incapable of doing that so I must be incapable”.
7. ‘It’s all my fault’ Thinking pattern – You see yourself as being the cause of everything bad that has happened e.g. “It’s my fault he left me for another woman.” You’ll notice this type of person does not take responsibility for the good things that happen.
8. ‘They’re all wrong’ Thinking pattern – You see everyone as incapable of doing anything right and your way is the best way to do it e.g. “He can’t do it right, I’ll stay late tonight and fix it when he’s gone.”

These are just some of the common thinking patterns I have come across in my life and I have used some of them myself, I used to use mix the ‘Never to me’ and ‘The negative psychic’ thinking patterns about everything, “She’ll never go out with me she thinks I’m an idiot.” I made a conscious effort to change what I believed about myself and what I believed about the world and it has literally changed my life.

How to change the destructive thinking patterns

The first stage of changing is to recognise the problem – You will find a lot of people in life who just don’t think there is a problem so there is no need to change. If this is you then do nothing. If you want to change you must think there is a need and you will start to recognise what things need to change and it usually starts with your perception of life. Everybody’s perception of life is different, therefore everyone’s reality is different. I don’t live in the same world as you and you don’t live in the same world as me. That might sound a strange concept to some people, but think about it for a few minutes, it could change the way you see the world. I’ll give you an example:

In 2004 I took a redundancy package from my place of employment and received about £10,000 for my troubles, not a lot at all when I was earning £25,000 a year when I left. I was speaking to my friend about it and he thought I was absolutely nuts to do it, especially since I was married with two children. I explained to him how free I felt and what plans I had to start an online book dealing business and my wife was right behind me. He still thought I was crazy. My perception of the world was one of opportunity, life was great and I was free from the rat race for a while and I would get to see my wife and children a lot more than I had, I was ecstatic and if it didn’t work out I had a lot of skills to offer another employer. My friends perception was one of doom and gloom, he needed the security of a full time job even though he hated it and was working 12 hours per day. It turns out I worked at it for 1 year made a good profit but gave it up due to a huge downturn in business. At the end of it I was still optimistic as I knew I was good enough to get another job until I could do something else.

Everybody’s view of the world is different and it all comes down to the thinking patterns you use in your daily life. If you think life is wonderful you will notice the wonderful things in your life, if you think life is shit you will find shit things about life. Change your thoughts and you literally change the world you are living in. First you have to recognise your destructive thinking pattern.

The second stage is to be aware of when you are using the destructive thinking patterns – We can employ different thinking patterns depending on what we are doing in life. For example you could use a positive thinking pattern at work as you are very confident in your ability and yet use a destructive one when it comes to looking for love. Recognising when you use destructive thinking patterns can help you to change that pattern. Now that you have recognised when you use the destructive thinking patterns it is now time to change it.

The third stage is to replace the bad with the good – This is something that you don’t do immediately. You don’t say to yourself ‘I’ll never be able to do that”, which is you old thinking pattern, to “Oh yes I can”. That won’t work. You have to let the old pattern die slowly whilst slowly introducing your new improved thinking pattern. Here an example:

You are out in a club and you want to talk to someone you are attracted to. Your thoughts are “ She’ll never talk to me, she’s gorgeous.” You will immediately recognise this pattern of thinking and tell yourself something good about yourself e.g. “I’m good at _______(FILL IN THE BLANK), it can be anything. This will not immediately help your situation but it will slowly begin to change your old destructive thinking pattern with a new one.

This stage takes place over time and is not done immediately. The best time to change a destructive thinking pattern is to let it run it’s course and slowly replace it with a thinking pattern that is better for you. I know people want a microwave life, stick it in the micro and it’s ready in 3 minutes, your life is not like that and you cannot change in 1 day, unless something drastic happens.
You can work on more than 1 destructive thinking pattern at a time.

To recap

To change your thinking pattern you have to

Recognise
Be aware
Slowly change and introduce a new thinking pattern
Keep working on all your destructive thinking patterns

Change your life with your new way of thinking

Recognising and changing your way of thinking can be a long process depending on what patterns of thinking you employ and how badly you want to change. People can change, do change and change for the rest of their lives, I know I have, so don’t be thinking you’ll never be able to change, you can and you will if you really want to.

After a few months you will see a huge difference in your life and you will want to use your new way of thinking to good effect. You will start to notice new types of people enter into your life who can help you reach the goals you have in life and in turn you will help them reach their goals, don’t worry about how just now.
Take time to think about your goals and take the time often to do this. I take time every day to think about where I want to be in life and slowly but surely it happens. Personally I find it better in the morning to really think about my goals and then again at night just before I am falling asleep. It works for me but you will have to experiment a little to find your way of thinking about your goals.

I hope this article has helped you a little. If you feel you would like to say something about it why not leave a comment.