How many unproductive thoughts get in your way every day

2024 Author: Malcolm Clapton | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 03:44

Regrets, dreams, doubts and other rubbish take space from really useful thoughts and prevent you from managing life.

Any person has two types of thoughts: productive and unproductive.

• Productive thoughts help to set goals and achieve our plans, make decisions, develop, strengthen relationships and improve the quality of life. From them useful actions are born.
• Unproductive thoughts make you worry, plunge into dreams, doubt, delusion.

The more productive thoughts you have in your head, the more opportunities you have to manage your life. So let's figure out what your "hard drive" is doing, but first, let's imagine consciousness in the form of a rectangle.

Unproductive thoughts that fill your head

Thoughts on the past

• "What if I had acted differently in this situation?"
• "So I got it …"
• "How good it was last spring …"

The past can be analyzed and conclusions drawn. And you can remember something good that supports you. But reliving situations over and over again or falling into nostalgia is counterproductive. In the past, nothing can be changed.

Thoughts about the future

• "It will be cool when …"
• "Damn, what if it doesn't work out …"

As in the past, you cannot act in the future. It hasn't come yet.

Thinking productively about the future is planning. But we often let the future take over our minds in the form of dreams or fears. They provoke emotions, but they do not help to perform useful actions.

The thoughts of the victim

• "They bother me, distract, let me down …"
• "I cannot influence this …"

Victim thoughts arise every time we shift responsibility to other people and circumstances, or confess our powerlessness.

It's more productive to focus on what's in our power. Otherwise, we take the position of an observer in relation to our own life.

Distractions

So, what new memes are there …

You are distracted, you are distracted yourself. This cannot be avoided, it can only be minimized: keep track of the schedule, develop attention management skills and establish communication rules.

Doubts

What if I still don't have enough information …

Doubts arise from uncertainty and the feeling that "there is still time."

Decisions made provide information, but rejected decisions do not. If you start doing something, you will find out if you succeeded or you made a mistake (in the second case, you will know what to avoid). If you don't start, you won't budge.

Decision rules can be developed for situations where you are in doubt.

Productive thoughts

So we got to productive thoughts, hurray!

Errors

Erroneous thinking cannot be avoided. And while they do not lead to useful actions (unless by accident), they are still productive.

And deliberate mistakes provide material for making the right decisions in the future.

Real productive thoughts

They can have two directions:

• Thought action: analysis, establishing internal order, clarifying values, the image of the future, and so on.
• Action: decision-making, the formation of specific intentions and their implementation.

Through productive thoughts, we change our lives for the better. They need to be cared for and cherished.

What to do

Unproductive thoughts can take over the entire mind. Often this is exactly what happens: you can grieve all day about some failure and look for the guilty ones or engage in empty projection.

The good news is that by freeing your mind of unproductive thoughts, you will gain the resources to consciously manage your life. As you can imagine, this is not a one-time job.

We must develop the habit of analyzing the contents of our consciousness and removing unnecessary things.