On 'thinking right' your humble correspondent has been noting down on Mecha his epiphanies about self management while going through an uncertain year. An addition to the series: my newest epiphany involves realizing when you're not "thinking right" and thus skipping thinking→[More:]

Almost an year ago I made a Mecha post about how I'm realizing the arbitrary way thoughts are dependent on external circumstances. About six months ago I sort of inverted that idea to note that "sometimes you can't think your way out of negative feelings".

Now I guess I have just crystallized the second idea: not only can you not feel better by thinking, it works the other way: situations/feelings can mean that your thoughts themselves are wrong. I've been hitting that button a lot lately. If there's a frustrating situation and my thoughts are in a melodramatic Sturm und Drang about it, I'm just like, I'm not thinking right. I'm not going to try to think about this right now, just do whatever I need to be doing.

I think that there's something else afoot as well: My life problems can't be solved by thinking. They're very simple. They require *doing*. And maybe just feeling uncertain, thinking about it, is a way of pretending you're doing something.

As a sidenote: I have also in the last few months discovered that stress, anger, anxiety etc can ruin your health in very explicit physical ways :| I think — if I think about it from another lens I'm using these days to much success in terms of thinking about personal health, the Paleo approach — we're probably designed more to have huge bursts of adrenaline from time to time than this continuous "oh I have to pay bills and my conversation with this person went wrong" type of low level anxiety

Previously: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6.