Dr. Steven Pashko has written about something close to home to each of us...our mental life. He makes a distinction among single occurrences of thought, logical thinking, and "thought streaming. What is thought-streaming? Dr. Pashko says, it’s easier to point to what it’s not … and then everything else is thought-streaming.
Single Occurrences of Thought are these include quick memories and insights. They are brief and momentary, involuntary and uncontrollable. They occur for a moment, then they’re gone (like a quick memory of a good time with an old friend or an insight that you need to buy milk at the store).
Logical Thinking is the kind that uses arithmetic, or some other formal logical progression, like priority or timeliness to it. It’s focused and intentional. For instance, making a travel plan to visit one city and then to travel on to another.
Everything else that goes on mentally is thought-streaming -- the rambling, unchecked mental blather that dominates our minds from morning to night. he writes that "Most people take this mental ‘cacophony’ to be normal, believing we must remain helpless victims of whatever mental intruders pop into awareness. And, unfortunately, it’s the most typical way we use our mind."
"Do you have anxious, fearful, or uneasy feelings for extended periods of time?" "If you do, these feelings must be linked to some thought stream that’s reactivating them over and over again. Stop the thought stream and you stop the persistent and repetitive feelings.
"Under optimal circumstances, all emotions come and go in relatively short order. A feeling – sadness, worry, anxiety -- may naturally continue for a few hours or, at maximum, up to a full day. But for an emotion to continue for longer periods, or to appear as if it’s remaining constant, you must sustain it with thoughts. Stop the thought streaming and the feelings disappear. Once it works for you, it will change your experience of life!"
Dr. Pashko goes further to make the point that thought streaming is a mental distraction, a barrier to intimacy, and a serious impediment to succeeding in a variety of endeavors, "from putting a golf ball, to assessing quality, to reading a book," he says. "All of these activities require focus and concentration, and thought streaming just gets in the way. Terribly. That’s why you find yourself reading the same paragraph over and over in order to comprehend it. Thought streaming is the hindrance and simply has to be stopped."
How to do it?
Dr. Pashko advises, "The initial practice involves spending some time just noticing your thoughts. When you become aware of certain thoughts as involuntary and unwanted, you practice dropping your attention from them." If you can't do that and get results immediately, it may be helpful to place your attention on something else – perhaps a manual task like sweeping with a broom or washing dishes.
Like anything we learn – a new sport, for instance – we take it for granted that we’ll have to put in some practice time. This practice of dropping your thought streaming is just like that. In fact, you already do it every night for that short period of time just before you drop off to sleep. You know you can’t sleep with a racing mind.
When you look deeply into how we perform most of the things we do on a daily basis, you’ll find that most commonly, as with certain animal behaviors, we don’t use logical thinking. Our minds may be ablaze with thought while we perform certain activities, but the thought is probably neither logical nor related to the activity. Rather, we typically think either about some unrelated past or present problem, or we’re concerned about a problem that might arise in the future.
Consider an example that involves typing on a computer keyboard. See for yourself: Sit at a keyboard and give it a try. What happens mentally when we’re involved in the complex process of typing? Are we engaged in logical thinking as our fingers move from key to key? No. Are we having general thoughts about our next meal or our personal relationships? No. Our mind is simply open and alert. We’re typing on the keys and being generally attentive to the text we’re trying to enter.
What happens when we’re moving right along with the correct keystrokes and some thought streams come into our mind? In thinking about our child’s flu or worrying about carpal tunnel syndrome, we actually have to stop typing because our work will begin to have errors. We can return to typing only when all that mental noise subsides. So, we don’t really use our thinking processes as we type. However, it’s equally incorrect to say that we type by instinct.
We usually believe we carry out most of our daily activities primarily using our thought streaming for direction, but we’re quite wrong. We use knowing. Our mental chatter isn’t helpful. It’s actually harmful- causing worry, decreasing intimacy, increasing our self-centeredness, frustrating and negative in its content and responsible for overly generalized stereotyping. Yet ironically, we've forgotten that it’s under our voluntary control…providing we continually practice disengaging from it.
Thought streaming can drop away completely while logical thinking and single occurrences of thought remain. Gone, however, is the needless worry and concern that pervades our mind. As time between thought streams lengthens, inherent joyousness reappears within a simpler life.
Dr. Steven Pashko is well known in the fields of psychology, health care improvement and quality of life research. He has authored numerous published research articles on these topics. Dr. Pashko co-edited Stress and Addiction, published by Bruner Mazel, and has just completed the book Free Your Mind.
Free Your Mind comes to fruition after many years. Dr. Pashko examined factors related to living meaningful lives, had discussions with people who surmounted difficult problems as well as added insights gained from his own personal experiences.
Although Dr. Pashko remains active as a researcher in life quality improvement, he now enjoys advising, speaking and offering workshops to show others how to get the best from what life offers. He talks on issues related to personal matters, business, sports, eduation and health.
