Your Two Minds: The Source of Suffering and Strength

Have you ever had endless thoughts that pour into your mind like a roaring waterfall?

Like a voice in your head that’s not your own?

One that’s always there just nagging and whispering random things into your consciousness. This happens to everyone. It’s also one of humanity’s greatest sources of pain and suffering.

It reminds you of what you fear, what you’re anxious about, what you desire, what your friend told you that made you mad, and everything you have to do tomorrow.

It’s annoying, and no matter how hard you try to stop thinking, you fail miserably. You might have a moment of clarity, but then your mind goes back to the default chatter. It keeps thinking and it won’t shut up.

But if your mind is thinking, then who is observing that it’s thinking?

That voice in your head is your second mind.

A Second Mind?

That’s right. You have two minds. It’s strange, but this concept has been around for a long time and found in passages from Buddhism, Stoicism, and other contemporary psychological research.

The first mind is the mind that you are consciously aware of and actively use. It’s called the Observing Mind, or conscious mind. It’s the mind that you use to talk to yourself in your head, direct your thinking, and solve problems – the one that you regularly know to be your mind.

Then you have your second mind. This mind is much more complex, subtle, and we humans have very little control over it.  It acts automatically and quickly brings up thoughts whenever we get anxious, afraid, or angry. It “tells you” if something is good or bad through feelings, emotions, dreams, sensations, and imagination. It assigns judgment to things and events and provides meaning to all our experiences in the world as seen through our habits and beliefs. This is called your Thinking Mind, and it feeds your Observing Mind.

The Thinking Mind, or subconscious mind, can also be aggravating. It works behind the scenes in your head with intensity and persistence. It babbles away when you’re waiting in line at the grocery store or trying to go to sleep. It’s there when you wake up in the morning and think about all the things you need to do today and didn’t do yesterday. It’s the running commentary of your life.

It also tends to err on the side of caution, pessimism, and negativity. It does this because it’s designed to keep you alive. Without applying judgment to things and events, we wouldn’t be able to tell if we need to avoid danger, pursue a goal that will improve our situation, or seek help.

When Your Minds are Fused

Most people are unaware that their Thinking Mind and Observing Mind are glued together. By this, I mean that most people immediately identify with any thought that pops into their head – anything their Thinking Mind tells them, whether it’s true or not.

For example, if someone has been insulted or harshly criticized, their Thinking Mind immediately applies judgment to what has been said to them. That judgment, or message, is then sent to the Observing Mind. The message is probably something along the lines of:

That person is such an a-hole!

She has no right to talk to me like that!

What an idiot!

He just insulted me and now I’m angry.

The Observing Mind accepts that message as truth and acts accordingly with anger or rage. When this identification happens, the Thinking Mind has taken over and all logic and reason leave the building. As a result, the person loses control by acting irrationally and making the situation worse, and mostly for themself.

Unfortunately, we don’t recognize when we fuse our two minds. We feel that we must seek justice for what we’re thinking or feeling.

Fortunately, we don’t have to identify with our thoughts. It becomes a choice once we establish awareness.

To do this, we must split our minds.

How to Split Your Minds

Thoughts, feelings, and emotions are not always a choice, but we can always choose how we respond to them. We can choose to examine them and decide if we want to identify with them or accept them as truth. Awareness of the two minds is the first step and foundation for developing mental fortitude. The following simple exercises can help you split your Thinking Mind from your Observing Mind.

1. Watch the thinker.

In his book, The Power of Now, Eckhart Tolle talks a lot about “watching the thinker”. He says that we should listen to the voice in our head instead of trying to suppress it. Be there as a witnessing presence. As we listen to our minds, we must pay attention to any repetitive thought patterns and voices that have probably been repeatedly playing in our heads for many years.

As you listen to this running commentary, listen to it without prejudice. In other words, don’t judge what you hear and don’t judge yourself for having the thought. Doing that feeds your identification with the thought. Just sit there and observe. Like watching a cloud go by.

At first, you’ll struggle because you’ve been habitually identifying with your mind for so long. But after a while, you’ll start to realize that there is the voice and I am listening to it, noticing it, as a witness. The thought will then lose its dominance over you and quickly diminish because you’re no longer feeding it through identification. This is the first step in splitting the Observing Mind from the Thinking Mind, and it’s the beginning of the end of uncontrolled and neurotic thinking.

You can do this simple exercise anywhere – when you walk, drive, before you go to bed, or when you’re waiting in line. I find it most useful to practice this for about ten minutes in a quiet room by myself. The fewer distractions around and the more attention you can put on the mental dialogue, the quicker you can quiet the Thinking Mind.

2. Suspend assent and value judgments.

The ancient Stoics were very familiar with the trap of identifying with thoughts. They practiced the psychological exercise called prosochê (attention to one’s mind), which resembles the “mindfulness” of Buddhism.

They saw automatic thoughts as intruders in our minds. The philosopher, Epictetus, said that we should question our thoughts as though they’re on trial in court. Stoics aggressively used reason and logic to snuff out irrational and untrue thoughts and impressions. They caution against what initial idea or impression we give “assent” to or say “yes” to in our minds.

For any thought or impression (good or bad) that crosses our mind, we must examine it and ask ourselves:

• Is this true?
• How am I so certain about my judgment?
• What am I failing to see here?
• Am I acting out of emotion?
• What’s in my control?
• Am I adding anything unnecessary to this impression?

This last question touches on something the Stoics call a “value judgement”. When you say that your dog died, and it’s awful, that’s a value judgment. When you get cut off in traffic and say, “That idiot cut me off! Now I know it’s going to be a bad day”, that’s another one. It goes beyond the facts and adds meaning to reality, and often for the worse.

We must practice objectivity.

Instead of saying that your dog died and it’s awful, say “my dog died”. Instead of getting cut off in traffic and cursing the driver and the rest of the day for it, just say, “he cut me off”. If someone tells you they didn’t like your cooking, they just didn’t like it. That’s it.

As Nietzsche put it, we must “stop courageously at the surface” and see things plainly, in objective form. Like the Stoics, observe thoughts with logic, and don’t add anything to them. See them as they are.

A thought only means something if you feed it the meaning.

3. Change the way you talk to yourself.

Whenever a thought or emotion comes up, instead of saying, “I am angry” or “I am nervous”, say “I feel anger” or “I feel nervousness”.

This subtle change in wording cuts off the connection between you and what you’re thinking or feeling. It detaches you from it and puts the power back in your hands.

You aren’t jealous. You have feelings of jealousy.

You don’t want to punch your boss in the face. You have thoughts of punching your boss in the face.

You feel the emotion and acknowledge it, but you aren’t controlled by it and it doesn’t define who you are.

4. Manipulate your thoughts.

Aside from their tendencies to surge out of nowhere, thoughts are also like Play-Doh. They can be stretched, molded, smashed, discolored, and even have their “volume” turned down.

Tony Robbins, in his book Unlimited Power, says that most thoughts come into your consciousness in the form of a picture or video. The bigger, louder, and more detailed the thought is, the greater its effect on you. If unrestrained, a thought can completely take over your mind and continue assaulting it randomly. This applies to both positive and negative thoughts.

Just as easily as a thought raids your mind, you can quickly counter it by manipulating it.

Try this out: If you have a fearful or anxious thought, for example, imagine that it’s in a television frame.

Make it as clear and detailed as possible.

Now make the frame bigger and louder in your mind.

Seriously, try this now and see what happens.

Notice how the effect of the thought intensifies. You feel it more.

Now try making the frame with the same thought very small and turn the volume down.

What happens?

If you give it some time, the thought’s effect will weaken, and sometimes significantly.

I love this exercise because of its immediate results. I save it for the strongest of negative thoughts like when I get very emotional, angry, or before I’m about to do something that scares me.

I like to get funny with it, too. Sometimes I’ll imagine the TV screen getting pulverized to dust by three overly sized cartoon hammers. I’ll then take the dust, form it into a Frisbee, and throw it into the sun. If a person insulted me, I imagine them dressed up as a clown and telling me the same insult but in an Elmer Fudd or Porky Pig voice.

5. Accept it and move on.

Sometimes you just need to do something NOW. And you don’t have time to watch thoughts objectively, filter out value judgments, change how to talk to yourself, or put your fears in a frame and smash it to bits. Accept what’s happening and move on.

Feel the fear and do it anyway.

If you’re anxious, do something about your situation that’s in your control.

If you’re dreading rejection, get it over with.

If you’re procrastinating, it’s a sign that that’s exactly what you need to be doing.

Acknowledge the Thinking Mind and all its ugliness, but do not let it keep you from doing what you need to do. No matter how many positive quotes you read on Instagram or affirmations you say, negative thoughts will always happen. They’re part of being human and we’re wired that way so we can stay alive. It’s not a bad thing, but a tool.

Negative thoughts and emotions also become more powerful if you try to eliminate them. Accepting and embracing them is a tactic for overcoming them.

These strategies are simple but hard. Without patience and consistent practice, they may never work for you. I skeptically practiced each one of these and it took me months (and some of them years) to successfully apply and accept them as part of my mind-splitting ritual.

It took me so long because I expected immediate results and when they worked, I stopped using them and forgot about them. I got tired of re-discovering them and allowing myself to go through so much mental and emotional pain that I could’ve avoided.

If you want to learn more about the two minds, I highly recommend reading Mark Manson’s article Your Two Minds and Eckhart Tolle’s book The Power of Now, which I reviewed in my Reading List.

I’ve successfully used these methods when I was under enormous pressure at work, dealing with jerks, judging people, procrastination, and overcoming the stupid shit that pops up in my mind.

You can, too.

If there’s one thing to take away from all this, it helps to remember what the neuroscientist Sam Harris said:

“It’s not thoughts themselves that cause suffering and confusion, but our habitual identification with the flow of thought – that is, our failure to recognize thoughts as thoughts…”