The Thinking Fallacy — How to Change Your Life

The Thinking Fallacy is simple: you can’t think your way out of a bad habit. You can’t think your way out of your troubles. You can’t think your way out of a box.

Your conscious, visual-verbal thinking part of your brain loves for you to believe you can think your way out of, beyond, over the obstacle.

Will power and mental-sentences only get you a bit further around the short loop.

The Thinking Fallacy results in worrying and rumination, not meaningful progress, release, or freedom.

Not that thinking is bad, thinking is good. But, good thinking knows it is limited. Great thinking knows it is often trapped by both repetition and bias.

So, what to do instead?

One way to help think outside the box, is to walk outside the box. In a room? Go to another room, or walk outside. Move. And breathe. And talk to someone:

1. Rumination

Stuck ruminating at sprint-speed, not getting anywhere because you’re circling?

Force your thoughts down on paper — pushing yourself outside the loop by asking, at every pause in thought, “and that means that?” Like a child asking “why” continue going deeper and taking lateral steps until you break the loop.

Or convo with someone who will ask you to take a different, new perspective, and won’t let you simply dash madly around the track.

2. Worry

Worrying and trying to somehow control future events by thinking about them enough?

Take a gigantic breath. Open your eyes wide as your body expands. Then, let that breath out and release your breath loudly and tell yourself you are releasing your thoughts simultaneously. Then add a big, corny, fake “haha!”

Disrupt yourself. Let go. Express. Breathe big. Hop in place.

Ground your feet. Talk to someone and tell them you need to flesh out all possibilities. Then flood your mind with other kinds of options, diluting the power of the worry.

Then take whatever action you can in the moment, if anything. And get comfort from a friend, take care of yourself, and choose to focus on other productive, engaging, awesome things.

How to Change Your Life

The thinking fallacy keeps you wound up and bound.

Freedom is found by moving your body, breathing boldly, and finding ways to break the loop wether in a journal exercise of talking to someone who helps you off the track towards another destination.