Danger! Dark thoughts in sight

Genetics and context can generate unpleasant thoughts. How can we avoid them?

How do we explain the things that happen to us in everyday life? Well, that depends on a multiplicity of factors, the recipe has a few ingredients.

First of all, we have our genetic endowment, which functions as a floor and a ceiling for all our possibilities. Genes are an inheritance that cannot be modified, but there is something over which we do have power: our thoughts and, by extension, the way we think about what happens to us.

Genes: the fixed part of us

Genes, of course, condition us; they are at the base of all our virtues, but also of our defects.. For practical purposes, they function as a set of guidelines or instructions that predispose us to develop in one way or another.

But of course, that's not the end of it. Genes are permanently influenced and shaped by the environment. Within it, we have the culture in which we are immersed, the type and quality of upbringing we have received, as well as the personality characteristics and relational style of our own parents.

The school we attended, our childhood peers and friends, each of the different experiences, both good and bad, that we had growing up, interact with our genes and do their bit to make us who we are.

How we feel, how we behave and how we relate to the world, depends on the cocktail of all these different elements that are mixed together.

What can't be changed

Of course, there is not much we can do about these factors.. The Biological parents we were given are unchangeable, this means that we cannot change them for others, nor can we do anything to improve them, if that were our wish.

The same applies to the genes we got in the lottery of life and to every event we lived during our childhood and adolescence; the time machine that allows us to travel to the past to make the changes that are convenient for us has not been invented and it seems that it will not be invented either.

But there are other variables over which we have a greater influence, such as our thoughts, in the here and now, in the present moment, and I assure whoever is reading these lines at this moment, that thoughts play a crucial role in the way we see and interpret the world..

Confusing thoughts with reality

Most of the time we make the mistake of believing that our thoughts are reality itself, and it is easy to fall into such a mistake for a couple of reasons.

First of all, thoughts are an invisible process, thoughts constitute an invisible process. They cannot be seen, they cannot be touched, and often we are not even aware that we are thinking. But we do; in fact, we think all the time, and even if we are not aware of it, everything that passes through our brain has a direct influence on how we feel, and consequently, how we act.

We must also keep in mind that our thoughts occur precisely inside our brain, they are ours, they are our own, they are trapped inside our head, therefore, we cannot compare them with the thoughts of others. As they are isolated, it is easy for them to end up becoming for us our most absolute truth..

The invisible thought process

Everything we think becomes our reality without us realizing it; we end up homologating what happens inside our mind with what happens outside our mind.. 

But one thing is what we think is happening, and quite another is what actually happens. And the irony of the whole thing is that what we think is happening is the only thing that really matters when we have to make a decision. From this idea, let's imagine a couple of situations.

The case of the airplane

We are flying in a commercial airliner at an altitude of 10,000 meters when, suddenly, the aircraft enters a zone of turbulence. Since we don't have much experience traveling, our first thought is: "Oh my God, the plane is going to crash and we're all going to die. Oh no... I'm going to die, I'm going to die...!".

Under that thought (and I insist, it's just a thought, which does not necessarily have to conform to reality). it is highly probable that fear will take hold of us.. We will experience tachycardia, trembling throughout the body, possibly uncontainable anguish and the sensation that we are going to faint from one moment to the next. In short, the experience will be extremely unpleasant.

On the other hand, if in the same context we think: "Well, we are entering turbulence. Hopefully it will pass soon and dinner will be served"; I think it is not necessary to explain that both our emotions and the consequent physiological response will be very different.

The following chart is intended to show the sequence of steps that you may experience in both cases:

Target Fact: Zone of turbulenceThought Interpretation: "The plane is going to crash "Emotion Feeling: Fear PanicBehavior Response: Nervous breakdownTarget Fact: Zone of turbulenceThought Interpretation: "This is normal "Emotion Feeling: Indifference ResignationBehavior Response: Read a magazineThe dating case

Another case: A woman arranges to meet a man she has just met on a social network in a coffee shop. The guy in question seems good-looking, and the times they exchanged messages he was cordial and intelligent, just the way she likes them. A good match, no doubt.

However, 20 minutes after she takes a table, at the agreed time, there is no news or trace of him. Then she thinks, "I should have figured it out, he doesn't like me, and clearly didn't dare when I invited him to see us."

Another option could be: "What a guy, he turned out to be disrespectful after all. But who does she think she is to make me wait like this...?"

In the first case, the woman will undoubtedly feel depressed, hopeless, or both. She may even cry for several days, and her thoughts will continue for a long time along the same path: "I'm horrible, I'm worthless as a person, no one will ever love me". In the second case, she will feel annoyed, angry, and will probably have outbursts of bad temper when talking to other people.

But the truth is, the woman on the date, faced with the delay of her potential Prince Charming, might also think: "It's a fact: he's going to be late. Maybe it would have been better to meet him in a coffee shop closer to his house, to get here he has to cross half the city". This is what lawyers call "presumption of innocence". In other words, it is desirable that we always try to orient our thoughts under the premise that no one is guilty until proven guilty.until proven otherwise.

The case of the wallet

An old man forgets his wallet on the counter of a pharmacy where he went to buy a medicine for hypertension. The next day he misplaces his glasses and to make matters worse, his wife remarks to him in passing that he has been very distracted lately. The man then recalls that his mother suffered from Alzheimer's disease.

"I have Alzheimer's. I've inherited it...", he thinks. "These are the first symptoms, that's how she started," he recalls.

That night he can't sleep. He keeps thinking over and over again about the dire and inexorable fate he believes awaits him. Obsessed with the idea, he begins to interpret as a symptom of the disease every little forgetfulness he has in his daily life. Worried, engrossed by his own gloomy lucubrations, he stops paying attention to what other people tell him, which leads, in turn, to some people telling him that they see him engrossed, as if lost, disconnected from the world. And that is when the protagonist of this hypothetical case goes into crisis and, in desperation, calls his doctor to ask for an urgent interview.

Of course, if the old man had thought: "I've been so stressed lately that I don't pay enough attention to what I'm doing, I'd better find a way to relax a little", the epilogue would surely be different.

One last example

Another illustrative example: the new office colleague who joined the company last week, walks past you in one of the corridors on a random morning and omits to greet you. You have two options:

The transformative power of thought

There is a common denominator among all the situations: you are thinking. And what you are thinking may or may not coincide with reality.

If we think that our colleague is rude, then we will probably feel ignored and annoyed, and henceforth, ill-disposed towards him, which in turn will make this colleague start to be unfriendly. I insist once again: a characteristic error of human beings is to confuse their own thoughts with reality..

What we are thinking is just that, a thought. But reality is something that happens beyond our brain. And this is vitally important, because what we think can determine how we feel and what we will do as a result.

• You may think that perhaps you did not see it, or that you were engrossed in your own preoccupations.