When I was young, my TV options were limited to VHS tapes and local network programming—Netflix and its contemporaries were still the stuff of sci-fi.
My screen time was often spent with Mexican soap operas, which, if you’ve ever seen one, you know are practically synonymous with DRAMA. And when I say “drama,” I mean the over-the-top, can’t-believe-this-is-happening kind of drama.
You might be wondering what soap operas have to do with anything I write about. Well, it’s not about their addictive quality or entertainment value; it’s about how our brains seem to have a penchant for drama, the kind that soap operas deliver in spades.
It turns out, our love for drama isn’t just a byproduct of our TV-watching habits. It’s hardwired into us, courtesy of our egos. Think about a toddler’s tantrum: no soap opera experience necessary there, yet the drama unfolds. It’s innate. Only through conscious effort can we train our minds to sidestep drama.
Humans experience 40 to 60 thousand thoughts daily, but they’re not all unique or even positive. Many are repetitive and form patterns—some of which can be incredibly distorted.
These distorted thinking patterns have fancy names, but they’re surprisingly common:
- The All-or-Nothing Thinking: Seeing the world in black and white. Anything less than perfect is a total flop.
- Overgeneralization: Making a general conclusion based on a single incident or piece of evidence. If something bad happens once, you expect it to happen over and over again.
- Mental Filter: Picking out a single negative detail and dwelling on it exclusively so that your vision of reality becomes darkened.
- Disqualifying the Positive: Rejecting positive experiences by insisting they “don’t count” for some reason or another and allowing you to cling to negativity.
- Jumping to Conclusions: Interpreting things negatively when there are no facts to support your conclusion. This includes “Mind Reading” (assuming the thoughts and intentions of others) and “Fortune Telling” (anticipating that things will turn out badly).
- Magnification or Minimization: Exaggerating the importance of problems and shortcomings or minimizing the importance of desirable qualities.
These patterns can send us spiraling into negativity and impact our emotional health. Awareness is the first step toward reshaping these thoughts into something more positive and realistic.
Now I am going to share with you something that will blow your mind (in a good way). Read carefully because this tiny piece of wisdom might just be what you need to know right now to transform your life.
Just because you think a thought that doesn’t make it true. You do not have to believe all the thoughts in your mind because it is highly likely that most of those thoughts are not even yours.
Wait, what? How can a thought not be mine if it is in my mind? Are you asking yourself this question? If you are, then read on.
We are conditioned with certain thoughts since the moment we are born, and, over time, after thinking and rethinking those thoughts, they become beliefs; we adopt them as ours but they were not ours in the first place. Knowing this and identifying those thoughts and beliefs allows us to challenge them, question them, and let them go if we conclude they are not ours.
It may feel like they are because you are used to them, but if they are making you feel bad in any way, then you can bet they are not yours, because your true essence, your higher self, your soul, whatever you want to call it, operates from love.
We need to train ourselves to listen to our true voice and stop paying attention to the other one. Just ignore it. Then we start training our mind to avoid the drama at all costs, which does not mean not feeling our emotions; it means not allowing those fake stories to control the narrative of our life and then have to live with their negative impact.
The journey to overcome these patterns is progressive. Catching yourself when you get sucked in by the drama and almost getting an Oscar for your role in it gets easier until it even becomes funny. You see yourself wearing the smudged glasses that are distorting your reality, and you simply take them off and go on with your day.
