Thoughts

[theia]

I think I may have started a thread on thoughts years ago but I could be wrong. I’m “wrong” about a lot of things as old age advances.

I’ve just been reading an article on pain and suffering. It acknowledges that we all feel pain but suggests that we make it into suffering by adding our thoughts to it. That seems to make sense to me but it’s much easier to say it than to practice. And I’m wondering, what is a thought?

[LarsMac]

What is a thought?

It can be a passing fancy, like a Bird that stops on your porch rail, for a second,
or a leaf floating down stream.
Or it can suddenly appear like a loose thread, and distract for little while.
Or, it can drop out of the sky with a thud, and become an obsession.

[Bryn Mawr]

What is a thought?

It can be a passing fancy, like a Bird that stops on your porch rail, for a second,
or a leaf floating down stream.
Or it can suddenly appear like a loose thread, and distract for little while.
Or, it can drop out of the sky with a thud, and become an obsession.

Or nowadays, it drops out of the sky like a biblical revelation and five minutes later you are scrabbling to grasp the tail and of it and remember what it was about.

[Betty Boop]

I can't even begin to start, I have no idea. Whatever a thought is, I know I overthink.

I know people give voice to a lot of their thoughts. I think if you think something too much it can become your reality, but I have no idea how you stop that.

If you snap at me, I feel hurt, I don't always say it, I keep quiet and back off. I don't forget it though, the snap hurt, and then I can think about it and keep hurting for hours. That's part of me taking everything personally. It will eat away until I question every aspect of myself and you, the snapper.

There's an example of thoughts making my suffering prolonged, I can't just switch that off, can you?

[spot]

1. Humans are mammals
2. There's nothing in the human mind that doesn't exist in all mammal minds. All mammals are first cousins to humans in the larger scheme of animal life. Evolution has focused a significant part of the human brain on the grammar and vocabulary of language, which gives people a new skill of logical thought which other mammals have managed to avoid so far
3. I don't think language has reduced or replaced our underlying mammalian thinking skills like emotion or recall or sensitivity to pain. The average wolf probably has a far better ability to enjoy life and remember its mother than I do, even though I'm better at arithmetic because I can manipulate words
4. If I use pain the way all mammals do then it's a useful attribute. If it weren't a useful attribute it wouldn't have evolved
5. If I process pain with language it's amplified, it can become permanent, it gets in the way. Language and pain don't belong together outside of a doctor's surgery
6. Because I have evolved to use language internally as a deliberate conscious skill, I find it hard to attune my thinking to stop doing it. Lots of people learn how to attune their thinking to stop using words for a while. Those people can spend periods without holding internal conversations Processing pain in that state avoids the amplification and avoids imprinting those thoughts permanently on the memory.
7. I expect that's a useful skill to develop
8. I expect there are people on the Internet who can teach how to do it

[LarsMac]

I can't even begin to start, I have no idea. Whatever a thought is, I know I overthink.

I know people give voice to a lot of their thoughts. I think if you think something too much it can become your reality, but I have no idea how you stop that.

If you snap at me, I feel hurt, I don't always say it, I keep quiet and back off. I don't forget it though, the snap hurt, and then I can think about it and keep hurting for hours. That's part of me taking everything personally. It will eat away until I question every aspect of myself and you, the snapper.

There's an example of thoughts making my suffering prolonged, I can't just switch that off, can you?

Sometimes.

[Betty Boop]

I can't even begin to start, I have no idea. Whatever a thought is, I know I overthink.

I know people give voice to a lot of their thoughts. I think if you think something too much it can become your reality, but I have no idea how you stop that.

If you snap at me, I feel hurt, I don't always say it, I keep quiet and back off. I don't forget it though, the snap hurt, and then I can think about it and keep hurting for hours. That's part of me taking everything personally. It will eat away until I question every aspect of myself and you, the snapper.

There's an example of thoughts making my suffering prolonged, I can't just switch that off, can you?

Sometimes.

Actually, maybe I can to varying degrees, not in an on or off manner though. If it's someone I don't know that well it will grate, and I will ponder, but then I generally have to tell myself enough, their opinion doesn't matter, so I put it aside. Its when its family or someone close, I can't turn it off.

[theia]

I’m wondering who it is who notices the thoughts we have. Perhaps it’s just level upon level of thinking?

[Bryn Mawr]

1. Humans are mammals
2. There's nothing in the human mind that doesn't exist in all mammal minds. All mammals are first cousins to humans in the larger scheme of animal life. Evolution has focused a significant part of the human brain on the grammar and vocabulary of language, which gives people a new skill of logical thought which other mammals have managed to avoid so far
3. I don't think language has reduced or replaced our underlying mammalian thinking skills like emotion or recall or sensitivity to pain. The average wolf probably has a far better ability to enjoy life and remember its mother than I do, even though I'm better at arithmetic because I can manipulate words
4. If I use pain the way all mammals do then it's a useful attribute. If it weren't a useful attribute it wouldn't have evolved
5. If I process pain with language it's amplified, it can become permanent, it gets in the way. Language and pain don't belong together outside of a doctor's surgery
6. Because I have evolved to use language internally as a deliberate conscious skill, I find it hard to attune my thinking to stop doing it. Lots of people learn how to attune their thinking to stop using words for a while. Those people can spend periods without holding internal conversations Processing pain in that state avoids the amplification and avoids imprinting those thoughts permanently on the memory.
7. I expect that's a useful skill to develop
8. I expect there are people on the Internet who can teach how to do it

Walk, swim - exercise!

Whilst the body is de-stressing the mind is in recovery mode.

[chonsigirl]

Sometimes we think all the time within ourselves. It can usually be in a verbal form, but do not forget the other ways to thiink. Music is one, and you can think on the lovely sounds for hours on end without a word popping in to disturb it. I know if it is a music day for me, with several hours of rehearsal thoughts do not transfer over easily to words. Especially if I am writing something.

[spot]

I’m wondering who it is who notices the thoughts we have. Perhaps it’s just level upon level of thinking?

Nomad would get his tinfoil hat on if he saw that.

The person who listens to what you're thinking is the other half of the internal dialogue. If I didn't have myself to talk to I'd never work anything out, and I'd never remember to put the grocery order in before Monday. An appropriate expression might be "I must remind myself it's Wednesday tomorrow", for example, or "Don't forget the library book".

[Beagle]

I think thoughts are sometimes the truths we don't speak out loud - - things that we say only to ourselves.

[FourPart]

The Government spent £Millions on a Campaign getting us to eat our 5 a Day.

All they needed to do was to leak a rumour about a National Shortage.

[G#Gill]

My latest thought is ------ Why the heck do companies like BT and Virgin Media etc. choose to have Asian operators ? I hasten to add that I have no complaint about having Asian people ring me up, it's just that I have great difficulty in understanding their accent !!!! I expect the Companies feel that Asian operators don't require such high wages.

There it is - money, money, money. No thought for customers' difficulty in understanding ! If I thought I could find a Company which used British accented operators, I would transfer in a moment, however it seems that most of these Companies all use Phillipines, Indian, Pakistani etc. operators. I have to wait over an hour to get through then I'm regaled with a strange language!

I repeat that I have absolutely nothing against this operators, it's just that I am not as young as I was and I just have difficulty in understanding what is said to me and I keep having to ask them to repeat what they say. The other day I was stuck on the phone for nearly 4 hours, and thank goodness it was an 0800 number. I'm afraid I was so upset with it all. I've thought about emailing them, but I need answers in less than 3 or 4 days! I just can't cope with it all, not these days.

Has anybody else experienced this problem ? I'm so fed up and dog-tired with it all. I don't know what the answer is. It's driving me mad !!!

[spot]

Has anybody else experienced this problem ? I'm so fed up and dog-tired with it all. I don't know what the answer is. It's driving me mad !!!

The regional accent problem is definitely a long-standing one. I have more trouble with accents from Newcastle, Liverpool or Cardiff than I do with Lagos or New Delhi, but that's just practice.

My extra problem, which may well be yours too, is a narrowed frequency range of hearing. It comes naturally with being extremely old. Any accent or none at just adds to the problem. I have to ask my son to shout in order to hold a conversation with him.

But there is help at hand. TalkTalk, along with every other major ISP, offers a text relay service. They are obliged by law to do this, it's called disability equal treatment legislation or something similar. If you check, for example, https://community.talktalk.co.uk/t5/Art ... -p/2205168 you'll find "Your calls will go through a relay assistant, who will translate them from text to voice and vice versa. All relayed calls are confidential and none of your personal information will be shared except in very specific circumstances" and it's free to end users like us. Nobody need explain why they choose to use it. Whether it's an inability to understand the speech of anyone born outside the county or mere auditory failure, the text relay solves the issue.

As for the half hour wait to get to the right department, stop using TalkTalk or BT. Nobody in their right mind would sign up to a company that runs a half hour queue system by the time you've been redirected round four departments. Sign up with Shell Broadband, for example - I've never known their switchboard to take longer than three rings before answering. As for their helpdesk staff, Helen sounds like she was trained by the British Nanny Association. I usually ask for Helen.