What I Learned about the Mind by Spending 100 Hours Alone with My Thoughts
Understanding what beliefs are and how to choose helpful ones to improve yourself and your life
Imagine this: for ten days you’re disconnected and isolated from the rest of the world. You have no internet, no music, no books, no phones, no nothing. You’re not even allowed to speak. For ten days you sit in silence and explore the unknown world of your mind.
This is what I did in 2017 when I took a silent meditation retreat in South Korea.
Spending ten hours a day alone with my thoughts helped me uncover profound truths about the nature of beliefs, truths that have the power to improve your life.
The Truth About Beliefs
During the retreat, I had the most disparate thoughts. One day I believed that what I was doing in that Korean meditation center was a great thing, so I meditated diligently all day and never skipped my group meditation sessions.
The next day I suffered heavily from boredom and believed the retreat was a huge waste of time. Demotivation kicked in, so I stopped going to the group sessions and stayed in my room sleeping or staring at the ceiling.
This roller coaster of emotions made me realise that although reality never changed, my perception of it kept being shaped by what beliefs and thoughts I would focus on at any given moment. And my actions, in turn, would change accordingly.
“What I’m doing in this meditation centre is pointless!”
“What I’m doing here is great!”
Neither of these beliefs was objectively true.
A belief becomes true to you only when you choose to believe it. In fact, the very definition of the word ‘belief’ is “something that you think is true”.
NONE of your beliefs are true. They’re just thoughts your mind has accepted as valid based on your experiences, interpretations, and conditioning.
So, if you believe you’re an anxious person, a great partner, a perfectionist or an idiot, then you’ll perceive yourself as such. If you believe people are evil, then you’ll see nothing but evil in people.
You are what you choose to believe you are. You see what you choose to believe to see.
What are the practical implications of this?
Choosing Beliefs
If none of your beliefs are true, then it’d be a great idea to adopt only those beliefs that can help you in life.
For example, if you want to complete a ten-day silent meditation retreat, “What I’m doing here is great!” is a helpful belief to have. (It’s this belief that helped me endure the experience and make it to the end of day 10).
Here’s another personal example.
Sometimes I wake up during the night and worry I won’t be able to fall back asleep. I don’t look at my watch because — if I know what time it is — I’ll start calculating how many hours of sleep I have left, which only makes it harder to relax and drift off again. So, since I never know what time it is, I can believe it’s whatever time I want it to be.
I say to myself, “Relax, it’s only 2 a.m., you still have more than five hours left before you have to wake up.” Adopting the belief that I still have plenty of time helps me relax and fall asleep. It may not be true that it’s 2 a.m. But it’s useful to believe so.
The usefulness of your beliefs determines the quality of your life.
Say you want to become a successful blogger.
To do that, you believe you must post one article every day. You also hold the belief that all your articles must be of super high quality and edited to perfection otherwise people wouldn’t read them.
Unfortunately, though, you don’t have time to write an article a day that meets your perfectionist standards, so you end up posting only one cool article once a month — which doesn’t get read as much as you’d like to.
After six months, you’re like, “Becoming a blogger is hard. It’s only for writers who have the time to churn out great articles daily.” And you give up. Your unhelpful beliefs led you to failure.
One year later, you decide to try again. But this time you want to adopt a mindset — a set of beliefs — to help you succeed.
How could you do that?
One way is to list all your beliefs about what it takes to become a successful blogger and then deliberately question them. (Wait, do my articles really need to be perfect? Is the opposite equally true? Is this a belief that will help me achieve my goal?)
Or you could prove yourself wrong by actively seeking evidence that supports the opposite of what you’ve always believed. (Let’s see if there’s a blogger who’s living proof that success doesn’t depend on posting perfect articles daily).
Or you could do the opposite of what you’ve always believed to be true and see where that takes you. (Let’s see what happens if I post one imperfect article a week for a month).
Success is never guaranteed. But by adopting helpful beliefs you won’t at least place imaginary obstacles on your path to it. Conversely, adopting unhelpful ones is a fantastic way to turn yourself into your own enemy.
Final (Sad) Thought
My 26-year-old cousin died in a motorbike crash in 2004. The day he died, the life of his parents changed forever. They got so depressed they even thought of committing suicide together. Thankfully, they’re still with us today.
What’s been helping them endure pain? Nothing but a helpful belief. They have chosen to believe God took their son for a reason. They believe their son is up there because that’s what God wanted.
The point is not that God will save you.
The point is that whatever you’re going through in life, whatever goal you have, whatever happened to you in the past, whatever opinions you have about yourself and others, you always have the option of adopting a helpful belief and letting go of an unhelpful one.
Believe wisely.
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