Whenever I become aware of some chaos in my mind, I try to follow my chain of thoughts to the source. This makes “me” just how tenuous and ridiculous most connections from one thought to the next are. The fickle mind crosses the flimsiest of bridges simply to fulfill its own need of constantly thinking something. Once your mind realizes just how ridiculous this all is and how embarrassing the source of all this chaos is, it automatically calms down.

I learnt another trick from Sam Harris’ interview which is to observe how repetitive your thoughts are. The results are even more embarrassing. More often than not my reaction is “didn’t I just think about this thing like 2 secs ago?”. It’s almost as if the default state of mind is to be stuck in a loop. You combine this proclivity with the previous one and you get yourself a small, highly-connected graph of thoughts on which the mind then just jumps around mindlessly.

Math helps a lot with dealing with this. In math, there is always something new to think about. If not new in the absolute sense, at least new for you. But even in math, many creative ideas arise without conscious thinking. They just pop up when you’re taking a long walk or have been driving for a while or are just waking up from a nap, post some mindless activity.

I try whenever I have the energy and the motivation to try to not think of things unnecessarily. Of course, you want to activate your System 2 whenever there’s a need to think about something deeply, like while writing this blog post, but more often than not there is just no reason to be consciously thinking about something - mushin.

We have evolved to be lazy, to find ways to survive using minimal resources. It is probably cost-effective to regurgitate the thought you recently had, the one that is still fresh in your RAM than to come up with a new one. And, thanks to modernization, the evolutionary pressures to inhibit this redundancy no longer exist. But it is even more cost-effective to not think anything! Repetitive thinking is, as with most other mental habits, a product of personal habits, education, society, and culture. In fact, repetitive thinking is not only a big waste of resources but also a major cause of anxiety. The reason we do it then is simply because we are unaware of it. The solution is to come up with some tricks that work for you that make you aware of your own thoughts.