All that we are is the result of what we have thought
This powerful thought is credited to Siddhartha Gautama, also known as the Buddha. Having lived in the birthplace of the Buddha (Nepal) as well as in two predominantly Buddhist countries (Thailand and Myanmar), I’ve learned about and have been influenced a lot by the religious and cultural aspects of Buddhism. In fact where I currently live, in Thailand, did you know that this year is 2565? Wait, what?! Well, Thailand uses the Buddhist calendar which starts with the Buddha’s “parinirvana”, or nirvana after death. And that happened 543 years before the birth of Jesus Christ.
But rather than write today about the many ways my perspectives have been expanded and shaped by living in Buddhist countries, I just want to share a concept that a friend here in Thailand shared with me recently that I think is a powerful one— think pollution.
When you hear the word “pollution”, most likely the first thoughts that pop up into your mind are related to our physical environment. If I asked you to close your eyes and visualize pollution, you’d likely paint mental pictures of the ways our Earth is harmed by human activity— heaps of trash; plastic and debris floating in the ocean; exhaust pouring out of vehicles; dangerous chemicals being pumped into the air by smokestacks, and so on. But when my friend talks about “think pollution”, he’s not asking us to think about the environmental pollution of our neighborhoods and waterways; he’s asking us to think about the pollution of our own thoughts.
Just as all of us are affected by environmental pollution, all of us are affected by think pollution as well. My friend who shared this concept with me would be better able to explain it, but I’d like to share a few of the main ideas here in hopes that it leads to further discussion and writing.
First, think pollution is similar to environmental pollution in that it’s harmful to our wellbeing. Think pollution occurs when we spend too much time thinking about things in the past which cannot be changed, or thinking too much about things in the present or the future which are essentially out of our control. Just as environmental pollution is everywhere but is more severe in different parts of the world, think pollution also happens to every one of us, but in varying degrees of harm.
For many of us, think pollution can compromise our ability to focus and reduce our sense of clarity. It can make us feel anxious and can eat up our most precious resource, time, therefore making us less productive and even more anxious. For others, think pollution can be outright toxic, leading to sadness, depression and other detrimental consequences to our mental, emotional and physical wellbeing. Think pollution—those negative thoughts that spin around in our head reminding us of our mistakes, missteps and inadequacies, whether real or imagined—makes us feel less adequate and less in control.
Secondly, I would make an educated guess that the COVID pandemic has made think pollution a lot worse for a lot of folks. We all know that COVID-19 has been devastating in many ways, but one of the ways it’s been particularly damaging is to our mental health, and I believe a big part of that is due to all of the ambiguity created by the disease. The pandemic made so many things uncertain, and all of us have stories about how this affected us. In my case I spent way too many hours fretting over how my family and I would be able to travel to see our families in Japan and the US and how we’d be able to get back to Thailand again. I just kept thinking over and over about these things that I had little to no control over, and this negatively affected my sleep and my disposition too, draining a good amount of my positive energy and making me feel downright unhappy at times.
Even the pandemic aside, I would speculate that the phenomenon of “think pollution” is becoming more problematic in our society with every passing decade if not every year. One of the reasons is that many of us spend a large amount of our waking day staring at screens (sorry for keeping you on one now!) and we are therefore bombarded with a lot of information and social media that can produce anxiety, particularly if it yields unkind comparisons between who/where we are and who/where we’re not or who/where we want to be. Depending upon our life situations and our mood, the gaps can make us feel inferior, can make us feel like we’re failing, and this can lead to overthinking and the traps we set up for ourselves. The fact is, we just aren’t resting our minds enough. And as I was reflecting about this over breakfast at one of my favorite neighborhood diners this morning, I happened to see this comic in the Bangkok Post:
I guess a lot of us are like Brutus. Our minds are busy most if not all of the time, and when you stop and reflect on what we’re actually thinking about, probably a significant amount of our thinking is in fact pollution, or things that don’t actually help us. And that’s why it’s so important that we recognize this and make an effort to clean out the pollution that builds up in our minds, or try to stop the think pollution in its tracks.
I’d love to hear what you think about think pollution, and what things you do when you find yourself stuck in a loop of negative or unproductive thoughts. I’ll share just one of mine before I go. When I drove a car in the US, I used to complain a lot when I got stuck in a traffic jam, and I’d often find myself consumed by the situation, thinking over and over again about how I was stuck in traffic rather than just trying to let it go. Then one day, I saw a bumper sticker that read, “You aren’t stuck in traffic— you ARE traffic!” And it hit me, just like that! How often do we complain about something when in fact we are part of the problem?