Are you someone that feels like their day is constantly tied up in thoughts, or maybe you’re really busy all the time and don’t feel you have much time for thoughts at all.
The average number of thoughts a person has every day has been floating around for years, ranging from around 100 thoughts a day, to an exaggerated myth that we had over 55,000. Thankfully now it has been scientifically studied by Dr. Jordan Poppenk and Julie Tseng at Queen’s University who used fMRI technology to detect “thought worms,” which are consecutive moments when a person is focused on the same idea.
You may or may not be surprised to know that the number of thoughts you have every day is around 6,200.
If you were to consider that every single one of those thoughts could be a thought that you think you need to do something with, that’s a lot of thoughts in one day to deal with. On average, that would be one thought every ten seconds for the whole of your day, including when you’re sleeping.
Imagine you had over six thousand emails coming into your inbox every day, for your entire life. There’s no way you would be able to read all of them. It would consume most of your day logistically, and leave you exhausted and potentially overwhelmed to actually do anything meaningful with them. Let alone what actually needed to be done during the day.
Fortunately the brain’s clever and it makes things simpler by filtering through most of them without you even being aware of it. This is made easier because the vast majority of these thoughts are repeated from earlier in the day, and thoughts you’ve already had many, many times. The good news is most of these thoughts you don’t need to do anything with. But for a lot of people these thoughts can seem to be very real and important pieces of information, or something that we have to act on.
So it’s no wonder that life becomes pretty exhausting if you spend all your time living in your head. The thing is, you don’t have to do anything with nearly all of your thoughts. Nothing at all - they are just repeated scenarios or ideas or comments that you’ve had loads of times already, or are just irrelevant thought bubbles. That is a good reason to just let them go, because trying to hold on to them is impossible, and mentally trying to is exhausting.
Learning to let them go isn’t always easy, but is possible, and the best way to start is ironically to notice you’re having the thoughts at all. From there you can learn to create space from them, and release them, knowing that you don’t need most of the 6,200 thoughts you have anyway. More on how to do that in upcoming articles.
For now, it can be helpful to focus on simply noticing your thoughts. So see if you can catch yourself the next time you find yourself thinking about something in your head. Just remember that it’s one of around 6,200 thoughts you’ll be having that day, and that it’s very likely not something you need to do anything with at all.