Have you ever sent an email or a message to someone and expected them to reply quickly, but hours or even days pass, and still nothing arrives in your inbox.
It’s quite possible that thoughts start appearing as to why they haven’t replied: did they take offence, didn’t they understand it, are they ignoring you? These thoughts might come in immediately, or take a little longer, but whenever they drop, they’re usually not based on facts at all. They’re just assumptions we make, but these thoughts can seem as real as if they were actual facts. The mind can then trigger stress responses as it reacts to the ‘facts’, when all they really are, are stories you’ve created about why you didn’t get a response, in place of any real information.
If this sounds like you, you’re not alone as there is evidence that demonstrates this is what the mind can do when it doesn’t have all the information. In his legendary book ‘Thinking Fast and Slow’, Daniel Kahneman calls this “what you see is all there is” (WYSIATI). That’s when the mind treats whatever information it’s got on hand as the whole picture and builds a really confident story from it. He’s shown that it doesn’t take long for the mind to think the reason you’ve created in your head is actually fact, even when you haven’t got any information as to why they haven’t replied, just the radio silence. You jump to conclusions, possibly thinking that it’s helpful, but typically it’s making things worse.
There’s no way you’d accept a decision in a courtroom that reached a verdict moments after the opening statements had been given, without any evidence being heard from either side. But for some reason, we accept the stories our mind creates with even less information, and don’t question whether or not there’s anything to back it up. Often this all happens so quickly that we don’t even notice the thought has triggered the story, which we then take as fact.
So today, see if you can notice a thought that jumps to a conclusion quickly in your head, without any real evidence. Try and notice whether you actually know this to be true, or whether it’s a thought that’s crept in and created its own outcomes. It’s not always easy to spot, but most of us do it, and it’s a really helpful skill to keep ourselves in check, and not getting stressed out about something that is probably not even true.