How to Catch Butterflies - On Thinking Original Thoughts

Spongebob SquarePants 

I haven't spent much time evaluating SpongeBob properly - I doubt he would make it through a full session. From what I can tell, he's not the most psychologically minded creation. It's a mystery to me how he's catching butterflies at the bottom of the Bikini Atoll. Maybe the radioactive fallout has created not only Spongebob SquarePants but also deep-sea butterflies. 

The reason Spongebob SquarePants entered my mind is that I thought about how to become more aware of my own thoughts, especially those fast, not automatic but high-speed cognitions that easily go unnoticed. That is what Daniel Kahneman describes as system 1, I propose SpongeBob only operates there. 

How to catch your own thoughts, let alone the thoughts of my patients? 

Is it like catching butterflies, armed with a huge net, you frolic in your thoughts and bring that's how you become aware of them? For sure, one of the exasperating but depending on the situation saving traits of our thoughts is that they are rather elusive. It's probably not as tricky as catching the Higgs Boson but difficult nevertheless. The constant urgent and unimportant, meaningless noise from our beloved "devices" has made it even more difficult to catch our thoughts.

That's an issue of modernity - that everything tries to catch our attention, because attention is a most precious commodity.

Not trying to catch your thoughts and not engaging in deep, effortful and focussed thinking we keep us shallow and reactive to whims of whatever and whoever succeeds in grasping our attention, chipping away from our ability to understand ourselves and our place in this reality.

And if that wasn't enough, our emotions interrupt our thinking as well. One of those emotions is anxiety, which often puts a quick stop to original thoughts. Thoughts that easily trigger anxiety are everything that is ad odds with what we think people around us do and should think about us. Thoughts that are forerunners of realizing that some decisions have led to unfortunate consequences. Thoughts at odds with current commitments and habits. We might not want to catch every thought. How about the ones that bring loss, failure and disappointment into our awareness? Very few things in our life elicit thoughts and emotions with the same emotional value, that is all good or all bad. With most people, events, even ourselves, we are ambivalent as there is light and shadow, qualities we cherish and qualities we abhor. 

So, catching butterflies seems to be a trivial pursuit compared to catching our thoughts. "What was I thinking?" is one of the crucial questions to ask repeatedly but to sit in silence and to simply think harder would we the equivalent to swing the net more furiously through the air when catching butterflies - probably not the best strategy. Our mind does not do too well when all we allow a mind to do is thinking and it can do a terrific job in keeping cognitions that might elicit negative emotions such as anxiety in the depths away from the conscious "surface". 

But we can help our mind, the trick is to lower its guard with benign distraction and solitude. That could be a journey alone, a train or bus ride. Or we could go alone to a cafe, take a walk in the park or the countryside, sit next to a stream or the ocean. A few things help us here: For once, distance allows our mind to be more willing entertaining challenging ideas. When outside walking, we do that automatically while we have to also take notice of what's going on around us. This might be enough "distraction" for our emotions to guard towards the outer world and allow original thoughts to slip unnoticed.

When I was a child, I took long walks with my best friend around the small town in Germany I grew up in. I realize now why that was so helpful for our development as independent thinkers. 

I suggest you take a walk now.