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- #132. Thinking about thinking
#132. Thinking about thinking
Shem Opolot
August 01, 2025
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LIFE.
Thinking about thinking.
“Beware of your thoughts, for they become words. Beware of your words, for they become actions. Beware of your actions, for they become habits. Beware of your habits, for they become character. Beware of your character, for it becomes your destiny.”
That popular phrase is an example of a common literary device, used by the likes of Yoda and Apostle Paul for emphasis, called anadiplosis. That popular phrase is also an example of a slippery slope fallacy. But for me, when I stumbled upon it again the other day, it sent me into a thought spiral.
A few months ago, I used my health insurance to go for a full-body check-up—which, by the way, you should do at least once a year if you can. Think of it as a vital all-hands meeting for your body, not one of those *hits unmute*—“nothing from my end” meetings that were conceived as emails but somehow metastasized into full-blown meetings.
Anyway.
Besides the full panel of tests, I prostrated before the good doctor armed with questions ranging from safe ones—”What does it mean when…?” to cautious ones—”What if a friend of mine…?”
At the top of my list was a phenomenon I struggled to explain. Infrequently, but often enough to land on my agenda, my mind would race with a thousand thoughts while doing a regular task like brushing my teeth. In that moment, my head would feel like a primary school classroom when the teacher steps out to take a personal call—the ensuing concert of chatter becoming one indiscernible hum. My mind would feel like what I imagine it’d be like to shove a hive of harmless but very active bees into my skull.
This feeling would last a few minutes, as the thoughts seemed to congregate at the front of my skull, as though trying to push their way out. The thoughts felt urgent, and I felt rushed, but in the same instant, I knew it was nothing, so I ignored it.
The first time I felt this thud of thoughts, I panicked. I thought it was a tumor or something, but I was too scared and too insurance-less to ask any more questions. After it happened a few more times, I added it to the agenda at my body’s AGM.
So there I was in the doctor’s office—a tattletale on my own private issues.
“The thoughts are a mild panic attack,” the doctor said dissmissively, like I was the twentieth person to submit that concern that day.
“What should I do about them?”
“Literally anything else,” she said. “Anything that requires a decent amount of focus and can distract you—drive, ride a bike, cook, anything.”
It worked.
The doctor’s tacit lesson was that action cures overthinking.
But how? And while we’re asking questions, why do we think? Where does thinking come from?
Thinking was a major software update our big-brained ancestors got thousands of years ago to make them more adaptive to the dangerous and capricious great outdoors. Small-brained animals experience unoriginal deaths because they don’t have memories, let alone thoughts. Their tiny brains optimize for basic survival, so they lack the time or capacity to recall how their friend died. Consequently, they end up joining their friend in the animal afterlife under similar circumstances.
You and I are immune to this puny, recursive death loop because one of our ancestors probably had a weird experience one day:
…at some point, one of earth’s creatures began to experience a new kind of sense perception. It began to experience ghostly images and sensations representing events that happened to it in the past, and could happen again later, and these sensations inform the creature’s actions in the present, perhaps even to defy its instincts!
You see, your thoughts are inextricably tied to your actions.
Thinking was created to prevent you from acting if you don’t have to. Or as philosopher Alfred North Whitehead said, “The reason we have thoughts is so that our ideas can die instead of ourselves.”
Thinking is supposed to rein in impulsive action, but in its most radical form—overthinking—it cuts off blood supply to any sort of action.
And overthinking-induced paralysis, which I’m sure idiots love to cite, is one of the main disadvantages of thinking.
To overcome the negative effects of thinking, we must follow the doctor’s orders and do literally anything. David Cain talked about battling overthinking using “corner glimpsing,” where you must literally glimpse at corners.
To interrupt a thud of thoughts, or a persistent singular thought, or that song you can’t get out of your mind, David recommends staring at a corner in the room, or the edge of your desk, or the edge of your laptop, and carefully tracing where the lines meet with your eyes. This simple but effective process displaces your focus long enough to reset your thoughts and, hopefully, allow you to focus on what you really want to do.
Your never-ending thoughts, before they vomit into words, are simply flags for your attention. They show you where you’re focusing. And while you can’t turn off the thought tap permanently (nor should you want to), you can master your attention using actions, which can banish your thoughts like light vanquishes darkness.
THINGS.
A quote.
As the tide in Gaza shifts slowly—but not fast enough—as we learn the West’s threshold for war crimes, I’m reminded of these prescient words:
One day, when it’s safe, when there’s no personal downside to calling a thing what it is, when it’s too late to hold anyone accountable, everyone will have always been against this.
A picture.
I consider it the ultimate privilege to have lifelong friends. Friends you wore diapers with. Friends you crammed in the back of your dad’s car on the way to school with. Friends you hit adolescence with. Friends you celebrated your first paycheck with. And now, friends you celebrate your children’s birthdays with. What a privilege! I thank God!
WORK.
A useful tool
If you work with others, you might repeat instructions often. This tool helps you create instructional videos or step-by-step guides that’ll end the redundancy.
PS. AI is here, but if you don’t understand how to use spreadsheets to analyze information and manipulate data, you won’t unlock AI’s full potential. Take my Google Sheets course today.
FUN.
The Friday Fix playlist
Shem’s picks
✅ How the NFL makes more money than any other league in the world
✅ Memory is more about your future than your past
✅ A fish that hunts pigeons
✅ The obsolete mechanism that powers most of the world’s most expensive watches
✅ A 5-minute video on using your iPhone for travel photography
Have a great weekend,
— Shem
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