Joseph Nguyen is the author of the #1 international bestselling book, Don't Believe Everything You Think, which has been translated into 31+ languages. When examining one of your thoughts, the first consideration is whether or not the thought is valid. Here are some questions you can ask yourself to help with this:

Now, turning that statement around in three ways, consider how the following are as true, or truer. With Mental Noting, you gently “note” thoughts or sensations as they arise in your mind by giving them a simple 1-word descriptor. (e.g. warm, tense, anger, etc.) The Work” of Byron Katie is a process of inquiry that helps you identify and question the thoughts that cause you the most suffering.Most of the time, your thoughts are just a story you tell yourself to make sense of the world. It’s all based on your interpretation of the world around you. Not some universal truth about reality. If you can learn to get more control over your thoughts, then you’ll tend to have better emotions and better responses to your emotions. You’ll also have an easier time doing the things you need to do. After all, some of your thoughts are excuses. The human mind is constantly processing the world around it. Each day is a non-stop barrage of thoughts, questions, and observations.

The Turnarounds help reveal the contradictory nature of our stories about other people, and how our judgements are also true, or truer for ourselves. Now, if you find that your thoughts aren’t valid or aren’t helpful, you’ll want to replace them with better thoughts. Here are some questions you can use to help with that:For the sake of example, let’s say you were feeling upset with your friend Jane, and had the thought “Jane should be nicer to me.” You can’t always control when these thoughts will surface. But you can develop strategies for responding to them in a way that doesn’t bring you down. Oftentimes, these are “should” thoughts. (e.g. “The world should be different,” or “My significant other should act in a different way.”)

Noting what arises in your mind has a host of benefits. It helps you stay present and see the contents of your consciousness more clearly. This creates space between you and the thoughts you experience, which gives you more power to act with intention. The second reason why not believing everything you think is difficult is that we’re often unaware of our thoughts. Most of our thoughts arise automatically, and we instantly believe and embody them. We rarely recognize them as thoughts at all. Becoming more aware of your thoughts requires mindfulness, journaling, or the help of a cognitive therapist. Note the thought with gentle curiosity, giving it a one-word descriptor. (Along the lines of, “Ah, I see: Fear.”) That’s it. Don’t believe everything you think. Our default setting is to simultaneously believe and embody the thoughts that we have. But the thoughts that we have are sometimes wrong, unwise, or unhelpful. So we should not automatically buy into them, and we should not automatically use them to guide our behavior. Is it Valid?

I discovered that when I believed my thoughts, I suffered, but that when I didn’t believe them, I didn’t suffer, and that this is true for every human being. Freedom is as simple as that. I found that suffering is optional. I found a joy within me that has never disappeared, not for a single moment. That joy is in everyone, always.” It would probably be more accurate to say that some Republicans don’t care about poor people (I’m looking at you Wilbur Ross), some Republicans believe that the free market is the best way to help the poor, and some Republicans are themselves poor. Is it Helpful? The irony of this situation is that everyone talks to themselves all day long. You just don’t verbalize this dialogue, so it isn’t heard by others.