To have a thought is a natural part of life, to think on it is a choice.
By: Rossani Garmendia
With the mental health awareness month of May almost here, your therapeutic comfort should never have to wait.
For those of us that feel trapped in our head at times with no way out, this one’s for you. “Don’t Believe Everything You Think: Why Your Thinking Is The Beginning & End Of Your Suffering,” a book written by Joseph Nguyen that attracted over a million readers to buy off the shelf. The book held different analogies and endless advice meant to bring one’s mind at ease.
As college students, we are given a glimpse of what waits for us by the end of our educational journey. The time is now that some of us are anxious for what is to come. “Will I even find a job?” or “I’m running out of time”. Our mind is at max capacity of anxiety and stress with no release. Nguyen’s book teaches the ideology and differences between “thoughts” versus “thinking”. Our minds cannot find stability while running at 100 miles per hour; therefore he wrote to bring an understanding between the two terms.
This is only one out of 15 chapters of Nguyen’s concepts that is found in chapter four. He expressed the difference between thoughts and thinking by explaining thoughts to be “…raw materials our minds use to understand and navigate the world.” While thinking is defined as “…the judgement or opinion we have about our thoughts.” Our thoughts as students is to work hard so we can achieve our personal goals in life, but when we think too hard about it, we make it seem impossible to get where we want to be out of our own self doubt. That is Nguyen’s purpose in writing this book, to help communities like us in letting go of the fear in the unknown and allowing ourselves to feel alive in the present.
In between each chapter is a small poem of inspirational words or simply food for thought. Nguyen’s book is not meant to solve everyone’s problems but to remind them that whatever they are going through is just a moment but will not be present forever.
