I’m doing some initial work in cognitive behavioral therapy. I’ve been tasked with starting to notice automatic thoughts and reflect on them. It reminds me of a concept in Eastern philosophy called third… something (someone help me out here): basically, that you should learn to not just react to an event, but take a step back and analyze your initial reaction, and then evaluate that feeling and make a choice.

One of my primary motivations for delving into this is to examine the self. Are my emotions me? Is it more “authentic” to trust my feelings to make decisions? BigThink has a good video on this – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i3-dxHavRe8 – So many of our initial impressions of new things that happen to us come from learned patterns of thought that were by chance and out of our control. They hardly constitute a truthful representation of reality. So then why are we so defensive of these feelings?

I remember seeing a video explaining how in society we are not given tools to understand how to pilot our brains. We assume they work just fine on their own. What I wonder is, is it natural for humans to balance automatic thinking with a culture of self-regulatory habits and teachings – a skill many of us have forgotten, a missing piece – or is this a relatively new step in human evolution, a step toward ailing the inherent suffering that comes with learned patterns of behavior from childhood?