How to Be Alone With Our Thoughts

By Tony Bates, JD, AM, LCSW

All of humanity’s problems stem from [our] inability to sit quietly in a room alone.

--Blaise Pascal

In my last post I wrote about how hard it is to put a stop to our bad or negative thoughts. No matter what we try, our mind has a curious tendency to present us with negative and distressing thoughts at inopportune times.

Our attempts to control that flow of bad thoughts can be pretty frustrating, and we can start to think “Why am I not good at this?” or “Why can’t I get it together?”

Sound familiar? Thoughts like that can quickly start to spiral and before we know it we’re up at 3 AM questioning the meaning of the universe.

The truth is, our minds just aren’t built to control themselves in this way. There are some good (but complicated) scientific reasons for this, but the upshot is if we’re finding we can’t control the content of our thoughts, it can be helpful to start changing our relationship to our thoughts. Here’s an example from the show “Steven Universe.”

Notice that difficult thoughts (“Here comes a thought that might alarm you/what someone said and how it harmed you”…) show up in this clip as butterflies. Notice how she reacts to the swirl of thought butterflies: first she crouches and tries to ignore it, hide from it, move away from it. This works, for a moment. But then a swarm erupts from her backpack and they’re everywhere. In trying to control the thoughts, there’s the danger of “losing sight, losing touch.”  

What’s the alternative? Garnet has the answer, as simple as it sounds: noticing the butterflies are there, letting them sit for a moment, and allowing them to leave when they’re ready. When this happens, they can sometimes seem not so scary. They’re no longer a problem to be solved. They’re simply just there, doing their thing. And eventually they fly away.

This is a skill we can develop in therapy, and I encourage you to try this at home with an exercise called Leaves on a Stream. The goal here isn’t to stop thinking. It’s to notice that we’re thinking so that we can choose what we do next.

Next time you find yourself alone or stuck in your thoughts, see if you can notice the butterflies or the leaves and say to yourself, “Oh. There’s a thought.” (P.S. you can choose any animal or image. Bill Hader uses this approach and sees his anxious thoughts as a monkey!) When we treat our thoughts as simply thoughts—instead of the things they represent—it helps us become more flexible, which allows us more freedom to turn toward what matters to us in life.