Thinking You’re in Control? You're Wrong About Your Thoughts

Have you ever heard someone say, "You need to control your thoughts"? It sounds like good advice, right? After all, if you could control your thoughts, you’d have control over everything—your mind, your emotions, your life. But here's the truth: you can’t control your thoughts. You can only control your thinking. And that difference? It’s massive.

Let's break it down. First, we need to distinguish between thought and thinking. These two things might seem like the same, but they couldn’t be more different.

Thought: The Unconscious Elephant

Thought is unconscious. It’s a wild, uncontrollable beast—like an elephant roaming free. You don’t have direct control over your thoughts. They pop into your head without warning. They are automatic, spontaneous, and they’re often influenced by things outside your awareness—your past experiences, your environment, your emotions, even your biology.

Think about it. You can’t stop yourself from thinking about something like a pink elephant the moment I say it. That’s because thoughts are automatic, and you can’t directly control them. They come and go, like waves on the ocean. But here's the catch: You don’t need to control your thoughts. Trying to control them is like trying to tame an elephant with your bare hands—impossible, and frankly, exhausting.

Thinking: The Conscious Rider

Now, thinking—this is where you get to take charge. Unlike thought, thinking is a conscious act. It's a chain of thoughts that you actively participate in. When you sit down to solve a problem or plan your day, that’s thinking. It’s where your control lies. The key here is that thinking is a choice.

Imagine this: If your mind is like an elephant, then thinking is like being the rider or master of the elephant. You might not control the elephant itself, but you control where it goes, how it moves, and how fast it travels. You're guiding it, making conscious decisions about its direction. It’s a powerful position to be in because you can steer the elephant, but you can't entirely control its nature. Your conscious mind has power over how you respond to your thoughts, not necessarily over the thoughts themselves.

Why You Don’t Need to Control Your Subconscious Mind

A lot of people try to control their subconscious minds, to control every little thought and detail. But that’s not just unnecessary—it’s unwise. Think about it for a moment. If you had to control every single function of your body—your breathing, digestion, blood flow—you’d be in serious trouble. These processes are automatic for a reason. The body has its systems running perfectly without you needing to focus on them. Your subconscious mind works the same way. It’s doing its job in the background, managing thoughts, emotions, and reactions that don’t require your constant oversight.

Now imagine if you *did* have to control all those systems. What if you had to consciously remember to breathe, regulate your heartbeat, or digest food? You’d be overwhelmed in no time. And the moment you forgot—just for a second—you might even stop breathing, and that’s it. You’re gone. Your subconscious mind is a protective, automatic system designed to take care of things without you even noticing. And that’s how it works with thoughts too. They’ll come and go, whether you want them to or not. You don’t need to wrestle with them.

The Real Power Is in Thinking, Not Thought

Here’s the game-changer: The real power lies in how you think about the thoughts that come to you. That’s where you have control. When a thought comes into your mind—whether it’s negative or anxious—you have the ability to decide how you respond to it. You can let it pass, or you can turn it into thinking. You can decide to engage with it or let it go. You can choose to shift your focus onto something else.

Let’s say you get a thought that causes anxiety—like, “I’m not good enough” or “I can’t do this.” The thought is automatic, unconscious, like an elephant stomping through your mind. But the thinking part is where you come in. You can either start thinking about it, dwelling on it, and making it bigger, or you can observe it and let it pass. The more you practice this, the stronger you become at choosing your thinking. Instead of spiraling into self-doubt, you can take a moment, breathe, and ask yourself, “Is this thought helpful? Is this thought serving me?” If it’s not, you let it go.

Why You Don’t Need to Fight Your Mind

One of the biggest misconceptions is that we need to fight our thoughts or suppress them. That’s exhausting and pointless. Think about trying to fight the elephant. The more you fight, the more you get trampled. Instead, the key is to learn how to guide your thinking. Just like an elephant rider isn’t trying to control the entire elephant, but instead directs its steps, you don’t need to control every thought. You just need to steer your thinking in the right direction. Guide it toward solutions, toward positive action, or toward a perspective that serves you.

The real power lies in how you respond to the elephant of unconscious thought. It’s not about stopping your mind from working—it’s about choosing how to deal with what comes. Your subconscious is like a vast library of memories, emotions, and automatic reactions. You don’t need to rewrite the entire library. You just need to choose how you react to what comes out.

The Nature of the Mind: A Perfect System

Now, let’s go back to the bigger picture. The system of nature is perfect. You don’t control your subconscious because it’s not meant to be controlled—it’s meant to work in the background, like the systems of your body. If you had to consciously control everything, you’d burn out. But when you understand that the subconscious mind operates on autopilot, doing what it needs to do for your survival, you can focus on the one thing you can control—your conscious thinking.

Think about it: The subconscious is doing its job just fine. It’s handling your emotions, your automatic responses, and even the thoughts that aren’t serving you. You can’t control that part of your mind, but you can control how you react to it. Just like you can’t control the wind, but you can control how you use a sailboat. The wind (your subconscious) is there, but you can direct the boat (your thinking).

Final Thoughts: Be the Rider of Your Mind

To wrap it up, your thoughts are like that wild, powerful elephant—unstoppable and unconscious. You can’t control it, and you don’t need to. Your real power lies in your thinking. That’s where you can be the rider, the one who guides the elephant, not by brute force but by choosing where to go. It’s the difference between feeling overwhelmed by life and taking command of your own mind.

So stop trying to control every thought. Instead, master your thinking. That’s where true freedom lies.

Remember, your mind is a powerful system. It doesn’t need your constant control—it needs your conscious direction.