Fact or Opinion?
When I was in elementary school, I remember a lesson that was entitled “Fact or Opinion.” We were given a series of statements and were asked to label them as one or the other. It was - and continues to be - an important lesson in literacy, but I find myself thinking about it as a self care exercise.
Did you know, as you go through your day, you are likely to have something like 80,000 thoughts? That is more than 3000 thoughts an hour, more than 50 thoughts a minute. Many of these are fleeting, passing through your mind before you have a chance to acknowledge them. Others are more meaty, occupying your attention for several seconds before finally passing by.
Our thoughts, as they pass through our minds, get incorporated into the story we are continually telling about the world around us. But like any good story, that narrative is made up of facts and opinions. “The train just went by.” “I missed the train.””Now I am going to be late.” “If I had gotten up five minutes earlier, I would not have missed the train.” “I am so lazy.”
When we hear the thoughts of people we love, or see our own thoughts written down, it is easy to see where a narrative crosses over from fact to opinion. When it is our narrative in our own heads, it is harder. We are committed to seeing our thoughts as true representations of the world around us. Just as incontrovertible in my own head as the words “the train just went by” are the words “I am so lazy.”
But what would happen if we could pause and recognize thoughts as not necessarily true representations of reality, but simply as cognitive phenomena, subject to evaluation?
The thought “the train just went by,” is based on our senses. Our eyes, the sensory receptors on our skin if we were close to the tracks, our ears all send information to our brain that forms this conclusion. We have gathered pretty solid evidence for this thought.
Similarly, your mind draws on evidence to form the “I am lazy” thought. Remember that time last month I also missed the bus? Remember all those times my mom told me to get out of bed? And my laundry has not been put away in days. And here I am again, missing a train. I must be lazy.
In its rush to come to a conclusion, however, your brain misses a lot of information. For example, you ignored the bird flying overhead, the specific lyric of the song you were listening to, the drop of rain on your cheek, when forming the conclusion that the train was going by. Those observations, similarly sent to your brain from your senses did not have any bearing on this thought.
Similarly, in forming the thought “Im so lazy,” your mind ignored the times you get up early to do volunteer work on Saturdays. It ignores the energy with which you approach your work when you are engaged in a project. It ignores all the many many days when you do easily make it to work on time. In the interest of forming a coherent story that matches the train going by without you on it, with the feelings of frustration and annoyance, the master storyteller picks the relevant pieces of evidence to create a “logical” conclusion.
This conclusion has consequences. Our mood is impacted differently if we engage with the thought “Im so lazy,” versus “well, that was disappointing.” That mood can shape the next 50 thoughts you have. And then the next ones. Before you know it, like a Chose your own Adventure story, the narrative of your day has veered farther and farther away from other possible stories.
So what can we do? Taking the time to evaluate each one of those 80000 thoughts is daunting. Our brains have evolved to pay attention to certain details for a reason. We would be overwhelmed if we tried to process all the information available to us at any given time.
To me, this is where the literacy lesson from my elementary school comes into practice. The simple query - is it a fact or an opinion? - helps to put thoughts into different categories. “The train just went by” - fact. “I am so lazy” - opinion. “If I had gotten up five minutes earlier, I would not have missed the train” - opinion. “Now I am going to be late” - conjecture, maybe, but not a fact. Maybe, if we start by recognizing when our thoughts veer from fact to opinion, we can start to shape the opinions we have in more compassionate and helpful ways.
