A comment by Kate Griffiths reads as follows, “It is your thoughts that affect your sense of emotional well-being and can impact your effectiveness in life. Remember there are no neutral thoughts.”
Can we think neutrally so that we do not have sour, bitter, or ant thought with “taste”? Emotions that affect our thinking have positive and negative charges. Our decision have charges because our emotions influence them.
Can we accept the outcome of our decisions neutrally? Alternatively, do we react to them emotionally with their heavy charges?
The PH Meter of Thinking
PH is a measure of how acidic/basic water is. The range goes from 0 – 14, with 7 being neutral. PH of less than 7 indicates acidity with 0 being very acidic. A pH of greater than 7 indicates a base with 14 being extremely basic.
This scale serves as well for our thinking. The more positive/optimistic our thinking is the more likely it shall turn sour. This is because we may tend to forget about risks and fill our hearts with false hopes.
It applies to negative/pessimistic thinking. The more we immerse in the basic water of thinking the more we shall fail because negativity chills us and close the door to possibilities.
Neutral thinking allows us to live in the moment and experience it without expectations.
Say you are planning for a walk and then it starts raining. Your reaction might explode negatively and use words like damn it- it is raining. I am very unlucky. The rain spoiled my plan. Your reaction might be positive. Watch your words saying it shall stop raining in a few minutes. I have always been lucky.
Neutral thinking is to accept facts and be in the moment. Your words shall be it is raining. So, what can I do to walk with much lesser possibility of being soaked by rain?
Is there neutral thinking?
We, humans, suffer from a negativity bias. Negative events affect us much more than positive ones. With such bias, can we think neutrally?
My experience tells me there is no such ideal thinking. However, the closer we keep our thinking to neutral the more we shall make better decisions.
We need to keep away from extreme basic or acidic thinking and be as much as possible in the zone of neutrality. However, to have completely neutral thinking I doubt.
Life is all a dichotomy!!
when we have to face a problem, an unexpected event, a moment of crisis, the first reaction is to let ourselves get discouraged and then self-impose a positive mentality, telling ourselves that that problem was actually an opportunity. Maybe choosing the most convoluted, uncomfortable, long and expensive solution in the name of the aforementioned “opportunity”. It is precisely here that we need to bring Neutral Thinking into the picture: that practical and judgment-free mentality (or pre-audition, as you rightly say) born to face moments of crisis in a non-debilitating way. In simpler terms, it is an approach that avoids the forced constructs typical of positive thinking and at the same time focuses on eliminating the negativity that distinguishes negative thinking, which usually accompanies moments of crisis.
This mindset is the only hope for staying calm and making the best of any situation.
It’s not easy, you have to train.
Elegant and thorough your comment is Aldo
The acidity meter or pH meter tells us it is sour on one extreme and bitter on the other Extremes.
This is to say that whether we are on the extreme positive or negative side the taste is ot favorable.
This you explained well and mindfully