Separate your thoughts from your actions

Published on February 24, 2023

Everyone struggles with it, including me. Fortunately, you can get better at it. An impulse grabs you and makes you want to do something, whether that means raiding the biscuit tin or watching Netflix for ten hours. It seems as if you have no control.

Fortunately, you do have influence over this. All it takes is a little curiosity, awareness and practice.

Look more closely at those impulses and you will see that an image or thought almost always comes first, even when it seems that the object of the action is drawing you in.

The first step is to create more space between thought and action. This gives you confidence that changing a bad habit or pattern is possible.

How to separate thoughts from habits, actions and impulses

Separating a habit from an action or impulse essentially has four parts:

1. Understand: every habit is preceded by a thought or image, whether conscious or unconscious.

2. Recognize: recognize how to separate thoughts from action, first with easier actions and later with more difficult habits.

3. Experience: experience thoughts and impulses appearing and disappearing again.

4. [Choose]: eventually, you can choose which habits and thoughts to act on. This becomes a conscious choice rather than an impulse. Your thoughts are now simply suggestions, a tool, a “hammer”.

This approach actually comes from Maslow’s stages of learning. With anything new, you move through four stages:

1. Unconscious incompetence: you do not know what you do not know.

2. Conscious incompetence: you know something is not working, but may not yet know how to solve it.

3. Conscious competence: you know how to solve something, but it is not automatic yet.

4. Unconscious competence: you solve something automatically, without having to think about it. It is now a habit.

What you are really doing is exploring how your brain works and what influence you have: you are not your thoughts. Once you are convinced of this, you are consciously incompetent.

The following steps prepare you for the technique of letting thoughts come, exist and go again, without following them or judging them.

How a thought gets you moving

Biomechanically, it is all very interesting: the cortico-subcortical circuits are responsible for translating motivation into movement.

That motivation varies is clear, but you can also ignore it.

A classic example is enjoying a video game when you need the toilet. It can wait; finish the level first. Eventually, the need becomes so strong that you pause the game.

There really is a physical component, but it comes and goes in waves.

How do you get out of this? By giving a thought no more weight than it deserves.

Ride out the wave!

A machine that is always running

You can think of your brain as a machine that runs constantly. If you do not give it a task, it invents one. That is its job: keeping you alive.

A negative thought is essentially just a simulation. If something was a bad idea, the thought dies instead of you.

In the modern world, however, danger no longer lurks around every corner. So the mechanism works overtime.

Just like a TV advert

Thoughts are actually like TV adverts.

Sometimes you cannot skip them. You cannot always skip an advert or a thought, but you do not have to engage with it either.

If you see a nice advert for something you might want to buy, you think about how you could use it, what it would be like, and so on. If something means nothing to you, you simply ignore it or change the channel.

You do not explain to the TV why you are not interested. You simply give it no importance. Perhaps you make coffee or get a snack meanwhile.

Treat your thoughts the same way: as suggestions. Sometimes they are welcome, and sometimes you simply do nothing with them.

To summarize, thoughts that do not help you:

1. Can be waited out without attaching importance to them, like an advert on TV or the radio.

2. Can be changed: just as you change a radio station, you can focus on something else. Go for a walk or sketch something out.

3. Become stronger when you resist them. A thought’s importance is determined by the emotional value you attach to it. It does not matter whether that value is positive or negative. If I tell you not to think about red elephants, red elephants are all you can think about.

You are not your thoughts: thoughts come to you, and you think

The problem is not so much receiving an impulse to act. The real challenge is that the thought of doing something grabs you. This leads to an impulse and eventually to action.

Fortunately, you have already experienced not being grabbed by a thought.

Remember the example of thinking you really ought to do something? You are comfortable on the sofa and decide to ignore that thought. This happens whether your thoughts are “positive” or “negative”.

You simply need to experience again that you can do this with every kind of thought and habit, and probably already have at times.

Ride out the wave

If you don’t overthink it or act on it, it will pass

Make the impulse a little harder to act on

If you know the route from thought to action, you can put obstacles in the way. This gives you a little more room to pause and think, “Hey, this is what I am doing. How interesting.”

How? Put your debit card at the bottom of something, hide the chocolate in a jar of rice, or charge your phone in another room. It can be anything, as long as more steps are needed before the action.

The little voice making excuses

You probably recognize this too. You have decided to drink less coffee or eat less sugar. The little voice in your head, the thought, tries to rationalize why you do not need to.

“You know what, we will start tomorrow. You know what, I will just have one.” Deep down, you know that never works once you give in.

You can observe these reasons too, without giving in. Even if it feels like you are that little voice, these are only thoughts that come and go.

Be curious about what happens

The ultimate goal is to remove the emotional charge from the subject. Your subconscious cannot judge whether something is good or bad, but if something weighs heavily on you, it must be important.

This is why focusing on no longer doing something works poorly. It is better to attach emotional significance to something new, its opposite.

Exploring impulses with curiosity keeps things light. You will notice more space appearing naturally, and that redirecting or riding out an impulse is not impossible.

To get your curiosity going, here are some things to explore.

How do you feel the thought in your body?

A thought often leads to action, but not always. It is interesting to unpack this for yourself.

A thought can prompt you to act in several ways.

It might work through your stomach, making you hungry, for example. If you feel like snacking in the evening and have nothing at home, you may still open the fridge.

You might also visualize or imagine an action without carrying it out.

You see this when you know you should do the dishes, for example. You can often picture what needs doing, but your motivation is too weak to actually move.

Step 2: shift your focus

Once you clearly and deeply understand that you are not the thoughts and voices, you can start doing the fun things.

You can make the machine work for you, and how it works is very simple.

With the same curiosity, direct your focus, your thoughts, toward something else.

You can do this gently, without forcing it. You do not need difficult practices such as visualization and affirmations. Simply thinking about things and being curious is enough.

For example, focus on:

1. “What healthy meal could I enjoy making today?”

2. “What shall I write about today?”

3. “What have I learned at work this month?”

Your focus shifts just by thinking about these questions, or perhaps even reading them.

That is what you want: the brain magnifies whatever it is occupied with. The reticular activating system is responsible for this.

The classic example is talking about red cars or having just bought one, and suddenly seeing red cars everywhere.

This system works in every area. You indicate what matters by attaching emotional significance to your thoughts. Forcing a thought to go away also adds emotional significance, which is why approaching this with curiosity is so important.