It takes more energy to stop a thought than to change it.
Thinking, that is! A study out of Case Western Reserve University shows that it takes more energy to stop a thought than to change it. No wonder it’s so hard to stop smoking or stop berating yourself or stop that tune that got stuck in your head. It just takes too much energy!
Some years ago, I underwent a year of intensive thought transformation in which a group of us focused attention on catching each other or sometimes even catch ourselves saying the “wrong” things – things that detracted us from our goals. “Try” was on the taboo list of words for obvious reasons – it holds a built-in failure. So, each time we’d hear one of us say the word, “try”, we’d say, “Cancel that!” The process seemed horribly difficult as we were catching each other often over that year. In the end, however, the goal was attained and my speech cleared up so much.
I wonder if we were unintentionally making it harder on ourselves by canceling (stopping) our thoughts instead of reframing them – sort of like nudging an asteroid instead of hitting it head-on.
In the largest experiment of its kind to date, 1162 patients aged 18 to 86 years (mean ± SD age, 50 ± 15 years) with a history of chronic low back pain for a mean of 8 years were randomly assigned to receive acupuncture, sham acupuncture, or conventional therapy (a combination of drugs, physical therapy, and exercise) for their chronic back pain. Patients underwent ten 30-minute sessions, generally 2 sessions per week.
