We all have ups and downs in life. Some days bring you happiness while others are a bundle of sadness. Some days you feel exhilarated and others you feel down. How do we cope up with all the random things going inside and around us? We all have our own personalised strategies to manage the stress we endure and make our life less miserable.
There are many methods to understand and control the emotions and stress we feel every day. Here we are going to discuss the method known as “Thought Onion”. Thought onion is basically a method in which we sort our thoughts or sudden reaction to a situation into three,
Superficial thought is your immediate reaction to a situation. Imagine that you had a fight with your parents and you are really hurt. You feel like your parents don't understand you and they don't support you and so on. This first thought that comes to your mind whenever you are in the middle of some kind of an emotional situation is called superficial thought. Once you identify it as the superficial thought let it go and find the authentic thought as follows.
The authentic thought is the thought that induces the superficial thought. For example, you felt like your parents don't understand you or support you, now ask yourself why and the answer for the why is the authentic thought. To put it more simply, superficial thought is what others make you feel or what you are taught to feel while authentic thought is how you really feel about the situation. Dig deeper into the authentic thought and try to understand your feelings.
It is true that every story has three sides; their story, your story and "The story". So are the thoughts. We are taught to behave in a particular manner but as we grow old we acquire knowledge and develop our own morals and values. Consequently, when we are in a stressful situation we often have conflicting thoughts (like the authentic and superficial) but deep down inside we know that these thoughts are not as conflicting as it seems. When we sit down calmly and think, we can find that all the thoughts, emotions and feelings are due to the way we perceive the situation. And when we dwell more on the cause than the situation the solution seem to be clear.
The ‘Thought Onion’ method defenitely helps us to categorise our thought to methodically decrypt each feelings so as to find a solution that could ultimately lead to our inner peace.
In short:
1. Analyse your immidiate reaction keeping others at the centre.
2. Analyse the same situation keeping yourslef at the centre.
3. Seperate both results and try seeing the real picture or point behind the actual suffering.
