Default Thoughts…
You know the thoughts that our minds come back to without us having to consciously think about them.
What Are Default Thoughts?
The ones that happen automatically. By default.
And, if we’re not careful, they can quickly turn into chaotic mental chatter that takes over our entire internal state.
Here’s the thing about default thoughts…
They can tell us a lot about ourselves, where we are in life at any given moment, and our overall psychological and mental state.
Let me put it this way:
We are what we think about.
The thing to know is they aren’t static. They’re fluid.
What we defaulted to thinking about five years ago is, in many cases, different to what we default to today.
For example, I default to thinking a lot about health, sleep, exercise, nutrition, and more. When I’m on a walk with nothing in my ears, in the presence of nature, my default thoughts automatically turn to something health-related.
This could be thinking about tomorrow’s workout, meal planning for the week ahead, or a big idea I’ve just come across, often a combination of all three.
Either way, I’ve come to realise that health is, more often than not, where my default thoughts turn to. And that hasn’t always been the case.
They’ve shifted, from obsessing over football to focusing on health, both in terms of intensity and frequency.
This isn’t necessarily good or bad. Default thoughts are simply a window into our psyche and where we are at this current stage of life.
The challenge is when our default thoughts contain us, and we become victims of them.
When they shift from thoughts we observe to loud, chaotic mental chatter that robs us of our inner peace and contentment.
When that happens, as they grow increasingly louder, it’s wise to begin questioning whether they’re serving us. And if not, to start detaching from them, letting go, and returning to some sort of psychological and mental harmony.
Why Default Thoughts Pull Us Away from the Present
Because here’s the second thing to understand:
Our default thoughts are either rooted in the past, ruminating about what happened, or fixed on the future, trying to predict and plan.
Neither brings us into the present moment, where life is actually lived.
Default thoughts take us out of the present by their very nature.
Yet it’s the present moment where we find peace, contentment, harmony, flow, and a sense of connectedness and joy with all of life. It’s where life is actually lived.
That’s not to say we can always live presently. I don’t believe that’s always possible, though I remain open to being wrong, despite what any monk or meditation teacher might suggest.
What it does mean is that having an awareness of our default thoughts, which vary in frequency, intensity, and theme from person to person, can tell us a great deal about ourselves.
And once we understand ourselves better, we begin to understand others and the world around us. Which, in turn, is all part of navigating this often crazy thing called life.
The Two Roots of Default Thinking
Default thoughts tend to be obsessive by nature because they’re rooted in one of two things:
- Insecurity, worry, or fear
- A deep interest or passion
The most frequent case, however, is the former, because we also operate, by default, in a safety and survival mode.
In simple terms, we would rather avoid a threat than pursue joy.
So I’m fairly confident that if most of us examined our default thoughts, we’d find them linked in some way to safety and survival, rooted in fear, worry, and insecurity, rather than something joyful like a deep interest or passion.
Again, that’s not always the case. Just the most frequent one.
When Productivity Masks Deeper Patterns
Take my health example. I like to plan almost everything: workouts, meals, the week ahead. Sure, this can be viewed positively: great for productivity, efficiency, and staying on the right path of growth.
But on the flip side, it could also be a mechanism for avoiding uncertainty. When we feel uncertain, it registers as a threat to our safety and survival.
The devil is in the details, specifically, in the extremes of how much we repeat any given behaviour.
Our psyches work in these strange, yet fascinating ways. We may think we know the reason behind why we do something, but under the surface, there are hidden drivers constantly influencing our choices, decisions, and behaviours.
Turning the Unconscious Into the Conscious
This is part of the journey of self-work and conscious personal growth, becoming aware of, and gradually uncovering, the deeper layers beneath our behaviours, habits, patterns, and default thoughts. Where do they come from? Why do they exist? And doing so one layer at a time. Which, it almost goes without saying, is neither a linear nor an easy path.
But I believe it’s a necessary one if we want to live our best life.
Why?
Because to live our best life, whatever that looks like for you, turning the unconscious into the conscious is an important and necessary step.
Without it, we rinse and repeat the same behaviours, habits, and patterns, which deliver the same or similar results. The same life outcomes.
Becoming more conscious and aware of these patterns isn’t for the faint-hearted. It isn’t always pleasant, nor the most enjoyable path.
Sometimes I wonder whether it’s easier, and might even lead to more joy, or at least less unpleasantness in the short term, to remain a little more naive and not embark on this path at all. Maybe I’m just speaking for myself.
But if you’re anything like me, you’re curious about these things.
Curious about why humans do what they do, not just to understand ourselves, but to understand others and the world around us. To make a little more sense of it all.
Our default thoughts are part of that journey.
Using Default Thoughts as a Tool for Growth
They’re an invitation to look into our inner world, our inner landscape, and see what’s occurring.
What we do with that is up to us. It depends on whether we believe, feel, and have evidence that our default thoughts are serving us or not.
For me, I gauge this by three things: whether they’re aligned with my values (health is a core value for me, so in that sense they’re well-aligned); whether they’re what I actually want to be thinking about; and how much distress, or lack of it, they’re causing me.
Unless we reach some rare level of enlightenment, which most of us won’t, given the investment of time and practice that would require, default thoughts are simply part of being human. But we can reprogram them over time.
This is another dimension of self-work and conscious personal growth: reprogramming our default thoughts so they work more for us than against us. It won’t be 100% of the time. But progress over perfection.
I’d rather consciously engage in that process than be a passive bystander, never understanding where these thoughts come from, why they exist, or having any chance of shifting them toward something more aligned with my values and who I want to become.
Maybe that’s my way of convincing myself I have some control over this phenomenon. What can I say? We all tell ourselves the stories we need to.
But at the very least, it cultivates a greater sense of agency. The sense that I happen to life, not that life simply happens to me all of the time.
While we can’t always change our default thoughts in the moment, that takes time, shaped by what we expose ourselves to and feed our minds, we can look under the hood. We can gain insight into where these thoughts come from, understand ourselves better, and begin the process of reprogramming them.
Because they’re not static. They’re fluid. And we can change them, even subtly.
The TLDR:
Our default thoughts are an insight into our inner landscape, our inner world. They’re not the truth, but they are insightful. They can tell us a great deal about what’s happening within us, which we can use as material for self-work and conscious personal growth. Become aware of them and use them as a tool to navigate and live your best life possible.