Meta-Thinking: A Guide to Your Mind

Ever found yourself wondering, "Why on earth did I say that?" or "What was I thinking?" You are not alone!

Our minds can sometimes feel like Wonderland, with thoughts zig-zagging like the White Rabbit and emotions shifting as quickly as the Cheshire Cat’s grin. The good news is that there’s a tool to navigate this topsy-turvy realm: meta-thinking, a nifty little trick that humans, unlike our furry friends, have up our sleeves.

Humans have a fantastic capability to access what lies in the deepest recesses of our minds. This tool is unique to humans — something our animal friends are incapable of contemplating.

"Everything that irritates us about others can lead to an understanding of ourselves," observed Carl Jung.

How does it make you feel?

What is meta-thinking?

Simply put, meta-thinking is thinking about thinking. Imagine it like a mental Russian doll. There’s a thought within a thought within a thought. Spooky, right? It’s about being an audience to your thoughts, a fly on the wall of your mind. Meta-thinking is like your very own behind-the-scenes tour of that chaotic concert happening in your head.

Meta-thinking is a gift we all humans have. It equips us with the tools to understand ourselves and those around us. For the many millions of people going through life and not realizing what drives their behavior and actions, meta-thinking gives us an incredible toll to both introspect and retrospect.

It gives us a chance to carefully sift through the emotions we deal with every day, dissecting and analyzing them and perhaps better understanding our antics and those of others. Humans are the only species on the planet capable of thinking about their own thoughts. Let’s pause for a minute and ponder a question: Do you do some thinking about your thinking? Well, I just made you do it!

Our animal pals, bless their hearts, lead a more straightforward life. Eat, mate, dominate — rinse and repeat. It’s as simple for them as a Disney sing-along. They don’t care about their rude behavior towards other animals or people. They don’t stop to think about the implications of their actions. Their aggressiveness to dominate, mate, and eat is the driving force behind everything they do. It’s simple: give an animal a mate, sufficient food, and a territory of their own, and they won’t worry about a thing.

We humans, however, need more — a whole lot more!

The magic word that sets us apart from our fur-coated, feathered, and scaled compatriots? Consciousness.

This gem of evolution makes us crave more than just survival. We yearn for love, acceptance, meaningful work, and, most of all, purpose. We dread the thought of departing this world without leaving an impact, a legacy, or at least a memorable goodbye note.

We need respect and money to survive in this world, and our emotions aren’t so uncomplicated. Not only do we need a mate, we need a loving mate, someone we could have a good relationship with, someone who genuinely cares for us. Our furry friends don’t care if their mate cares for them. If they want to mate, they will after some good courting. And that’s all they care about. They don’t paralyze themselves by agonizing over what their mate thinks of them.

We humans, however, do — a rather lot. We don’t just need a house. We need our house to be our status symbol. We want our house to tell a story about us. We want it to portray a picture we "like" to tell the world.

We want to matter to people, especially to those we deeply care about. This is precisely why we have the luxury of meta-thinking. We can think about what we are thinking about. We are blessed with being aware of our thoughts, with some mindfulness and self-awareness, of course!

While we are far more sophisticated than our animal friends, it’s not all roses for us. Consciousness can both be a blessing and a curse. We overthink and overanalyze. Our lives are far from simple. We are an intricate web of emotional complexities, although we would be far less inclined to say otherwise.

Let me burst that bubble for you, Sherlock.

Stop for a moment and think back to all the decisions you have made in your life so far. Were they based on pure logic, or were emotions also involved? Cringe* Cringe*

Our actions and thinking processes are almost always the puppets controlled by the invisible strings of biases, prejudices, and emotions.

Beneath every calm and composed reaction is an emotional tug-of-war happening, which makes me think of this great analogy:

A duck serenely floats on a pond, but if you dig deeper, you will you’ll find that this duck’s webbed feet are paddling faster than a squirrel hyped on a double espresso.

Our actions and thinking processes are almost always punctuated and underpinned by prejudices, personal biases, and cognitive biases— both good and bad.

When we want something, we don’t say it. We want to be understood intuitively. If we are not, we hold it against the other person. We grow resentful. We grow hateful, making the most trivial of issues important enough to judge and sometimes even destroy good relationships. To say that we are complicated would be a huge understatement.

Evolution has conditioned us to feel a wide array of emotions. Every emotion has a purpose waiting to be decoded by the person who feels it. Strangers to ourselves, we take our emotions at face value.

Emotions are intertwined with our existence. You can’t NOT feel something. Not feeling something is in itself a feeling: boredom.

Our frustration is a cue that something about our or others’ behavior is wrong. Something needs fixing. We perhaps need self-awareness and mindfulness to ponder why we are thinking about what we think about so that we can make changes to our behavior and tell others to consider theirs.

Kickstarting Your Meta-Thinking Journey

So, how do you hop onto this meta-thinking bandwagon? Here are some practical steps:

1. Awareness: Start noticing your thoughts. It’s like bird-watching, but in your mind.

2. Questioning: Ask why. Why did that comment irritate me? Why did that compliment make me happy?

3. Evaluation: Understand the impact. How are these thoughts shaping my decisions and actions?

Meta-thinking is a great skill that we can all practice every day to improve our lives. If you ever find yourself reluctant to pore over your emotions, chances are, something needs to be fixed immediately. When we don’t investigate and question our own thoughts, we try to protect our self-image so that we can keep thinking well of ourselves. But it is worth remembering that meta-thinking is not a luxury reserved for the intellectuals; it is a necessity.

The more you understand yourself, the higher your chances of achieving your goals. Or perhaps you may discover that you have been chasing the wrong ones all this while. Now, isn’t that some food for thought?