Example thought process

[Koala17]

Does anyone else go through this thought process? I mostly get preoccupied with ‘pseudo-philosophical’ questions, but it seems like this formula of doom works for everything at the moment, no matter how random the topic:

• I have a thought . . .
• Then I think something is wrong with that thought . . .
• Then I have to work out what is wrong with it* . . .
• If I find a convincing explanation (rare), then I am happy, but probably reinforce to myself that the feeling of wrongness was justified, and that I was right to try to figure it out.
• If I can’t find a convincing explanation, then I have to keep on searching.
• Generally, even a fully plausible explanation doesn’t remove the feeling of wrongness, which makes me think I haven’t actually understood it properly.
• The longer I can’t explain it, the more convinced I am that there is something deeper, possibly even incomprehensibly abstract, that I’m just not getting.

*’Wrongness’ generally implies some abstract meaning that I think I’ve not quite grasped - the feeling of not understanding something properly generates the feeling of ‘wrongness’.

As a fun variant of this, even when I figure out what the thought meant, I’m often then concerned about why I thought anything was wrong with it in the first place, and try to think about it in the ‘wrong way’ to understand where my thinking ‘went wrong’. i.e. I feel the need not only to understand how the thought was thought, but if it all ‘checks out’, I also need to ‘understand the misunderstanding’ that caused me to check it in the first place!?!?!

Simplistic example:

• Colleague: “2 cubed is 8”
• My brain: “That’s not right”
• My brain: [pause]
• My brain: “No wait, that is right”
• My brain: “Oh no! Why did I think that was wrong?”
• My brain: “I must have confused it with 2 squared”
• My brain: “Or maybe I thought they said 2 squared and knew that was wrong”
• My brain: “Or maybe . . . “

This is particularly the case when I’m distracted by something else when trying to think about the thought, but even when I’ve got time to myself, I often find that while the general topic of the thought (i.e. what initially set me off) is easy to hold in my mind, the actual question of what is bothering me is very hard to pin down. It almost seems to slip between my mental fingers as I try to grasp it.

I’m often also simultaneously bothered by the thought that I ‘shouldn’t be wasting time on this’, and ‘should sort it out quickly or let it go’, which just proves even more of a distraction.

At a higher level, I’m not even sure what happens in our minds when we decide that we understand a thought or not. People often say OCD is an issue with the ‘danger off’ switch in our minds, which in my case is perhaps more of an ‘understanding complete’ switch.

Thanks,