That's men for you Padraig O'Morain's guide to men's healthCan you think your way out of trouble? The answer is sometimes yes, sometimes no.
That "sometimes" is important. There are those whose response to life's problems is solely to try to think their way through them. Both men and women do this but in my experience it is men who are most likely to be afflicted by what I call locked-in thinking.
By this I mean thinking and thinking and thinking as if the answers to all your problems are in your thoughts.
Women place a higher value than men on talking about their problems and are therefore less likely to get trapped in the illusion that thinking about your problems is the way to solve them.
Those who are caught in the illusion are more likely to withdraw from another person, for instance, to think about a relationship problem.
Unfortunately, that very withdrawal can damage the relationship further. The person locked into thinking about problems has made the error of placing too high a value on following a trail in his own brain and too little on contact with the real world.
But aren't my thoughts real? Sort of. The thing is, your thoughts are generated by you and may bear no relationship whatsoever to the problem you are trying to solve. It's like searching every room in the house again and again for an object you dropped on the street.
If you were a different person, you would generate different thoughts to the thoughts you are generating now, because you would have had a different set of experiences.
In fact, when you are in a different mood, as you will be sometime today, you will generate different thoughts to those you are generating now. Where does that leave all your wonderful thoughts? It doesn't mean you should stop thinking. You can't stop thinking - it's something brains do. It also doesn't mean thinking has no contribution to make to your life - that would be an absurd suggestion.
What it means is that we must not take our thoughts too seriously. They are not necessarily the last word on anything.
What would happen if instead of thinking and thinking and thinking about our problems we just let them go? Impossible? Not really. It is possible to experience the stress of a problem and then to let go of that stress without thinking yourself into a corner.
The method is simple - so simple that if you are a locked-in thinker you may well reject it without trying it.
The method has three steps:
First, become aware of whatever it is that's bothering you. Notice the physical effects of the negative feeling you are experiencing. That could be a tightening up of your chest or stomach for instance. Let it be there for a second or two.
Second, invite yourself to let go of that feeling. Just ask yourself if you could let it go.
Third, just release it. Feel that physical tension falling away.
Try this a couple of times and there is a good chance your stress or worry or anger will reduce without you having to analyse anything. You can practise this on all uncomfortable feelings related to small or big events in the past, present or future.
Why should this work? First, the method makes use of a natural ability you had as a child. Then, you could get into a rage over the absence of your bottle but you could drop all that anger the second the bottle was shoved into your gob.
So you knew how to do this stuff until you learned to think in an abstract way. Then you gradually forgot it - but it's still there to be used.
The second reason why this works is that you are actually releasing a tightening of the muscles, which you can do since it was you who tightened them in the first place.
If you want to know more about this approach, read The Sedona Method by Hale Dwoskin, published by Element. And give your brain a rest.
pomorain@irish-times.ie
Padraig O'Morain is a journalist and counsellor accredited by the Irish Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy.