We register reality in a binary way —
but it's actually continuous.

Let me explain this using pain.

There’s a good chance you only notice pain once it reaches a certain tipping point — like when your feet hurt after a long day.

But that’s not how it really works. Pain exists on a continuous spectrum that slowly builds from 0 to 100 (or faster, if something suddenly hurts).

So by the time we consciously experience pain, we’ve already passed a certain threshold.

Depression works like this too.
It builds up gradually over a continuous spectrum — over years.
But when it becomes a problem, it appears binary.
As if you suddenly became depressed overnight.

But that’s not what happened.
And that’s why you can’t fix a depression in one day.

Boundaries and Invisible Suffering

Imagine you have a child in your class with ADHD. The child constantly crosses your boundaries: shouting, being overly active, not listening.

But the reverse is also true: you are constantly crossing the boundaries of someone with ADHD. You’re forcing someone to sit still who has too much energy to sit still. You’re literally imprisoning someone in a chair.

The same goes for children who are more intelligent than others. The problem with intelligence is that it often expresses itself as being difficult or annoying—because you're already 1,000 steps ahead of everyone else. It’s like you’re able to run, but you’re only allowed to jog.

My point is this: we tend to focus a lot on what is visible (like hyperactive children), but most suffering and most forms of imprisonment happen silently. And that’s the painful part.

How Thinking Works

I want you to first think about all the things you're not thinking about right now.

You could think about every dish, every single person on Earth individually, about consciousness, about what happened yesterday, how bad you feel, or a scientific problem.
You could think about billions and billions of other things.
But you don’t — you're thinking about that one thing you're thinking about right now.
This is why thinking is so fantastic.

Thinking, in a way, has a bad reputation. In some religions, they practice breathing thoughts away. I would never do that. Sometimes my thoughts make me literally cry with laughter.

Thinking is also often labeled as ‘overthinking’. But overthinking doesn’t exist. Sometimes, you actually need to think about your overthinking in order to fix it.
It sounds paradoxical, but it’s not. You can develop strategies to stop thinking at certain moments — but to get there, you need to overthink first.
It’s like telling Messi he shouldn't practice football so much because he'd get too fluent.

 

Why Thinking Works the Way It Works

The reason you're thinking about something is because it holds some kind of importance for you.
Even if you try to breathe your thoughts away, you're still making them important — because otherwise, you literally wouldn’t be thinking those thoughts at all.
So by thinking about thinking, you automatically give value to certain thoughts — or to thinking and consciousness itself.

And that’s how the brain works: with relative importance.

 

What to Do When You Have Intrusive Thoughts

You have intrusive thoughts because they hold some kind of importance for you.
If they didn’t, you would let them go without even noticing — just like the billions of things you're not thinking about right now.
Like the things you don’t even know exist on this Earth.