Eckhart Tolle explains how anxiety and depression come from the mind's interpretation of events, not the events themselves. Your internal self-talk and conditioned thinking patterns create the emotional distress, not what's actually happening around you.
The book has been used, I'm told, to combat anxiety and depression. How? People who read the book begin to realize that the majority of their problems, most of their problems, ultimately arise not so much from the circumstances of their lives, but from how their mind interprets the circumstances of their lives. There is a story that people could continuously tell themselves in their head. They talk, they talk. This is the self talk that most people engage with, sometimes without even knowing it. We've all met people in the street who are talking out aloud and we say they're crazy, they're talking to themselves. But ultimately everybody's doing it inside their heads. So there's a voice. This is the conditioned thinking. It never stops talking. And for many people it's not a pleasant voice. Sure, because it works on small scale in small situations as well as in significant situations. Let's say you are, you're becoming anxious because you're lining up at a supermarket or the airline check in counter and it's not moving and you're becoming upset and anxious. And this is awful. But. And at that moment, I would recommend that you ask yourself the question, how would I experience this moment if I did not add these thoughts to it? If I did not add this baggage of thoughts to it that says this is awful, how would I experience this moment? This is just an experiment you can conduct. Okay, Here, here I am, I'm still standing here. And now I'm not adding any narrative to it. I'm just taking this moment as it is. And suddenly you don't experience the upset, the anger or the anxiety anymore because you have let go of the narrative which interprets this event in negative. It.
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