Short spoken piece from Brian Johnson (A Philosopher's Notes) describing the mind metaphor: minds as 'drunk monkeys' or 'ants' representing automatic negative thoughts (ANTs). Presents statistics claiming ~60,000 thoughts/day, 95% repetitive, and 80% negative; frames the goal as taming those thoughts and moving toward optimism.
Hi, this is Brian with another mini chapter from A Philosopher's Notes. This one's called Crazy Little Drunk Monkeys and Ants. In Buddhism, they like to say that our minds are like monkeys, swinging from thought to thought to thought. Only the monkey in our mind is drunk. Swinging from thought to thought to thought. Then our little drunk monkey is stung by a scorpion. That's not all, though. Take that drunk little poisoned monkey and make him crazy. That is how our minds tend to be. Psychologists actually have a way to describe this as well. Apparently, somebody figured out how to count all those monkey swings and came up with the stat that we have, on average, about 60,000 thoughts per day. Wow. Get this. 95% of those are the same thoughts from day to day to day. Yikes. And 80% of those thoughts are negative. Daniel Amend calls them automatic negative thoughts. Ants for short. Whether we see our minds as filled with crazy little drunk monkeys or equally crazy little drunk ants, let's tame and sober them up. And that's really what this book and this particular section of the book is all about. So next we will explore some ways to get to the Optimism Gym for now. Hope you dug it and have an awesome day. See you.
