There are two types of thoughts. Default Thoughts are those you arrive at as a natural consequence of your prior thinking and your prior actions. For example, as a Hispanic American, if I arrive at a store and a clerk looks at me with disgust and walks away from me rather than greeting me, my immediate thoughts may be that the clerk is a disgusting, racist person. (While this has happened to me, it is infrequent, thankfully.)

Every day we have the option of whether we will stick with our default thoughts and assume them to be true or whether we will engage in more reflective thinking.

Reflective Thoughts are when we choose to more deeply process our default thoughts. Some of my reflections in this particular situation may be as such:

Okay – this clerk appears to not like me and is perhaps a prejudiced person, but what do I gain if I purposely look for confrontation with him? If I do that, then if I am correct about thinking he is a racist, I am just reinforcing his beliefs, “proving” to him that people like me have attitudes, are unlikeable, and cause trouble.

So if I act according to my default thoughts, causing me to get an attitude with this person, then I am making the world a worse place, losing this opportunity to positively impact the people and environment around me.

Please bear with me through this mental exercise. I just want you to understand that it is quite easy to form default thoughts, assume they are the truth, and allow them to affect our whole day. Meanwhile, our default thoughts often represent great falseness in our lives. This case example may not be one you relate to – that is fine, just imagine any scenario where someone appeared to have a distaste for you, without a good reason.

My trick in many life situations (I’m sure I did not invent this) is to pretend that I am not aware of certain things I am actually aware of. I believe this technique is used much more by women than men, but it can be quite useful. If I perceive that someone is in a horrible mood or seems to be prejudiced against me, I will simply behave as I always do, pretending that I did not notice their mood or attitude. Of course, I may quickly look for a way to give them their space.

My default mode of behavior is to be polite with everyone, to treat everyone as if they have some internal importance that I may not be aware of. Every person you see every day is more important than you think. This person may have saved someone’s life, may be managing a multi-million-dollar company, may have raised a family of doctors and teachers, or may have had the potential to do all the above things if he had ever simply been given the opportunity.

When people assume that you are a certain way, and then you show them that you are not like they had assumed, hopefully, this helps to change their perceptions. Hopefully, they can begin to see that they do not need to assume everyone of a certain race, religion, or political party is bad.

Most people are good, or they aspire to be good most of the time. Sometimes, of course, we think we are doing good, but the effects are actually bad. Ultimately, it is our default thoughts that poison us all against each other. And to be frank, often this is driven by news media, social media, and all the people who are stuck in “us vs. them” thinking to an extreme level, who forever blame someone else for all the ills of the world. Many of these people and media have the loudest voices, reminding us over and over that our group hates that group. Or their group hates our group. Or this group started this, and the other group needed to get revenge.

This creates and spurs endless psychological and even physical warfare. Because these are the loudest voices, many of us assume that we live in a scary world, but it can’t possibly be as bad as it is portrayed to be. For instance, the news is built to report mostly negative news – positive stories are rarely reported.

The major caveat here is that the more we think the world is a scary place, the more closed off we all become, afraid to get involved with anything we see, afraid to help, afraid to ask for help, and as you may guess, these thought processes will probably make the world a scarier place to live in.

By thinking we live in a scary world, we make it so.

Something I wish all of us to learn is that our thoughts are potent. We don’t understand the power of a simple thought in this age. And the collective thoughts of masses of humans are incalculably powerful – they are responsible for inventions, religions, philosophies. Still, they are also responsible for needless vitriol and toxicity, misinformation, and warfare.

We must take our thoughts seriously.

How can you help make the world a better place? Do this.

Start thinking about your thinking. Take note of the types of thoughts you often have. Here are some common thoughts people tend to have:

• I am not as good as my peers

• I can never seem to attract any good, successful people into my life

• Everything I do seems to fail.

• Many people don’t like my personality.

• If I had more money, things would work out.

• I’m not smart enough.

I did specifically choose mostly negative thoughts, as these are the ones that tend to cause the most harm in our lives.

Let’s take the thought, “Everything I do seems to fail.”

We have to examine this more carefully.

Everything you do cannot possibly be failing. You are breathing, and your heart is beating, so your body’s systems seem to work just fine. Perhaps you mean that much of what you do at work isn’t going well. Then we can examine certain projects you worked on and see that perhaps there is a pattern of failure. Then we should examine the parts of the projects more carefully. Perhaps 90% of the tasks in your projects went quite well, but that 10% that did not were critical enough to cause big failures. Fine – you can use this information to improve and stop being so hard on yourself. Achieving 90% is an A in school, but sometimes it is a failure in a real-life project.

Be very cautious with general, all-encompassing words, such as Everything / Nothing, Everyone / No one, Always / Never. If you use such words in your thoughts, this should be a big signal that your default thinking is flawed.

As a general rule, we can assume that our default thinking is indeed flawed. This means that if you do not engage in reflective thinking, that most of your thinking is probably flawed. And if most of your thinking is flawed, your whole life may be headed on a path that is not best for you.

You do not need to think reflectively about every single thought you have, but at least try it out for your most common thoughts. If you are not aware of your thoughts, try this exercise. Set the alarm for every hour of the day (at 8:00, then 9:00, and so on). Every time the alarm goes off, write down what you were thinking at that moment. Later on, look for patterns in your thoughts. Then, think reflectively about your thoughts. Scrutinize them carefully. You will find mistakes, fallacies, incorrect assumptions, and you will see that you can improve your thinking.

If you find it difficult to properly examine your thoughts, it may help to read about cognitive biases, logical fallacies, or other books in the psychology / self-development domains.

When you improve your thinking, you will improve your behaviors, which will help create more positive and fruitful thoughts, and you will create a virtuous positive cycle of thoughts and actions in your life and possibly others’ lives.