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I read an athlete autobiography recently where he mentioned that humans have between 2,000-3,000 thoughts per day. So I went down a Google wormhole and tried finding a good source for that fact, and found that it is actually very much debated.
Some scientists have estimated it might be as high as 60,000-80,000 thoughts per day. For the record, 80,000 thoughts per day would be more than one per second. That’s a lot of thoughts!
Some of the debate ended up centering on, what actually is a thought?
I didn’t find a firm answer on the definition of a thought but it is an interesting thing to unpack. If I’m mad about an email that I just got from a co-worker, that’s one thought. If I then consider whether to respond right away, or maybe it’d be better to wait, or maybe I should drive to their house and then when I get there punch them in the face… is that one big thought? Or four small ones?
So yes, if you’re keeping score at home, I discovered lots of thoughts about thoughts.
Anyway, that isn’t the point of this newsletter. I found a good amount of consensus around the idea that the number is probably closer to 6,000 thoughts per person per day. So I am going to use the figure 6,000 for this exercise because that seemed to be the most recent batch of headlines summarizing what scientists are saying.
So if you have 6,000 thoughts per day and I subtract eight hours every day for sleeping, that’s about 375 thoughts per hour, which is one thought every 10 seconds.
I wanted to try to plot out what my thought statistics used to look like during active addiction, and what they look like now.
By my estimate, when I was actively using during the final few years of addiction, I think about 5,000 of my 6,000 thoughts per day were about drugs and alcohol. That might sound like too big of a number, but I don’t think it is. When I was at my bottom, I spent more than half of every day getting drugs and alcohol, then using them, then covering it all up, then starting to plan for the next day, then dealing with the after-effects of my use that day—as in, passing out, puking in the bathroom, disguising my breath.
I also remember I probably had a good 500 very sad thoughts every day about how bad things had gotten. I would constantly churn through in my head whether I needed help, whether I was going to die, whether I was even worth saving. Oof. It’s painful to think back on the percentage of every day that was stuck in that shame.
Now fast forward to today. Let’s use that 6,000 figure. Obviously, 5,000 of the 6,000 thoughts now are about sex … just kidding, that number is probably more like 100 per day, which is still higher than I’d probably like.
So that leaves 5,900. I’d say my brain thinks about work for probably 2,000 of those thoughts. I’d say 2,500 of them are about my family—I’ll include the cats in there. (Stay off the freaking air conditioner, Mittens!)
That leaves about 1,400. I probably spend 500 thoughts on recovery, 100 on the gym, 100 on which errands to run, 500 on TV, movies and podcasts (I consume a lot of media) and 200 or so on miscellaneous stuff.
Now here’s the most interesting question from my little experiment. Of my 6,000 thoughts per day, how many are positive? How many are negative? And what are the patterns there?
I kept track of my thoughts for a few days, and here’s what I figured out about myself. I’d say about 30 percent of my thoughts are not good. Most of those negative thoughts center on pointing a finger at somebody for doing something I don’t like and me deciding what an a*****e they are. Then I often had a second thought about what I should do to stand up for myself or teach them a lesson or whatever other b******t flows through this river in my brain.
That’s one thing I noticed about negative thoughts: They are an infectious disease if I don’t treat them right away. I can go on a tailspin of bad ideas in a way that I don’t about positive thoughts. I wish it were the reverse!
But then, let me throw out some hope: I find recovery-based thoughts tend to immediately begin to pour in at some point. I’ll go from that bad thought, plus the vengeance I might need, into 60 seconds of nonstop thoughts about forgiveness, whatever my side of the street is, what parts of me are perhaps overreacting to the moment. Even though I don’t always do it, I do have a voice in my head that constantly tells me to pause because I am agitated. I need to encourage that voice to speak up!
This is where my spiritual fitness comes in. When I am really in recovery mode, my next five thoughts are all about the solution. Do I pray? Do I get to a meeting? Do I make a few phone calls?
Or… do I sit with the bad thought? The payback that is deserved? Or the self-pity I want to sit in? I’ll be honest, self-pity is a warm bath. I like to just lay in there and feel aggrieved and feel like the world always screws me… it’s a bunch of b******t, but sometimes I like it.
This is where I will say the one suggestion I would make based on what I found. I got into a few tailspins of a flood of bad thoughts, and I eventually got out of the tailspin but it was much harder than if I immediately recognized the tailspin was coming and did not get into it to begin with. So I am suggesting to myself that next time I feel that coming on, I need to halt it immediately, or it will run wild with my next 50-100 thoughts. Then it takes a few hours sometimes to get out of that mud.
Man, now I am having some bad thoughts about this newsletter being too long and all over the place. So I better go and quickly try to get myself out of that tailspin!
This newsletter is a place of joy and laughter about the deadly serious business of sobriety. So, as I will often do, let me close with a joke:
Did you hear about the drunk who staggered into an upholstery shop to sleep it off?
He woke up recovered.
(Credit: AA Grapevine, October 2005, by the Quilchena Group in Vancouver, British Columbia)
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