How I treat my thoughts

I started journaling about two years ago. While the amount I wrote fluctuated, for the last two months I have written three pages per day. I find it a great way to dissect my thoughts and simply love to deconstruct my life in it.
Until recently, my assumption was that most people would, if they only tried it, learn to love this just as I do. A conversation about this topic changed my mind.

The person I talked with had found, that it is a terrible idea for him to scrutinize everything about his life. He gave me the following example.
When one of his close childhood friends died, it upset his life considerably. He started to look for reasons why it had happened, but this only made him feel worse. In the end, he even considered that god exists and only created this universe to see him suffer.
The big lesson this episode taught him was to stop questioning everything and not always try to find a reason for why something had happened to him.
He is in a much better place now.

This fascinated me because it seemed that our minds work very unalike in this aspect. My solution to overcome similar situations always has been to ask more questions, not less. But since I enjoy spending a lot of time in my head, I developed a set of guidelines that help me out with that.

One of the most important things I learned in that regard is to treat my thoughts like something external.
If you pay enough attention to it (meditation will help here), you will realize that you don't have much control over the thoughts that come to your mind.
Most of them are not even yours. You might think about something you have read recently, heard in a podcast, or that came up in a conversation.
This realization was enormously liberating. Instead of trying to change my thoughts, I started to work on how I reacted to them.
I understand now, that if you don't want to deal with a thought, suppressing it does not work.
But sometimes, all you have to do is to acknowledge it.

The origin of our self-doubts is an old part of the brain (evolutionary speaking), that is driven by instincts and fear. Yet all it wants is to protect you.
When a thought like this crops up, I nowadays just thank it for being there and continue with whatever I was doing.
When this doesn't help, I resolve it with journaling. I lost count how many times I wrote in my journal something like "Right now, I'm troubled by X, but I really don't want to think about it".
And before I knew it, I wrote about why I didn't want to think about it, what it made so uncomfortable and started to resolve the issue.

My daily journaling practice gives me a time and place to deal with all my negative thoughts and self-doubts. It gives me the opportunity to see them through, to reframe them.
For most things I don't want to deal with, I either find a perspective why it is helpful or not as big a problem as I believed at first.
In this process, I ask myself a lot of questions. There are some really helpful prompts for this, but what I found is that it's more important how you treat the question you ask yourself than the question itself.
For example, you might ask yourself a great question, but only answer it in a half-sentence. On the other hand, you can ask yourself a mediocre question, but think about the hidden assumptions behind it and question your answers. This way, you get way more out of the mediocre question than the great one.
One meta question I often use for this is: Why am I asking myself this question right now?

Coming back to the starting point, how did the conversation about questioning yourself change my perspective about the topic?
I identified two things I took away from it. The first is an improved attention to situations where journaling doesn't offer a solution.
It's easy to overthink your current frame of mind when all you need is a short break and a glass of water.
How many technical problems can be solved by turning your PC off and on again? Sometimes, all you need is a quick reboot.
Since this conversation, I pay more attention to this.

The other thing I took away from this is a renewed appreciation for how easy it is to assume yourself to be the norm. While I believe that we all are mostly the same, something that might work perfectly for me, might not work for you.
Nonetheless, I am still convinced that everybody, who at least experiments with a regular journaling practice will get some value out if it.