Every day we get to decide the quality of our lives based on one thing, and one thing only, our thoughts. As the old adage goes, your thoughts create your beliefs, your beliefs create your habits, your habits create your actions, and your actions create your life.

But in order to make use of this reality, we must first know what it is we’re even thinking about to begin with. This is not as easy as it sounds.

We have on average 60,000 thoughts each day, with the vast majority of them being negative, what we have been thinking about for years, and here’s the kicker, aren’t even aware of. Our thoughts being so “comfortable” and familiar to us, that we are mostly unconscious of what is going on in our own minds. Other than maybe, we’re not so comfortable after all.

In other words, not only are we often unaware of what we’re thinking, we believe all, or most of our thoughts, to be fact. Whether that thought is about who we are, who others are or how the world works; insisting that the thoughts we think, are in fact, the truth. Even when our current lived situation may be pointing to another reality entirely. Even when our thoughts are creating suffering.

This past week I caught myself in one of these places. Struggling with a lingering cough for several weeks, in a moment of rare clarity over this, I realized that with the exception of a few select moments, I have been locked in a very old, very habitual thought pattern without even knowing it. Every day for weeks now, I have been thinking the same version of the same thing over and over again.

In my world, what I think about manifests itself in my life. In this case, being the health of my body. Specifically, an unwanted cough that keeps repeating over and over again; wearing me thin on many levels and being driven by my repetitive thinking.

What was I thinking about? What has my mind been locked on? The fear that if I cough around other people, they will be disturbed and that I will be made to pay somehow for their disturbance. My thoughts have been telling me that to disturb another is to risk negative and even dangerous consequences of some sort or another. Maybe they will form an opinion of me I don’t feel is true. Maybe they will aggress on me with a cutting word. Maybe I’ll be kicked out of the relationship, or even emotionally annihilated.

I know this last part may seem overly dramatic. But it’s not. To the psyche that was forged in childhood, where all of our beliefs around safety, survival and belonging are formed, to fall out of the good graces of another, i.e the grown-ups in your life, is to risk everything from disapproval to the fear you won’t be loved or cared for.

Which is why so many of us, without even knowing it, are enslaved by our childhood beliefs about who we need to be. Unless, of course, we choose to pay attention to what we are thinking about and consciously update those thoughts to reflect what we really want.

If this makes sense to you, create a new habit of thinking by catching your thoughts across the day while asking yourself a question or two. What am I thinking about right now, and why? What does it remind me of? Is this thought true? Is it even mine?

I will say that when you tap into those thoughts that feel like your safety is at stake, like my fear thoughts that a cough will disturb someone enough to make them want to hurt me somehow, there will be resistance to being with that thought.

Deep in our own psyches, at a very unconscious level, is the belief that some of the thoughts we think and the behaviors we engage in, are what has kept us alive, safe, belonging and able to fit in. And on some level for many of us, this idea would not be untrue given our past circumstances.

But at some point, maybe we are at a place where we can begin to deeply question if it’s true that coughing is dangerous, and whether or not it is still worth it to manage yourself to keep another from being upset.

Personally, I am coming to the conclusion that it’s worth the risk to challenge something that keeps me trapped in a false sense of safety. Not to mention how at odds it puts me with my own body and my right to exist exactly as I am. No matter what anyone else might think.