Author: Joseph Nguyen
Full Title: Don’t Believe Everything You Think: Why Your Thinking Is The Beginning & End of Suffering
Date: Mar 2022
This highly recommended book left me conflicted. On one hand, Joseph Nguyen occasionally lands on insights that really resonated with me, especially his distinction between an initial, simple desire of the heart and the spiral of “what ifs” that follows. For example, what starts as “I have a great idea” quickly devolves into “all my ideas are garbage” once it is overthought.
On the other hand, those moments are buried under layers of vague self-help language and the familiar “look inside yourself” trope. If a person already struggles with overthinking, being told both “stop thinking” and “trust your intuition” at the same time feels unhelpful and nearly impossible. You cannot be asked to “not think” and then, in the same breath, be told to consult your inner thoughts for guidance.
Nguyen’s central claim is that our suffering comes not from our circumstances or even our first thoughts, but from the chain of thinking that follows. He illustrates this with examples: the simple thought “I want to start a creative hobby” is initially neutral, even hopeful, but quickly turns toxic when it is followed by “It’s a waste of time, I am not creative, people will judge me.” In that sense, he is right to highlight how rumination amplifies fear, regret, and anxiety and drags us out of the present moment into an imagined past or future. But labeling all of this as “suffering” felt off to me. There is very real suffering in the world, including oppression, loss, chronic pain, and injustice that cannot and should not be reduced to a matter of “too much thinking.” Calling rumination “suffering” in light of the reality of suffering lands as self-centered and grandiose, and it makes a kind of sense only if we assume we are at the center of our own lives.
Where the book became more helpful for me was when I translated its better insights into a Christian frame. Scripture already calls us to something like what Nguyen is reaching for, but with a different center: “taking every thought captive” and submitting it to Christ, not simply trying to empty the mind. When Nguyen mentions the lousy payoff of doing fifteen minutes of meditation for fifteen minutes of peace, it pushes me to think about how the Christian vision is a life increasingly marked by prayerful awareness of God’s presence. We are invited to “pray without ceasing,” not to escape into a quiet moment and then jump back into anxiety. His frustration that meditation only bought him a brief window of relief actually made me think about the invitation to walk with God throughout the day, not just visit him when I feel desperate.
Nguyen’s PAUSE metaphor is strong, but I would like to reshape it into something like this. Pause and pray. Ask the Lord to align your heart and mind to Him. Understand and remember that God is sovereign, wise, and good, and that He is actively at work in your story, even when your emotions resist that reality. Say, out loud if needed, “God is good, I will trust Him,” and let that interrupt the churn of negative thinking. Experience, by grace, not self-generated inner peace, but the joy of knowing a good God is with you and for you in Christ. Nguyen is correct that simply thinking harder rarely solves our inner turmoil, but where his answer is to move away from thinking into your “inner self,” the Christian answer is to move away from self-sufficiency and into the presence of a loving, sovereign Father who speaks, comforts, corrects, and carries us.