Stop Drowning in your Thoughts

The guide to end mindless self-talk I wish I had.

A war rages between your ears while you’re picking up groceries. You’re rehearsing the perfect rebuttal to that guy at the bar last night who claimed Jeff Bezos doesn't pay taxes. You’re prepping a well-crafted answer for a stranger who might stop you on the street to ask your take on the Middle East. Your wife asks you to add some pita bread to the shopping cart and make sure it's whole wheat, interrupting the masterclass you were giving to an imaginary audience on why Marx’s Labor Theory of Value is dead wrong.

This self-talk seems so natural that you never question it. You never do so because it masquerades as real thinking. But it's not. And it’s degrading your mind.

There is a specific word in the guitar world for the habit of mindless playing. The kind that, if left untamed, screws up your practicing and turns you into a bad, sloppy musician. We call it “noodling.”

When you noodle, you’re ditching deliberate practice for autopilot. Instead of strengthening your weak points and building your musicianship brick by brick, you let your fingers take the wheel. You are playing random melodies out of context or half-assing passages of your favorite song. You’re stuck in a ‘fake it till you make it’ loop, except you’re only faking it, hoping you will somehow magically “make it” one day.

At some point, you have to confront reality and play in front of(or with) others. This is when the veil of delusion lifts, and you are forced to see your actual skill level in a blunt, hyperreal way. Whatever impression you had about your playing gets crushed by the hammer of reality. All that matters here is if you can play in time, clearly and with conviction. This hammer feels particularly heavy when you are standing before a veteran musician who operates on a whole other level. This is a harsh experience and many don’t survive it, but in hindsight, it's the greatest of gifts. When you recover from the initial shock, you can see the effort, discipline, and time it takes to master your instrument. This makes you realize, instantly, how much time you've wasted.

There are many remedies to this, but none of them are “natural”. Noodling comes easy because it only requires ignorance and imagination. The vision of yourself playing a packed stadium is so strong, and the dopamine hit so real, that the delusion perpetually builds more delusion. The only way out is through a moment of shock: a forceful incident that grounds you and reveals a Clockwork Orange truth you can’t unsee.

The same thing happens inside your head more often than you would like to admit. Whether we like it or not, we are all thought noodlers—and that includes you. If you weren’t, you wouldn't be so constantly confused and angry. You wouldn't be up in arms over every micro-disagreement, and you would certainly be a whole lot less anxious and pessimistic.

The tricky part is, given the nature of modern discourse, it’s increasingly difficult to experience this “hammer of reality.”

Thought noodling is way harder to spot and cure than guitar noodling. That’s because we usually surround ourselves with people who agree with us and rarely encounter “master thought players” who can show us how it's really done.

Now, why am I saying all this?

Because I’ve spent years mastering both types of noodling, and it finally occurred to me to take the tools I used to cure my guitar habits and apply them to my self-talk.

You might not be convinced this is a bad thing. You might say, ‘I’m a thoughtful person, and I’m genuinely concerned about this issue. I care, so it occupies my headspace.’

I believe you.

I really do.

But if you live like this, your brain will get destroyed, and you’ll become a muddled thinker. The fall, though, happens in slow motion. First, bad habits are repeated, and then emotion replaces logic as your primary filter, where ‘feel-good’ statements take precedence over facts and principles.

All this results in being perfectly reasonable and functional in some areas of life, but totally irrational in others.

You might be able to navigate the world, like manage your taxes, raise children, and eat healthy, while simultaneously thinking we should give Communism another shot, believing veganism is saving the planet, and being convinced that billionaires are actually lizards.

Is there a way out?

Absolutely.

But it isn’t easy.

You have to borrow concepts from musical pedagogy and apply them to your thinking, something I’ve found to work remarkably well.

writing as composing

One way to practice clear thinking is to write. Many have said this, so nothing new. But it's the approach that makes or breaks the habit.

A common strategy for getting better at improvisation is to pre-compose. Even today, the best musicians transcribe their favorite artists to build a vocabulary of what they love. They take those fragments, mix them, and pre-compose their solos to gradually build a unique voice.

Jazz icons and classical giants have done this for ages. Charlie Parker transcribed Lester Young, Pat Metheny transcribed Wes Montgomery, and Olivier Messiaen transcribed… birds(e.g. in Catalogue d’oiseaux, “Catalog of Birds”). By doing this, you remove the 'unstoppable pressure of time' and discover what you actually hear. You’re asking: 'If I had all the time in the world, what is the best musical phrase I could come up with?' This deliberate repetition strengthens your musical muscles so that one day, you can perform on demand without even thinking about it.

You can do the same with your mind. But don’t just write. Start ‘pre-composing.’

Try to compose the ideal answer to a question you actually care about. Don’t treat it as a one-off thing, but rather treat it as a living explanation that you work on and refine over time. Think of it as a ‘thought box’—a place where you store your best current explanations for everything you are curious about.

You can take this a step further and pre-compose all the counterarguments to your own positions. Try to articulate them as clearly as possible, stripping away all emotional language. If you can do this better than your ‘enemies’(aka Munger’s Law), you’ll become lethal.

Of course, you can overdo this. If all you do is pre-compose, you’ll end up sounding stale. In both music and writing, you have to preserve the spontaneity of the moment and make it sound like it was conceived on the spot. This is why you should test your opinions in the real world. It’s the best way to sharpen your arguments or realize you have no arguments at all. A conversation with a friend is like a jam session at a local club. You aren’t performing at Carnegie Hall, so don’t act like it by trying to sound ‘smart.’ Just get on the bandstand and take a few swings.

knowing where to land

There is a concept in jazz known as Forward Motion, systematized by pianist Hal Galper(book Forward Motion, From Bach to Bebop).

Forward Motion ​is a series of techniques based on the universal laws of how we perceive music. These are the rules that dictate what sounds ‘right’ or ‘wrong.’ The goal is to internalize these principles so you can “think ahead” while improvising. To know exactly where your melodic line is going and where it will land. The same logic applies to the realm of ideas. The forward motion of thinking is… questions.

Learning how to construct spot-on, well-structured questions is a high-value skill. And you'd be surprised how few people can do it.

Everyone wants the gold. That’s why they’re willing to use a map. But without a question, you can’t figure out where you are on that map, and without a starting point, you can’t choose the right path(so no gold).

A good question tells you exactly where you stand and where your thinking is going to land. From there, you can build a chain of follow-up questions, allowing you to think several moves ahead. This is some next-level, 4D-chess stuff.

constraints are freedom

By far the most valuable concept in my recovery from ‘noodling’ was learning the power of constraints. To the undeveloped mind, constraints are just obstacles to freedom. But to the mature mind, they are a practical framework, a way to break down complex problems into manageable, conquerable chunks of progress.

Noodling is, by definition, the inverse of that. You abandon constraints for a temporary high. The instant gratification of ‘free expression’ or ‘playing from the heart’ makes deliberate practice feel boring and pointless by comparison.

Self-talk, by nature, has no defined constraints. If you have no questions, no strict definitions, no counterarguments, and no debate, you have no boundaries to push. You might be ‘expressing’ yourself, but you are also feeding your own delusion.

​Essentially, you are becoming a toddler again where constraints don’t exist, and delayed gratification isn’t even a concept. Uncontrolled self-talk, like noodling, will slowly detach you from reality.

There is no concept of “freedom” out there floating by itself. It can’t exist. It only exists against something you are contained by. If you can't define your constraints and work through them, you will never be free, whether in music, literature, or life. A constraint is the only measurable indicator that you are approaching freedom.

Of course, you don’t do all this just to become a master debater or an expert lecturer who never leaves the house. You can’t become an accomplished musician by playing in your bedroom alone. The point is to warm up properly so you don’t burn yourself out in the changing room before you even set foot on the stage.

Next time you’re in the supermarket shopping for apple juice and someone asks you about “Hayek’s economic calculation problem”, resist the urge to attempt a lightning-speed, face-melting solo and go for an honest, five-note melody.