5 Questions to Ask Yourself Every Evening

It is estimated that some 70,000 separate thoughts hurry through consciousness from the moment we wake up to the time we slip into sleep. To help us understand those thoughts we’ve produced five questions to direct our minds to areas which we tend to neglect, and from where trouble can most intensely arise when we do so. Enjoying our YouTube videos? Get full access to all our audio content, videos, and thousands of thought-provoking articles, conversation cards and more with The School of Life Subscription: Learn, heal and grow; get the best of The School of Life delivered straight to your inbox: FURTHER READING You can read more on this and other subjects in our articles, here: “Our minds are some of the busiest places in the known universe. It is estimated that, under a deceptively calm exterior, some 70,000 separate thoughts hurry through consciousness from the moment we wake up to the time we slip into sleep – some of these elaborate and sequential, many more fragmentary and sensory by nature. What these many thoughts have in common is that we seldom do them any kind of justice. The river of ideas and feelings is relentless, turbulent and chaotic. In a typical minute, we might briefly register that we are annoyed with a friend, then our minds are directed to a worry about a tax return, which is then quickly supplanted by the sighting of a raven, which makes us think of our grandmother, who evokes a trip we once took to Greece, which ushers in thoughts of some lip balm we need to purchase, which is then supplanted by a registering of a pain in our left knee, which is succeeded by a memory of a friend we lost touch with after university, which cedes to a recurring reflection on what kind of lamp we might invest in for the living room. And we might here still only be at the thirty second mark of what we casually call ‘thinking’ or just ‘gazing out of the window’…” MORE SCHOOL OF LIFE Watch more films on SELF in our playlist: SOCIAL MEDIA Feel free to follow us at the links below: Facebook: Twitter: Instagram: LinkedIn: CREDITS Produced in collaboration with: Gemma green Hope Title animation produced in collaboration with Graeme Probert