How Do I Think About How I Think?
(Now With the Double Helix of Thought and Feeling)
To think about one’s thinking—what psychologists call metacognition—is like trying to see your own eyes without a mirror. Yet, the more I pause and watch my mind in motion, the more I realise this reflexivity is not only possible but vital. It is not just an intellectual trick; it is how I come to understand myself.
But there’s a catch. Thinking is never pure. It is always entangled with feeling. My mind and my emotions wind together like the two strands of a double helix—spiralling, crossing, entwined. Every thought is tinged with emotion; every emotion carries seeds of thought. To think about my thinking, then, is also to notice how I feel about my thinking.
1. The Sparks That Set the Helix Spinning
External triggers often arrive dressed in fact, but they hook me through feeling. A competitor’s product launch sets off strategy wheels, yes, but also anxiety, pride, or excitement. The emotion determines the trajectory of the thought. Am I threatened, or am I challenged? Like the spider sensing vibrations in its web, I must ask: is this a signal to fear, or an opportunity to create?
Internal triggers are even more obviously double-stranded. Curiosity—half thought, half emotion—pulls me toward research at midnight. Anxiety before a speech floods me with contingency plans. Joy at a colleague’s praise fuels fresh motivation. Even hunger is both bodily sensation and cognitive nudge: it pushes my mind to plan, to imagine food, to act.
Every trigger, then, is not just a spark of cognition but also a flare of feeling. Thought and emotion spiral together, each influencing how far, how fast, and in what direction the helix climbs.
2. The Modes of Thinking — and Their Emotional Counterparts
When I slip into different modes of thinking, I notice that each has an emotional twin, braided into it.
- Critical thinking (the fox looping back) often carries scepticism, irritation, or curiosity. The emotional undertone keeps the analysis sharp—or bitter.
- Creative thinking (the octopus shifting colour) is buoyed by wonder, playfulness, sometimes manic energy. When joy is absent, creativity wilts.
- Analytical thinking (the bee building hexagons) is guided by the calm of order, the satisfaction of pattern, but can shade into anxiety if too rigid.
- Lateral thinking (the crow cutting knots) is fuelled by mischief, rebellion, delight in surprise.
- Systems thinking (the murmuration of starlings) rests on awe at interconnection. Without that awe, it collapses into bureaucracy.
- Strategic thinking (the owl blinking slow) requires patience, often fed by a quiet hope or deep-seated fear of failure.
- Collaborative thinking (the hive buzzing) only works when trust and empathy animate it.
Thinking is never an abstract machine; it is always mood-inflected, tone-coloured. The helix ensures that for every cognitive strand, there is an emotional one twisting alongside.
3. From Reaction to Reflection — Helical Growth
When I map the progression of my thinking, the double helix again reveals itself:
- Reactive thought is fused with raw emotion—anger, panic, thrill.
- Reflective thought still carries feeling but in calmer measure, slowed enough to metabolize it into wisdom.
- Narrow thinking is often driven by fear or urgency: the adrenaline of fixing one problem now.
- Integrative thinking requires curiosity, humility, even compassion—the emotional elasticity to hold contradictions together.
- Tactical thinking leans on impatience and pride (“let’s get this done today”).
- Strategic thinking is built on aspiration, sometimes dread. It needs vision’s emotional charge to sustain long horizons.
Growth in thinking, then, is not simply cognitive sophistication. It is also emotional maturation—the ability to notice the feelings braided into thought, and to metabolize them rather than be hijacked by them.
4. Practices for Managing the Helix
My tools for sharpening thought are also, inevitably, tools for tempering feeling.
- Bias-busting: confirmation bias is cognitive, but its root is emotional comfort. Devil’s advocates don’t just challenge logic; they puncture emotional attachment.
- Metacognition: when I journal about my reasoning, I also log my moods. Did optimism inflate my forecasts? Did defensiveness shut out feedback? Noticing both strands makes the helix visible.
- Structured reflection: after projects, feelings are as important as facts. Why did morale dip? Why did tension spike? The After-Action Review must ask not just “what happened?” but also “how did it feel as it happened?”
- Mental models: First Principles thinking clears emotional fog as much as cognitive clutter. Second-Order Thinking asks, “And then how will people feel?”. De Bono’s Six Thinking Hats explicitly integrates emotions (the Red Hat) into decision-making.
The point is not to sterilize emotion out of thought but to braid it consciously into the helix. When acknowledged, feelings enrich thinking; when denied, they distort it.
5. The Poetics of the Double Helix
In my metaphors, too, the helix appears. The owl waits not only with logic but with patience. The fox retraces tracks because of curiosity tinged with fear. The caterpillar dissolves into goo with no guarantee of wings—a terrifying yet necessary emotional surrender.
Perhaps the deepest insight is this: thought without feeling is sterile; feeling without thought is reckless. Together they form the double helix of human intelligence—spirals of cognition and emotion encoding the DNA of wisdom.
When I think about my thinking, I am not only analysing thought. I am listening for the emotional undertones, the half-buried feelings shaping every choice. The helix teaches me that wisdom lies not in suppressing one strand but in letting both dance in their entwined form.
Conclusion: The Helical Dance of Reflexivity
So—how do I think about how I think?
By seeing the double helix: thought and feeling, coiling and uncoiling, shaping each other. By noticing how triggers spark both cognition and emotion. By naming the modes of thought and their affective twins. By mapping growth not only as cognitive expansion but as emotional deepening. By practicing tools that integrate, rather than deny, the spiral.
Thinking about thinking, then, is not only metacognition. It is meta-feeling. It is becoming aware of the helix in motion—how fear sharpens analysis, how joy fuels creativity, how patience enables strategy, how empathy sustains collaboration.
In the end, my thinking is not a solitary staircase of logic but a living double helix—fur and feather braided with pulse and sigh, logic twined with longing. If I can see that spiral clearly, I may not only think better but also live wiser.
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