You Have 6,200 Thoughts a Day. Most of Them Are Running on Autopilot.

I want you to try something for a second. Take a moment to pause. And to turn your focus inward. And to notice what you are thinking about right now. Not the content of your thoughts. Just the thoughts floating, buzzing around. See them as a weather pattern. Hear them as background noise.

All this 'weather' is what scientists at Queen's University in Ontario refer to as thought worms.

And according to them, you are having about 6,200 of them today.

What science just figured out about your thoughts

A study published in Nature Communications had a fascinating finding (yes, I find almost anything fascinating). Psychologists Jordan Poppenk and Julie Tseng used fMRI brain scans to track the moment one thought ended and another began. They called these transitions "thought worms" — distinct shifts in brain activity that signal the mind has moved on to something new.

On average, they found, we have around 6,200 of these transitions every single day. What they couldn't tell us is what those thoughts were. But they could tell us when they changed. And that distinction, the punctuation of the mind as Poppenk puts it rather than the vocabulary, turns out to be quietly revolutionary.

So what are we actually thinking about?

Your 6,200 thoughts are not creative breakthroughs or well considered decisions. They are just repeating what has been happening to you that day, what events were similar in the past, how it matches into your belief system, and so on.

And unfortunately they are largely negative. To be accurate, it's positive that they are negative — after all, with positive thinking our tribes wouldn't have survived millennia. It's just due to your brain being a pattern-matching machine that defaults to what it already knows. It's scanning. Predicting. Replaying.

If you grew up in an environment where worry felt necessary, your brain learned that worrying is useful. If you absorbed the message early on that the world is unpredictable or unsafe, your brain built its thought patterns around exactly that. And it's been running that programme on loop ever since, thousands of times a day, without you noticing. That isn't who you are. Yet. It's what you've been doing — thousands of times a day, without choosing it. And you can become that programme if you don't learn how to interrupt it.

You can't change what you can't see

Every piece of advice about anxiety eventually circles back to awareness. Notice your thoughts. Observe them. Don't judge them. And it's good advice. Genuinely. When you can catch a thought in the act — when you can see it as a thought rather than a fact — you create a tiny gap between stimulus and response. That gap is where change lives.

But here's the thing about 6,200 thoughts a day: most of them don't announce themselves. They don't arrive with a label that says "anxious thought incoming." They arrive as feelings in your body. A tightness in your chest. A vague sense of dread or restlessness. By the time you're aware of the thought, you're already in it.

This is why mindfulness practice — however imperfect and however inconsistent — genuinely matters. It's not to silence the thoughts, repression is not the answer here. It's to create space between the thoughts and your identity. Not to become your thought, just be the person having that thought.

Fortunately hypnotherapy can go deeper and be more effective than that — finding out where those thoughts originate from and making them more complete. Not only negative, but well-rounded views on the world. The power of the negativity will sting less, and you will be less affected by it. Many of those thoughts may disappear altogether — because once they've been heard and understood, once they've done their job of keeping you safe, they become redundant. And redundant thoughts don't need to stick around.

What you can actually do with 6,200 thoughts

Monitoring all of your thoughts is not the goal. But noticing the ones that keep showing up is useful. This is what I do when I feel like I want to have a hypnosis session for myself — what thoughts keep showing up and stopping me or creating a problem in my life. So I already welcome them as little sticky notes. Signposts of what may need my attention, ready for reframing in a deep state.

I focus on thoughts that tell me that I am behind, small, powerless or that I should be doing things differently. If I am stuck in a conversation from days ago, replaying it and coming up with better responses in my head. These thoughts aren't random — they are paths your brain took many times, so they become highways.

So when these pop up, I don't analyse all of them. Conscious analysis is not where I want to spend my energy. I notice the thoughts being there, I might write them down, often say to myself "How interesting that this thought keeps playing in my head." And that's it. I notice them and let them be. And if these patterns keep repeating week after week and I have a 3-hour window, I book myself a hypnosis session. But often times they just dissipate after being noticed.

The layer beneath awareness

Awareness gets you so far. And it's a genuinely powerful place to start — especially if anxiety has felt like an uncontrollable force rather than something with a pattern you can learn to recognise.

But some of what drives our thought loops sits deeper than conscious awareness can reach. It lives in the subconscious — in the stories we built about ourselves and the world before we had the language or cognitive ability to question them. Mindfulness can soothe the surface and will result in changes in your brain and your behaviour. But to change the programme underneath, you need to go where the programme actually lives.

That's what hypnotherapy does. It works at the level where those 6,200 daily thoughts are generated — not just catching them as they surface, but quietly rewriting what produces them in the first place.

If you're curious about what that looks like in practice, I have a free hypnosis recording on the website. No prior experience needed, just a quiet place and 15-20 minutes.