The primary reason narrow thinking is so harmful to us is that it significantly reduces our capabilities and imaginations, making us less happy and more prone to fear. The result of this fear can lead to prejudice and discrimination and generally ignorant behaviour, alongside general anxiety towards the unknown.
Which of our treatments can best help you with narrow thinking?
- Guided meditation can help us to expand our minds. It can be a wonderful way to step outside of our existing preconceptions, and explore the world from a new perspective.
- Self-development programme: we can help you to take practical steps to reduce your self-limiting thoughts, and ultimately become more open-minded.
The Causes of Narrow Thinking
There are several reasons why we might become narrow-minded. Sometimes we are born into environments that promote narrow thinking, whether a particular political ideology or mindset of a nation or a household. We can be fed information that ultimately leads us to narrow viewpoints that promote ignorance or unhappiness. We can also develop these viewpoints throughout life depending on how we are influenced and what we see around us. It is easy to be led astray or to face an opposing view, and ultimately we don’t believe that this is our fault, but something which is still our responsibility to address. Sometimes, people cannot be as open-minded as others because of cognitive differences, such as autism. While this is not something that can be helped, it is something that you can develop an awareness of and learn to consider more greatly.
Effects of Narrow Thinking
If we are narrow-minded, we can find ourselves acting with ignorance or distaste towards things that we are unfamiliar with or simply not used to seeing. This is not always our fault, but it can lead to unrest in several different ways. Narrow mindedness can cause unhappiness in both familial and national situations and personal relationships being destroyed by opposing viewpoints. While some ideologies disagree, acting with tolerance for others is a far more appropriate system of behaviour, which we should adopt.
The Benefits of Being Openminded
As humans, being open-minded is one of the greatest behavioural changes we can make personally, which can improve the world we live in. When we overcome narrowmindedness and become open minded, we can enjoy a variety or welcoming and enjoyable things as a result. We can find greater tolerance with people who have fundamental differences to us, such as those with different religions, ideologies, nationalities, races, sexes and identities. When we embrace everybody with equal amounts of love, we are allowing ourselves to open up to a world of far greater empathy and joy, a world which everybody can be a part of. What’s more, when we are openminded, we can rationalise and consider other ideas better and with greater tolerance, improving our cognitive function and making us better thinkers.
