“Thinking” is a purposeful process of integrating new observations with your existing knowledge and values to reach new conclusions.

It is not a passive state of registering random impressions. It is an actively sustained process of identifying one’s impressions in conceptual terms, of integrating every event and every observation into a conceptual context, of grasping relationships, differences, similarities in one’s perceptual material and of abstracting them into new concepts, of drawing inferences, of making deductions, of asking new questions and discovering new answers and expanding one’s knowledge into an ever-growing sum. (Ayn Rand, “The Objectivist Ethics”)

Informally, thinking is a process of asking and answering questions with a purpose. You need to think whenever you don’t already know what to do. Anything that makes it difficult to ask yourself questions or difficult to answer them or difficult to stay concentrated on your purpose will stop the thinking.

This is such an important issue that I have dubbed these “dysfunctional states.” A dysfunctional state is a mental state in which the automatic functions of attention interfere with performing a thinking process. Attention is drawn automatically to moving objects and loud noises, to the objects of emotions, to pleasure and pain. This gets in the way of directing your attention in the thinking process. If you get into a dysfunctional state, you need to reboot your thinking process!

There are a number of dysfunctional states: overload, blankness, and confusion are the simplest and most familiar.

Rebooting when you’re overloaded

Overload is a dysfunctional mental state because so much new material is coming into attention so quickly, that material is dropping out of attention before one’s normal processes of recognition and consideration have time to occur. The influx of material can come from memory or from perception or a combination; it doesn’t matter.

You cannot think your way out of overload, but that doesn’t mean it poses an insuperable problem. You can address the problem directly if you notice where the overload is coming from.

For example, you can easily reduce the amount of perceptual material coming into attention by direct volitional action. If there are too many sights and sounds flitting by and dragging your attention around, you can close your eyes and/or put in ear plugs and/or move to a different location with fewer disturbances.

If the overload is caused by too many ideas coming up from memory, you can offload the ideas to paper. This reduces the load by ending the need to remember items. It lets you slow down the pipeline of ideas and prioritize them.

More generally, if you’re overloaded, you can adjust your purpose a bit. For example, if you are overloaded by too many objections to a plan, you could decide to look at one objection at a time. That change of intention would immediately change how many ideas come up from memory.

None of this is giving up. This is respecting the nature of your mind and the need for a manageable data flow and “crow space” to think.

Rebooting blankness and confusion

All dysfunctional states are like this. All dysfunctional states involve disproportionate material coming into attention relative to what is needed for thinking. They are addressed by correcting that imbalance by slightly changing your purpose.

For example, blankness is a dysfunctional mental state in which nothing gets triggered from memory in response to a question. You get no answers. If this happens persistently, you can’t think because you can’t answer the logical questions necessary to do the thinking on that topic. Typically, blankness is resolved by giving yourself an easier assignment — one that you can think about. For example, instead of trying to answer, “What is the best use of my time right now?” (for which you might be blank), you might ask yourself, “What are some things that might be good to do now?” (which is likely to trigger some answers).

Similarly, confusion is a type of overload in which proliferating questions are triggered from memory into attention. This is part overload, part blankness. How do you solve it? By reducing the load and giving yourself an easier assignment. Judge the questions coming up to decide which would be most helpful to think about and try to answer one at a time, instead of trying to deal with everything at once. Sometimes you cure confusion by going more concrete because that’s where you can get a foothold. Other times you go more abstract and get a logical overview. There are always choices about how to pursue any goal, but you always need to be working from what you know, not what you don’t know.

Indulging in dysfunctional states

If you let yourself stay indefinitely in a dysfunctional state it becomes self-indulgent.

For example, it can be tempting to indulge in confusion. When you have a challenging goal, it’s easy to generate an unlimited number of interesting questions about how you might proceed or what might happen along the way. This question-generating process superficially resembles planning, so it might feel like a productive activity. But in most situations, generating questions that you may or may not ever have time and energy to answer is self-defeating. Forward progress comes from answering questions. Generating those questions might be intellectually stimulating, but it’s not purposeful action.

The words “I can’t” can help you indulge in overload. Once you notice you are overloaded, you can bemoan how terrible it is that you are overloaded. You can rehearse all of the things that you can’t handle. This is a kind of pity party. It’s a chance to feel sorry for yourself and a great way to rationalize doing nothing. But it doesn’t actually help the situation. It just wastes your time and energy. It’s better to reboot by reducing what you’re focusing on!

The words “I don’t know” are the key words for indulging in blankness. There are always lots of things you don’t know. But you solve problems and make decisions based on what you do know. If you find yourself stuck in “I don’t know,” you are not taking the trouble to reboot to identify what you do know that would be helpful.

Don’t hesitate to reboot

These simple dysfunctional states — overload, blankness, and confusion — are inherently unpleasant. But that is not why they are a problem. That negative affect is a good thing — it draws your attention to the problem. The problem is that you are stalled. You need to think to figure out what is in your best interest right now. You need a functional mind to identify what a doable goal is to pursue or what you do know that is relevant or how to simplify the problem. That takes thinking — and you can’t think just now.

It’s important to accept that you can’t think at the moment, while remembering that you haven’t lost power over your mind. You can reboot — adjust your purpose to something easier, smaller, or less confusing to get some traction. And that reboots your thinking process so you can figure out what to do.