Challenging my first Negative Automatic Thought

I was reading something on the way to the tube this morning. It didn’t contain reference to anything particularly misogynistic, homophobic, racist, anything that took the piss out of disabled people, people who aren’t middle class (or whatever), people who may not be conventionally attractive…

It just reminded me how big the world is. How there’s so much to consider. And my heart sank. So my Negative Automatic Thought (NAT – something I have been told I should recognise in my CBT) was, “I can’t deal with all of this – there’s too much.”

I feel like to change the world (see previous post) I need to understand human nature perfectly. But how can I do that? I mentioned before that thinking about free will gives me a headache, and I avoid it as much as possible. The thing is, now I feel like I can’t continue to avoid it – I need to work it out.

Of course I don’t need to know everything. Things like free will, and everything else, aren’t known. In particular, still nobody knows, really, whether or not women are biologically different to men, or whether it is socially conditioned. Women still won the vote, we still have the legal right to the same pay for the same work.