Before Christmas I took a young relative to a jazz concert. The thought of it ruined his whole day. He scuffed around the house like an alt-right voter at a refugee camp.

In the event, even he acknowledged that we had a fine time. But neither of us would ever get back the dreadful hours that preceded it. He’d fallen prey to a cardinal paradox – poisoning the present by agonising over a future hardship that never materialised.

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We’ve all done that. The homo sapiens is so damn clever, and yet sometimes so stupid with it. We are the only species that can really think “offline” – wrapped up in things that haven’t yet happened or things that are long gone but can never be changed. This makes us excellent problem solvers, but appalling worriers at the same time.

Thinking is what gave humans ascendancy. But overthinking is threatening to bring us down. Critical thinking has undoubtedly advanced our cause and become one of the essential assets of being so brilliantly human, but introspective thinking – our near constant self-evaluation, who we are, where we fit, how we compare – is becoming one of the most destructive aspects of modern life. We must purge it.

We are in thrall to the rigid, judgmental thoughts we think about ourselves, prisoners of the sinewy web of cogitation that tells us we are strong, clever, important, unassertive, patriotic, hopeless, old, fat, hard done by, forgotten – when actually we may be many of these things rolled into one. This narrow view of ourselves shapes impossible expectations that can only lead to disappointment. It ripples outwards into our emotions and our behaviour. The results are to be seen daily on our front pages. A father thinks he is the ultimate authority in his family. When his daughter challenges him, he has her killed. A young man thinks he is strong, identifies through his supposed manliness; it directs his violent behaviour.

Our obsessive thinking about ourselves even informs the air of political revolt that made 2016 such a big turning point. In the richest, healthiest, most prosperous era we have ever known, people punish themselves by ruminating and finding that their lives don’t match up to those they think others are leading. It’s a short step from disappointment to blame, and a protest vote.

Too much of our behaviour is determined not by how things are, but how we think things are

But this overthinking tendency is not limited to politics. It embeds personal misery in an era in which we are tempted, even encouraged, to compare ourselves with other people: the teenager who feels low because of what her Instagram feed makes her think; the thwarted youngster, demoralised by the success of others; the employee who feels insecure because she thinks the boss blanked her on the stairwell; the hypochondriac who thinks he is dying of everything. Think bad, feel bad. Compare and despair. It’s no wonder there is a mental illness epidemic out there. Time to wake up, people. The voice in your head is not who you are. It’s just an excitable commentator. You are the game.

Too much of our behaviour is determined not by how things are, but how we think things are. But this thinking is not worth paying too much attention to, for two reasons. First, it is probably incorrect. Let’s face it: we are hardly objective in evaluating ourselves. We overexaggerate both our talents and failings. This is the original fake news.

And second, whether right or wrong, these self-evaluations simply are not helpful. They just make us feel worse.

We need a completely new relationship with our thoughts. Instead of viewing the world and our experience as we think they ought to be, we need to treat them as they actually are. We need to recognise when we are ruining a day, a week, a moment or a relationship with catastrophic thoughts and judgments, and understand that often it is the thought itself that makes us feel bad, not the experience itself.

But how to cultivate that sense of detachment from a poisonous, unhelpful or just plain wrong stream of thinking? Visual clues can help: a post-it on a computer screen (mine just says “thinking …”) or a screensaver on a phone. I wear a black wristband to remind me why I do this. A discreet tattoo might do the same, if that’s your thing.

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Habit is even better: get used to observing, say, the first three thoughts you have upon waking every day – were they functional, workaday, banal; or were they judgmental, apprehensive, punishing? Some people like to use motifs – thoughts as a torrent of traffic, cars driving past, and you don’t have to get in the passenger seat. And that same recurring, corrosive notion can be an ugly polluting SUV that comes, stays and moves on again, without really affecting you. Or else thoughts are a busy stream, chattering away in front of you, often pulling you under. But each time you are submerged, eventually you notice and pull yourself out and sit undisturbed, again and again until it starts to become habit to notice the thought rather than believe it.

Happily, some schools are starting to teach this important element of psychological flexibility. It should be compulsory in secondary schools.The myriad apps that teach the practice of being present in the now are another entry point, helping us cultivate our observing selves, rather than our thinking selves.

Instead of obsessing, fuming, curdling about things we don’t have, we need to accept and celebrate what we do. Instead of worrying about things we can’t control – people’s opinion of us, for example – we need to direct our attentions to things we can influence, and leave the rest be. Instead of judging each other, and – worse – ourselves, let us simply take as we find. Instead of ruining our short time alive by setting expectations of how we think everything should be, from our jobs to our love lives, our children to our prospects, let us accept that some things will not always go as we wish.

You’re not who you think you are. You’re so much more than that.