First Thought, The

This audiobook is narrated by a digital voice.

A thought can arrive in a second. Then we can spend the rest of the night thinking about it. A short text message acquires an unexpected undertone. A pleasant idea about Crete becomes a small logistical operation. Something that has not happened suddenly feels very real.

In The First Thought, Robin Lynch explores the difference between the thought that appears and the thinking that follows it. With warmth, quiet humour and everyday examples, he traces the ways worry, feelings and physical reactions can fuel one another — and how solving problems can turn into manufacturing more of them.

As a songwriter and music producer, Robin has earned his living from ideas. He is also familiar with the less profitable business of mentally resolving situations that may never happen. The same brain can write a song and keep the office open long after everyone should have gone home.

The book moves between the kitchen table, the music studio and questions people have wrestled with for thousands of years. Stoic philosophy, Buddhist perspectives and modern psychology offer different ways of looking at thought. There is room, too, for the body, real difficulties and problems that genuinely call for action.

Along the way are simple questions to try: What do I actually know? Is there something I can do now? Have I got new information, or am I going round again? They offer ways to notice when a thought has become a story we have started treating as a fact.

The First Thought is a personal, gently funny book for anyone who sometimes thinks for longer than the situation requires. It invites you to recognise what your mind is doing, make room for useful thinking and let other thoughts come along without putting them in charge of the whole journey.