The Practice of Not Thinking by Ryunosuke Koike

ELI5/TLDR

A Japanese Zen monk argues that most of what we call “thinking” is actually our brain running on autopilot, grabbing at whatever stimulates it most — usually something negative. His fix is not another thought technique but the opposite: stop thinking and pay attention to your senses instead. The whole book is a field manual for doing that across everyday situations — speaking, listening, seeing, eating, buying, sleeping — with a closing interview where a neuroscientist basically confirms he’s right.

The Full Story

The premise, stated flatly

Koike opens with a diagnosis. The brain, left to its own devices, keeps generating thoughts whether you want it to or not. It hunts stimulation. Because negative stimulation lands harder than mild contentment, the brain drifts toward anger, worry, and rumination. We don’t choose most of our thoughts. They just happen to us, and then we mistake them for our own will.

“This information processing device that we all have is a rogue entity that continues to forge ahead in search of thought-provoking stimuli regardless of the effects on us and whether we’ll end up suffering as a result.”

He names this “thinking disease.” The symptom: you’re spending time with someone you love, the sensations are all right there — warmth of a hand, sound of their voice — but your mind is elsewhere, chewing on something irrelevant, and the moment passes without landing. Keep that up and, in his math, you lose 54 out of every 60 minutes. “By the time we grow old, we’ll be looking back and marveling at how quickly those years have flown by.”

The three poisons

The engine for all this is what Buddhism calls the three kleshas (he uses the Japanese “clacia”). Imagine three standing orders your brain keeps issuing:

Desire — grabs at anything pleasant and wants more.
Anger — pushes away anything unpleasant. Broader than the word suggests — includes jealousy, regret, loneliness, nervousness, self-reproach.
Ignorance/uncertainty — the brain drifting off because the current situation isn’t stimulating enough, looking for somewhere louder.

Plus a recurring fourth he keeps naming: arrogance — the urge to protect your self-image, not wanting to be seen as less than you are. This one shows up everywhere, especially when you talk back to a boss or dash off a defensive apology.

The fix, in outline

You can’t stop thinking by thinking about stopping thinking. That just loops. His alternative is to move attention out of the verbal mind and into the five senses. Sensing is physical, immediate, and it occupies the same mental bandwidth that thinking would otherwise hog.

He makes a distinction worth holding onto:

“The passive state of seeing and the active state of looking. The passive state of hearing and the active state of listening. The passive state of noticing a smell and the active state of smelling something. The passive state of tasting something and the active state of savoring it. The passive state of touching something and the active state of feeling it.”

Most of life is the passive version. Sensing happens to you while you think about other things. The practice is to deliberately do the active version — focus on a single patch of sensation and stay there. When you do, the mental chatter has less room to run. This is the whole book in one move.

Speaking

Koike spends a long time here because speech is where thoughts leak out before you notice them. You meet someone important, a thousandth of a second later your mouth is saying something polite about the weather that you don’t actually mean. You weren’t lying on purpose; your mind autocompleted a socially acceptable line and your voice played it.

His main practical tool: listen to your own voice while you speak. Not what you’re saying — the sound itself. Pitch, speed, volume. Because arrogance and desire both show up as speeding up and pitching higher. Awareness of the voice acts as a thermostat. You don’t force yourself to slow down; you just notice, and the noticing does the work.

Related tools from this section:

When you feel the urge to talk back, bracket the feeling. Say silently to yourself: “I think I’m irritated.” Not “I’m irritated” — the extra layer matters. It turns the emotion from fact into observation.
Real apologies include what you plan to do differently. “Sorry, I’ll be more careful next time” is mostly for your own comfort. “Here’s the specific thing I’ll do differently” reduces the other person’s pain, which is what an apology is actually for.
Telling someone “I’ll be there in 5 minutes” when you know it’s 15 is arrogance disguised as optimism. You’re protecting your image at the cost of making them wait longer than they expected.
Four of Buddhism’s ten precepts concern speech: no lying, no vulgar language, no spreading negative rumors, no idle chatter. His logic for why badmouthing people is self-harm: the words you say are heard first by you, and they deepen the anger groove in your own mind more than anyone else’s.

Listening

The listening chapter flips the usual advice. Most books on listening tell you to focus on the speaker’s content. Koike says: focus on the sound. Pitch, speed, pauses, the quality of their breathing. If you only attend to content, a boring topic will let your mind wander. If you attend to the voice, you start picking up the micro-signals of where the person actually is emotionally, and the conversation becomes interesting even when the words aren’t.

“There are also times when they may halt, take a moment to breathe, and then suddenly start to speak in a rapid-fire manner. Those are signs that they are experiencing a strong sense of bitterness.”

Applied to criticism: if someone says something hurtful, don’t respond to the content. Analyze the sound. If it’s clipped and throat-caught, they’re running on anger. If it’s euphoric and over-enunciated, they’re running on arrogance. Either way, the person is in pain, and the pain is what produced the words. This isn’t saintly tolerance — it’s an information reframe that happens to short-circuit your own anger response.

He’s also anti-noise generally. Keep unnecessary stimulation out of your ears. Don’t drown your commute in music — it trains your mind to reject all the quieter, neutral sounds, which then makes it harder to listen to a colleague later. Attend to the boring sounds and everything downstream gets easier. He goes as far as suggesting you practice opening and closing doors quietly, placing objects without the clank. Less noise generated means less noise to process.

Seeing

Same structure. Don’t let your eyes graze passively over everything. Pick an object, look at it, hold it. The other stuff fades to background and the looking itself becomes restful.

What to avoid looking at:

Violent or hyper-stimulating media (he’s no fan of TV)
Comedy that mocks people — it trains your aggression
Bank statements, paycheck stubs, your follower counts — they pump arrogance
Anything that inflates ego or spikes envy

What to practice: walk down a street and notice the small things changing as you move. A sign appearing, approaching, gone. Rain on your skin. Not as aesthetic appreciation — as a concentration drill.

Watching other people’s faces gets its own long treatment. The subtle signs that someone’s in pain or pretending — tight cheek muscles, a forced smile, eyes averting. When you see those and don’t take them personally, compassion becomes a natural response rather than an effort. And the laughter section is surprisingly cold-eyed: a lot of laughter is just converted anger or arrogance. Comedy on TV usually works by making you feel superior to someone, which is the arrogance klesha firing. Smiling gently is different from laughing hard, and it’s better for you.

This section has aged into prophecy. He was writing when blogs were dying and Facebook was rising, but the mechanics he describes are exactly what you’d write about Instagram or Twitter today. The core claim:

“The stronger your desire to be accepted or to write negative things yourself, the bigger those kleshas will become, distorting your mind.”

His specific claims about social media:

Blogs for public view nurture the desire to be recognized, then the pain of not being recognized, then the reward spike when you are, which your brain misreads as “pain equals pleasure,” which leads you to seek more pain. Classic addiction mechanics.
Anonymous posting doesn’t hide your true self — it reveals it. The things you write when no one knows who you are are the things you actually think but keep suppressed. The rage expressed there inflames the rage within.
If you must write online, write by hand first. Typing on a keyboard is too fast for the mind to curate. Pick 3-4 topics out of every 10 that come to you. Drop the negative reviews — writing hate does more damage to the writer than the target.
Don’t check your traffic or comments. Don’t check your phone for messages compulsively. Remove comment sections if their absence would depress you — their presence is the problem.

For emails: avoid starting with “sorry for the late reply” because the subtext is “I don’t mind keeping you waiting, you’re not that important,” which the recipient picks up. He suggests neutral openers — a remark about the weather, factually only. “It’s getting warmer after the rain here.” No evaluation.

And for your own reflection, write a journal that no one will read. Include the specifics — why you were irritated, when, what shifted the mood. Read it back after six months. The patterns come out.

Eating

People overeat because they’re not eating — their mouth is busy but their attention is elsewhere. The mind can’t register “I ate” without sensory input, so it orders another round. Diets fail for the same reason: the more you tell yourself not to eat, the more food occupies your mind.

The alternative is what any meditation teacher would call mindful eating, but he’s specific about technique. Put the spoon down between bites. Don’t chew while your hand is moving. Close your eyes when you can. Follow the tongue — it’s in constant motion, tasting, shifting, feeling texture, and you normally ignore all of it. He also argues for cooking carefully, quietly: slide the knife through vegetables instead of chopping with pressure (preserves nutrients, reduces noise).

Discarding and buying

Ownership has two psychological components: recollection that you own the thing, and resistance to losing it. Both generate low-grade noise in the mind all the time, even when the object is buried in a drawer. That forgotten box of stuff you shoved into a closet years ago — your mind hasn’t actually forgotten. It’s just filed.

“Increasing our stockpile of items amounts to creating a fog in our mind that makes it impossible to see the view before us.”

His recommendation is simply to throw things away, or give them away, or sell them, as active training. Not Marie Kondo-level decluttering — more like a spiritual exercise of repeatedly practicing the loss of control. He doesn’t lock his bicycle. When it gets stolen, he notes the fact and moves on. When money gets lost, same. He’s not advocating recklessness; he’s pointing out that the fear of losing things weighs more than the things themselves.

On buying: the fact that something is discounted 75% is not a reason to buy it. It’s only a reflection that your brain processed “cheap” and then “must buy.” Slow down. Buy what you actually need, from makers you respect, in small quantities.

Touching, waiting, resting

Touch is the anchor for when concentration breaks. If you’re losing focus at a desk, attend to where your body meets the chair, where your fingertips meet the keys. The sensation is always there; you just haven’t been looking at it.

On itches and heat: don’t scratch immediately, don’t crank the AC immediately. Pause. Focus on the sensation itself. He claims an itch, fully attended to, dissolves on its own — because what makes an itch unbearable isn’t the sensation, it’s the brain’s “must eliminate this” narrative stacked on top. Strip the narrative, the sensation becomes tolerable.

Waiting: same principle. A 30-minute delay at a station is an opportunity to meditate or observe the people around you. Being irritated makes the time feel longer without changing its length. He’s matter-of-fact about this, not preachy.

Resting: don’t resolve exhaustion with more stimulation. If you’re burned out and want to escape, horror movies and action films are the wrong medicine — they just numb current pain by adding new pain. Choose mild over intense. A walking holiday beats a tourist-attraction-hopping vacation.

Nurturing others

The final behavioral chapter is about how to help someone without making it about you. His version of compassion is astringent:

When someone is in trouble, shut up and listen. Don’t bombard them with advice disguised as care.
Don’t agree falsely or contradict; just listen until the inconsistencies in their own thinking surface. Then help them notice, not by telling them, but by asking questions that make them notice themselves.
Worrying excessively about others is often a way of avoiding your own problems.
Crying at a sick friend’s bedside isn’t love — it’s your klesha of sadness being released in their room. It makes them worse, not better.

On raising children: praise and scolding based on performance teaches the child they’re only loved when compliant. In the early years, the message should be unconditional acceptance — you’re wanted regardless. Scolding becomes useful later, once that trust is established.

On romantic relationships and persuasion, he gives a memorable example: a woman wants her obese boyfriend to lose weight. The wrong move is threatening the relationship. The right move is for her to examine why she wants it — maybe the answer is that she’s embarrassed by how others see her, which is her klesha of arrogance — and then to say that honestly. “I like you, but I worry how others judge me for dating someone overweight. Could you lose weight for me?” Submitting like this — showing the strings that control you — is counterintuitively more effective than projecting strength.

Sleeping

The same pattern. You can’t sleep because during the day, busy-ness covers the mental noise, and at night the noise surfaces. People numb it with alcohol, food, horror movies, upbeat music, sleeping pills. All work short-term, all make the underlying thinking disease worse.

His prescription: meditate with compassion. Chant something simple — “may my mind settle down” — and let the concentration crowd out the verbal static. Sleep before midnight. Get up with the sun.

The neuroscientist interview

The last third of the audiobook is a conversation between Koike and Yuji Ikegaya, a neuroscientist at the University of Tokyo. It’s surprisingly good, because Ikegaya doesn’t flatter him. Key points that emerged:

Pain as the foundation. Brains evolved as feedback systems in primitive creatures like earthworms and leeches. The original function was “sense something, decide whether to flee, move the body.” The default value baked in is discomfort — run from the bad thing. Pleasure circuits came later and are separate. So Koike’s claim that “everything is suffering” matches, roughly, the engineering of the nervous system.

Aversion tracks bitterness. When subjects tasted bitter food, a specific facial muscle (levator labii superioris) activated. The same muscle activated when they saw something disgusting. And the same muscle activated when they were treated unfairly in a money-sharing game. The path from physical bitterness to social injustice runs through the same neural hardware.

We feel others’ pain. When you watch someone in pain, your own pain circuits light up. Social pain — being excluded, isolated — activates the same neural area as physical pain.

Placebo is real. A placebo painkiller doesn’t just fool you; it physically activates the same brain stem pathway morphine does. And a stress hormone study showed that people who believed they could quit the experiment at any time showed 80% less stress response — even if they didn’t quit. The mere option to escape suppressed the physiological stress.

We have no free will — we have veto power. Ikegaya notes that the brain issues a motor command before conscious awareness of the decision. What we have isn’t initiation but the ability to cancel. Koike’s practice, as he describes it, is exactly training this: notice the command fast enough to choose whether to run it.

Referendum prediction. A study in Italy predicted how people would vote on a military base expansion a full week in advance, using free-association patterns from a questionnaire. What looked like free deliberation turned out to be reflex firing on rails.

Smiling works physically. Subjects who held a pen sideways in their mouth (forcing the smile muscles active) rated comics funnier and found positive words on a page faster than subjects who held it lengthwise. The reward system activates. This isn’t self-deception — the neural circuits run the same direction whether the smile is prompted by joy or prompted by a pen.

Concentration is a tool, not a goal. Ikegaya asks whether meditation is escape from reality. Koike’s answer: concentration is the scaffolding. What you do from within concentration is observe your own reflexive patterns and rebuild them. If you use concentration only to feel good, that’s escape. If you use it to see and dismantle your scripts, it’s training.

Key Takeaways

Most of what you call “your thinking” is reflexive output from a brain hunting stimulation. You don’t have free will; you have veto power — the ability to notice a command fast enough to not execute it.
The three kleshas — desire, anger, uncertainty — plus arrogance, are the engines. Most negative states (jealousy, regret, loneliness, anxiety) are variants of anger.
Negative thoughts are more stimulating than mild contentment, so the brain defaults toward them. This is a bug, not a feature.
Passive vs active senses — seeing/looking, hearing/listening, tasting/savoring. Active sensing is the primary tool for breaking the thought loop, because attention is finite.
Listen to your own voice while speaking. Awareness is the thermostat; correction happens automatically.
Bracket emotions: say “I think I’m irritated,” not “I’m irritated.” The extra word turns emotion from fact into observation.
When receiving criticism, analyze the sound (pitch, pace, breath), not the content. The sound reveals the speaker’s pain, which is what actually produced the words.
Blogs and social media nurture the desire for recognition, then the pain of not getting it, then a spike of reward when you do — which your brain misreads as “pain equals pleasure.” Classic addiction wiring.
Anonymous online posting reveals your true self, doesn’t hide it. The hate you express while pretending to be someone else is you.
Write by hand before typing. Keyboard speed outruns the mind’s ability to curate.
Eating without attention prevents the mind from registering the meal, so it orders more. Put the spoon down between bites. Don’t chew while your hand is moving.
Every possession you own generates low-grade mental noise — recollection of owning + resistance to losing. Throwing things away is a concrete training exercise in the loss of control.
When something is discounted, the urge to buy is not evidence you want it. It’s evidence your brain registered “cheap.” Slow down.
Itches, heat, cold — don’t scratch/adjust reflexively. Focus on the sensation. The sensation minus the narrative is usually tolerable.
Real apologies include specific steps for doing better. “Sorry” alone is for your comfort, not theirs.
Starting an email with “sorry for the late reply” subtly telegraphs that you saw them as someone you could keep waiting. Neutral openers (weather, factually only) work better.
Worrying about someone else is often a way of avoiding yourself. Crying at a sick friend’s bedside makes them worse, not better — your grief waves land on them.
Unconditional acceptance in early childhood (ages 1-3) builds the trust that makes later scolding land productively. Praise/scolding based on performance trains the kid to be a puppet.
Submitting first — showing your flaws openly — resets stuck relationships. The person who drops their defense first holds the key.
Smiling (lifting the mouth corners) physically activates reward circuits, whether the smile is prompted by joy or a pen. Forced smile is not faked happiness — it routes through the same hardware.
You have no free will — you have veto power. That’s enough to rebuild the ratio of good commands to bad through reinforcement learning.
Placebo is real — the same brain pathway morphine uses. Belief is physical.
The stress hormone study: subjects who could quit the experiment showed 80% less stress even when they didn’t quit. An available exit suppresses stress chemically.
Concentration is a tool, not a goal. If you use meditation to feel good, you’re escaping. If you use it to observe and dismantle your reflexes, you’re training.

Claude’s Take

This is the whole book read aloud, not a YouTube video in the usual sense. HETvertellen uploads the Penguin audiobook; the “channel” is a reader outfit. So you’re essentially getting the full text as a four-and-a-half-hour sitting. The reader, Susan Mokonchu, does straightforward work — no dramatization.

The content itself is a mixed bag. Koike writes very clearly and his framing of the three kleshas plus arrogance is genuinely useful as a lens on your own behavior. The move of putting attention on the senses instead of fighting thoughts with more thoughts is correct and underrated. The bit about listening to the sound of someone’s voice instead of the content is a small revelation that I think actually works. The journaling-for-yourself-not-for-others advice is good. The email and social media sections are weirdly prescient for a 2010 Japanese book — he saw the attention-economy problem coming.

What’s less strong: the book is repetitive. The same framework gets applied to speaking, then listening, then seeing, then eating, then touching, and the moves are essentially the same each time. A tighter book would be 40% shorter. There’s also a Japanese-coded austerity that doesn’t always translate — his rules on what kind of humor is acceptable, his vegetarianism, his “you should use a kitchen timer” specificity can feel like monastic overreach. And some of the cultural claims are dated (the stuff about the “Japanese disease of saying thank you” is calibrated to Japan, not to a reader elsewhere).

The Buddhist philosophical background is where it’s strongest. “You have veto power, not free will” is a claim with real teeth, and the neuroscientist in the closing interview confirms the basic picture is defensible. The placebo and stress-hormone studies Ikegaya cites are legitimate and more interesting than most of what you’d read in a Western self-help book on the same topic. Their conversation is the highest-signal section of the audiobook.

The weakest link is Koike’s own claims about specific experiences — the mosquito that sits peacefully on his hand because he’s not tense, the money that doesn’t matter if it burns, the items that disappear from the mind once discarded. These read as either advanced meditator reports or as slight overclaims. Probably some of both. A reader trying to replicate them on week one will be disappointed, which he eventually acknowledges in the afterword: people who take the rules too literally and fail will get discouraged. The real message is to relax the perfectionism about non-thinking itself.

Score: 7. Solid foundational text for anyone wanting a Buddhist-ish operating system without the spiritual baggage. Not revelatory if you’ve read much in this space (Thich Nhat Hanh, Shunryu Suzuki, Sam Harris, etc.), but the specific move of structuring the techniques by sense modality is clean and practical. Read the afterword and the interview first if you want the highest-density parts. The middle section on everyday habits can be skimmed.