Ah yes, Bailey, thinking is by far the worst symptom of personality. And personality is the worst symptom of identification. And identification is the worst symptom of the mind.
And medicine IS a often a guessing game, to a far larger extend than doctors will want to admit. And guessing is the favorite activity of the mind (the mind however cleverly calls this thinking), so there you are: thinking about medical things is a never-ending (and mostly unhappy) story in the mind. Stop it! (STOP = Stop – Take a deep breath – Observe – Proceed).
By the way, Jenny’s infliction (wanting to be agreeable) is very common and exhausting too. It also depends on thinking. But there is a severe fault in the assessment: “I am (extremely) agreeable”, because agreeability as we know it is only defined as a function expressed to others. While in reality and true life, this character trade expresses in the interaction between you ànd others. This is an important and overlooked difference. So if you are only agreeable in the common sense of the word, you totally deny yourself as part of the process. This sort of agreeableness is not something to be loved at all about yourself. So if you love this about yourself, you should really ask the question: “Why do I think this is a good thing, who taught me this?” because in fact, you are hurting yourself with it constantly. Of course this is all conditioned behavior we learned as we grew up, but there is a time in life to honestly reflect on all that you have learned as a child and question these things to the core. It mostly revolves about the question “Who am I?” but we are not willing to look into that deeply. We are too busy thinking and worrying.
Being truly agreeable would include yourself in the process. Then there will be a balance between your own interests and those of the others, which would result in a much more healthy and mature interaction. You can only be there for others, if you are there in the first place. For that, you foremost have to take care of your own wellbeing and best interests. From that position you can truly be an asset in all of your interactions, not as a goal but as something that will happen of itself.
So, to come back to answer Bailey’s question: the whole of the personality makes life difficult. Personality is a hindrance in living a happy and fulfilling life. Thinking (by this I mean thoughts that are about I, me and my, and about past and future) makes up a large part of this personality. Try and count the percentage of thoughts that are about I, me or my and about past/future. If you leave these out and only have neutral, non-sticking and simple true thoughts about what presents right now (in stead of guesses and presumptions of what might happen or has happened), life becomes much easier and more happy. You will save an enormous amount of time and energy that can be devoted to just living life, in stead of thinking it. Then life runs itself mostly, and much better without the interference of the mind. Just surrender to it. It has all been taken care of. Have a little trust. Or better: have a lot of it.
This is not at all equal to “throwing caution to the wind” (see how the mind loves to create false opposites?) If you don’t think about yourself, the past or the future constantly, you are not being reckless – on the contrary, if you approach life from being and intuition in stead of only thinking, you get a much more complete and correct view of reality as it is. And with much less problems.
By the way: I’d never heard of this OCEAN personality test so I took a look on a website and completed 4 pages of questions. I had to laugh about the questions that mostly did not make sense to me, meaning they were not at all even applicable to how I experience reality. Most of the questions started with “I” and presumed some abstract intern separate çreature was present inside me who called the shots and “did” things, which I don’t feel is the case really. Most of life simply happens. I had to answer a lot of question with “neutral” for that reason. I guess that’s why the results all came out slightly over or beneath the 50% score, but there was an N-score which was really low. The “meaning of these scores for my individual experiences” read as a sort of general horoscope you can find in a TV-guide – and a lot of laughter came out of me again. It was a funny thing to do and read.