Changing My Mind
The brain-body relationship is complex and endlessly fascinating.
I listened to this podcast yesterday. Here are a few of my takeaways:
Just as you cannot open and close a door or window simultaneously, the brain cannot experience anxiety and curiosity at the same time.
If you're worrying about the future, bring the timeframe in closer, then closer, then closer still -- until it is right now.
Rather than thinking of yourself as "an anxious person," it can be helpful to work with shifting this to something more like, "I am a person who sometimes experiences anxiety."
Thoughts are not identities.
One thing that has stayed with me a decade later from work with a really skilled therapist back in Burlington, during a tumultuous and thus deeply enlightening period of my life, was that my mind had become something of a refuge.
I would slip into thought loops, not because they delivered me to changes that would make my life calmer and more grounded or reveal useful solutions to sticky challenges, but because they were deeply familiar.
Instead of feeling feelings, I could burrow into mind mazes no one else could see.
Dr. Judson Brewer describes the trigger-habit-reward loop. Interestingly, the trigger is the least important of these. The habit, in my case, was the thinking itself, and the reward? An attempt to secure some kind of understanding, as if I could cogitate my way into ease. (Spoiler alert: Nope.)
I continue to train myself out of these thinking habits that surely began much earlier in my life, through many forms of mindfulness practice and by recognizing when I'm going over and over things and getting "lost in thought."
Simple practices such as noting what is actually happening in the moment -- the white noise of the fridge hum, drips from the eaves outside the kitchen windows, a slightly rumbly tummy asking for breakfast -- are all the basis for so much of my writing practice, which is why so many of my posts begin with the words, "In this moment..." or "I am sitting..."
In moments of stress, the least effective thing I can do is to try to figure things out.
In fact, I made a pact with myself years ago that when "try to" and "figure out" came on stage, that was my cue to exit the theater and get some fresh air. Better to step away, literally breathe, and come back to solutions-oriented thinking when I've given myself the chance to return to the body.
After all, much of what we feel an urgent need to "figure out" resolves all by itself. That which doesn't -- the things that truly need our attention and care -- will still be there, and we're much better off addressing them responsively and not reactively if we've given ourselves some time to come back to ourselves.
Obviously, there are times when things are NOT ok, and it's for these that the protective mechanisms of our brain are designed to kick in. It's just that so much of the time, they are in overdrive even when we don't need them, and our ability to discern between actual and perceived danger is unreliable.
Learning how to be with distress, learning how to be with uncertainty, learning how to cultivate an inner experience of ease when the world presents no shortage of things to worry about -- these are tall orders, to be sure.
We may not ever become perfect at it, nor is perfection the goal.
By becoming friendlier and more curious towards ourselves, especially in difficult moments, we can slowly transform our relationship to anxiety into something less confining and more generative.
Over time, we might even come to trust in our own ability to move through moments (or periods) of unease without losing ourselves to thought loops and other short-circuiting habits.