Joseph Grammer's Blog - Posts Tagged "walk"
Morning Walk (Avoidance)
It's cold out today in Alexandria, and I have many things to do. Hard to remember sometimes that the thoughts in my head are merely voices, not who I actually am, but when I successfully recall this seemingly innocuous idea, I feel like I can tackle whatever it is I'm supposed to, uh, tackle. It's not an original idea, and certainly not mine, but let's call it "You're Mad Plural, Bro."
At any given time I have 1000 competing spikes of information, all vying for top billing in my DLPFC (dorsolateral prefrontal cortex), right in the front of my squishy brain. But when I'm stressed, or anxious, like this morning about the work I have to do for my client, it makes a big difference to realize, "Shit. That one obsessive sentence is not the be-all end-all of existence. It's just a single damn thing."
Normally, the hopped-up crowd of thoughts can seem overwhelming, or at least confusing, but at times like these I'm way grateful for their numbers. They outweigh the recurring alarm-bell thought of "DANGER. WORK. YOU'RE FUCKING UP, JERK-OFF."
Walks outside are good for fostering healthy brains. At least for mine. When I consider myself, I can see I'm more like a weird conduit or husk for all these thoughts and less the generator or factory (the conscious part of me, anyway). Shit kind of pops up in my head and I deal with it. Some psychology guy somewhere mentioned a technique in which you're all like, "I'm having the thought 'X'," which is supposed to distance that idea even further from your nervous system. Next-level dudes can say, "I'm aware that I'm having the thought 'X'," and then I guess you do that a lot and you're a Zen master. Word. C'est la conscience (coffee).
At any given time I have 1000 competing spikes of information, all vying for top billing in my DLPFC (dorsolateral prefrontal cortex), right in the front of my squishy brain. But when I'm stressed, or anxious, like this morning about the work I have to do for my client, it makes a big difference to realize, "Shit. That one obsessive sentence is not the be-all end-all of existence. It's just a single damn thing."
Normally, the hopped-up crowd of thoughts can seem overwhelming, or at least confusing, but at times like these I'm way grateful for their numbers. They outweigh the recurring alarm-bell thought of "DANGER. WORK. YOU'RE FUCKING UP, JERK-OFF."
Walks outside are good for fostering healthy brains. At least for mine. When I consider myself, I can see I'm more like a weird conduit or husk for all these thoughts and less the generator or factory (the conscious part of me, anyway). Shit kind of pops up in my head and I deal with it. Some psychology guy somewhere mentioned a technique in which you're all like, "I'm having the thought 'X'," which is supposed to distance that idea even further from your nervous system. Next-level dudes can say, "I'm aware that I'm having the thought 'X'," and then I guess you do that a lot and you're a Zen master. Word. C'est la conscience (coffee).
