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January 15 - February 11, 2020
One of the most critical facts we learned was that there is a difference between those of us who have experienced an episode of depression and those who have not: depression forges a connection in the brain between sad mood and negative thoughts, so that even normal sadness can reawaken major negative thoughts.
huge leap in our understanding of depression when they found that mood was strongly shaped by thoughts—that it wasn’t necessarily events themselves that drove our emotions but our beliefs about or interpretations of those events. Now we know there is much more to the story. Not only can thoughts affect mood, but in those of us who get depressed, mood can affect thoughts in ways that can then make an already low mood even lower.
But sadness can give way to depression when the sadness turns into endemically harsh negative thoughts and feelings. This morass of negative thinking then generates tension, aches, pains, fatigue, and turmoil. These, in turn, feed more negative thinking; the depression gets worse and worse and, with it, the hurt. We only compound our feelings of depletion if we deal with them by giving up activities that normally nourish us, like getting together with friends and family who might be a real support for us. Our exhaustion is compounded if we deal with it by simply working harder.
The themes of worthlessness and self-blame permeate the list. If we’re feeling okay at the moment, we might see quite clearly that these thoughts are distortions. But when we’re depressed, they can seem like the absolute truth. It’s as if depression is a war we wage against ourselves, and we marshal every bit of negative propaganda we can muster as ammunition. But who wins this war?
The fact that we often take these toxic and distorted thoughts about ourselves as unassailable truth only cements the connection between sad feelings and self-critical thought streams. Knowing this is vitally important to understanding why depression takes hold in some people and not in others or on some occasions and not on others. When such thoughts have affected us on one occasion, they remain ready to be triggered on other occasions. And when they are triggered, they drag our mood down even further, draining what little energy we have at a time when we need all our resources to cope with
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Eighty percent of those who suffer from depression consult their physician because of aches and pains in the body that they cannot explain. Much of this is linked to the tiredness and fatigue that come with depression.
When a negative thought or image arises in the mind, there will be a sense of contraction, tightening, or bracing in the body somewhere. It may be a frown, a stomach churning, a pallor in the skin, or a tension in the lower back—all part of a preparation to freeze, fight, or run.
Whenever Alice’s mood began to sink, and she felt her energy was just draining out of her, she consciously adopted a strategy of giving up her “unimportant” and “nonessential” leisure activities, which actually gave her pleasure, such as seeing friends or just going out for fun. As she saw it, this strategy made sense because it meant that she could focus her dwindling energies (which she viewed as a strictly limited fixed resource) on her more “important” and “essential” commitments and responsibilities. This is understandable, except that her essential commitments included being the perfect
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In giving up the “nonessential and unimportant” leisure activities that might have lifted her mood and extended rather than depleted her reserves of energy, Alice deprived herself of one of the simplest and most effective strategies for reversing a decline into depression.
What’s the point?—Nothing’s going to make any difference to the way I feel, so I’ll save myself the effort, and stay in and rest—that will make me feel better. Unfortunately, as Jim was lying on the couch resting, his mind simply drifted into well-worn self-critical grooves. These, of course, all combined to create the perfect setup for the persistence and deepening of his depression. Jim’s “rests” ended up making him feel even worse.
Depression makes us behave differently, and our behavior can also feed depression. Depression certainly affects the choices we make regarding what to do and not do, and how to act. If we’re convinced we’re “no good” or unworthy, how likely are we to pursue the things that we value in life? And when we make choices informed by a depressive state of mind, they’re more than likely to keep us stuck in our unhappiness.
Why, then, do depression and unhappiness outlast the situations that trigger them? Or why, sometimes, does a sense of malaise and dissatisfaction go on and on? The short answer is that these emotions persist because we have emotional reactions to our own emotions that actually keep them going.
Huh, I hadn’t thought of it like that. It’s sort of a double whammy then.
Our reactions to unhappiness can transform what might otherwise be a brief, passing sadness into persistent dissatisfaction and unhappiness. The problem with persistent and recurrent depression is not “getting sad” in the first place. Sadness is a natural mind-state, an inherent part of being human. It is neither realistic nor desirable to imagine that we can or should get rid of it. The problem is what happens next, immediately after the sadness comes. The problem is not the sadness itself, but how our minds react to the sadness.
Over our lifetime, we may have come to dislike or even hate emotions such as fear, sadness, or anger, in ourselves and in others. If we have, for example, been taught not to “be so emotional,” we will have picked up the message that expression of emotion is somewhat unseemly and may have assumed it wasn’t okay to feel emotion either. Or maybe we remember clearly the drawn-out feeling of an emotional experience like grief and now react with dread when a hint of similar feelings arises. When we react negatively—with aversion—to our own negative emotions, treating them as enemies to be overcome,
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You’re also aware that the sun is shining. You think, It’s a lovely day; I should be feeling happy. Let that thought sink in: I should be feeling happy. How do you feel now? If you feel worse, you’re not alone. Virtually everyone reports the same response. Why? Because, in the case of our moods, the very act of focusing on the gap, comparing how we are feeling with how we want to feel (or how we think we should feel) makes us feel unhappy, taking us even further away from how we want to be.
You may think of this self-focused, self-critical frame of mind as brooding. Psychologists also call it rumination. When we ruminate, we become fruitlessly preoccupied with the fact that we are unhappy and with the causes, meanings, and consequences of our unhappiness. Research has repeatedly shown that if we have tended to react to our sad or depressed moods in these ways in the past, then we are likely to find the same strategy volunteering to “help” again and again when our mood starts to slide. And it will have the same effect: we’ll get stuck in the very mood from which we are trying to
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We ruminate when we feel low because we believe that it will reveal a way to solve our problems. But research shows that rumination does exactly the opposite: our ability to solve problems actually deteriorates markedly during rumination. All the evidence seems to point to the stark truth that rumination is part of the problem, not part of the solution.
When has this ever worked for me? I can't think of a single incident past what I thought 20 minutes later. Remembering terrible incidents years later hasn't offered any new solutions or done anything other than just made for feeling badly. Ruminating is a serious waste of time and just makes you feel like shit.
Being mode is the antidote to the problems that the doing mode of mind creates.
Get out of our heads and learn to experience the world directly, experientially, without the relentless commentary of our thoughts. We might just open ourselves up to the limitless possibilities for happiness that life has to offer us.
• Stop trying to force life to be a certain way because we’re uncomfortable right now. We’ll be able to see that wanting things to be different from how they are right now is where rumination begins.
As the Buddhists say, Desire is what makes us unhappy.
Mindfulness is the awareness that emerges through paying attention on purpose, in the present moment, and non-judgmentally to things as they are.
Both Christ and Buddha spoke out about being judgmental. Perhaps I’m slightly different senses though in judging others we are very likely to judge ourselves as well.
Mindfulness means paying attention to things as they actually are in any given moment, however they are, rather than as we want them to be.
mindfulness is experiential, and it focuses directly on present-moment experience. By contrast, when we ruminate, our minds are preoccupied with thoughts and abstractions that are far away from direct sensory experience. Rumination propels our thoughts into the past or into an imagined future.
The habit of judging ourselves severely disguises itself as an attempt to help us to live better lives and to be better people, but in actuality the habit of judging winds up functioning as an irrational tyrant that can never be satisfied.
Mea culpa.
emotions. Our emotions are not the enemy, after all, but messages that reconnect us in the most basic and intimate of ways with the adventure and experience of being alive.
Mindfulness is not paying more attention but paying attention differently and more wisely—with the whole mind and heart, using the full resources of the body and its senses.
We often relive remembered emotions or prelive anticipated ones. Not only do we remove ourselves from the only reality that we can directly experience, the here and now, but we also suffer the agonies of events that are either long past or may never actually happen. No wonder we can end up feeling worse than we started out.
chapter, in doing mode the mind selects only that information that is immediately relevant to attaining that goal. Without being conscious of doing it at all, we screen out much of what is available to our senses, even to the extent of not noticing at all the person to whom we are speaking. Psychologists call this change blindness.
It turns out that focusing on just this moment, no matter how apparently trivial the task, had benefits she had not counted on. For one thing, it seemed to “pull the plug” on her tendency to prelive the future. For another, it prevented her mind from getting trapped in the doing mode that she had previously used to avoid imagined catastrophes.
He tried to think grand thoughts, philosophical speculations, to worry about the state of the universe. Anything. He started to run low on things to think about and even got a little bored. Where had all his thinking gone? Soon the “best” thoughts he could get seemed a little worn, like an old coat that had become threadbare. Then he noticed gaps in his thinking. Oh dear, this was what he had been told to avoid. Another failure.
He had all the best thoughts. Snort!
The teacher was pleased because the novice was now ready to recognize something of real significance: You cannot force the mind. And if you try to, you won’t like what comes of it.
Research by Drs. Wenzlaff, Bates, and associates shows that this can work for a little while—but at a huge cost: those who put more effort into keeping negatives out of mind end up being more depressed than those who do not. From such research, many psychologists have confirmed the conclusion long suggested by meditative wisdom: trying to suppress unwanted thoughts is not a very effective way to stabilize and clear our minds.
9. As best you can, bring a quality of kindness to your awareness, perhaps seeing the repeated wanderings of the mind as opportunities to cultivate greater patience and acceptance within yourself and some compassion toward your experience.
labile
labile /ˈleɪbɪl, ˈleɪbʌɪl/ I. adjective 1. ‹technical› liable to change; easily altered. • persons whose blood pressure is more labile will carry an enhanced risk of heart attack. • we may be the most labile culture in all history. 2. ‹technical› of or characterized by emotions which are easily aroused, freely expressed, and tend to alter quickly and spontaneously. • mood seemed generally appropriate, but the patient was often labile. 3. ‹technical› [Chemistry] easily broken down or displaced. • the breakage of labile bonds. • [in combination] a heat-labile protein. II. derivatives lability /ləˈbɪlɪti / noun – origin late Middle English
Happily, such occasions happen so often that we will have countless opportunities to witness the seething pressure of the doing mind, perhaps perceiving it with greater clarity than ever before, uncomfortable as that may sometimes be. These occasions also provide us, crucially, with valuable opportunities to cultivate the skills of releasing ourselves from the doing mode and returning to the more mindful being mode.
This is why the instructions for the mindfulness-of-breathing practice encourage us to congratulate ourselves at first when we notice our awareness is no longer on the breath. In that very moment, it can be helpful to note briefly what is on our mind and name what is going on (for example, “thinking, thinking,” or “planning, planning,” or “worrying, worrying”). Whatever the content of the thought or impulse, the task is the same: to note what is on our mind in this moment and then to gently escort our awareness back to our breathing, renewing our contact with the in-breath or the out-breath,
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What is thinking, thinking of planning, planning? Why the double words?
Irritation is closely associated with frustration, and frustration arises when an expectation or a goal is thwarted.
once we have felt a sense of peace, even for the briefest of moments during a session of practice, the doing mind’s habitual tendency to look for goals naturally kicks in and generates the expectation or hope that we will have the same experience in the next moment or the next time we do the practice. And if that experience doesn’t repeat itself according to our expectations, how easily we can feel disappointment and irritation. And even if we recognize the expectation and the irritation, we can still easily feel critical of ourselves for getting irritated.
So if irritation arises in any moment, it may be helpful not to take the route of judgment and fantasy, but rather simply to note it as “irritation,” labeling it as a way of acknowledging it for what it is. Then we can gently redirect our attention back to the breath.
Be gentle with yourself. Don’t berate yourself when meditating just accept and repeat awareness off the breath again. Then catch the distraction and go back to breath awareness. No need to be angry with you mind. It’s just doing what it does but you are gently training it to do something new. Which is to shut the hell up for a change. Ha!
Vince has learned to notice the drifting and bring his attention back to the breath without giving himself a hard time about it. He has stopped getting so frustrated by the fact that his attention tends to get hijacked by his various thoughts. Not that it doesn’t continue to happen. But learning to witness this whole process without reacting to it so automatically has allowed him to refocus on the sensations of breathing much more reliably than when he is caught up in being self-judgmental.
Isn’t this true of everything? Has getting all pissy about things going wrong every helped to fix them? So why do we continue to do that to ourselves?
Beginning again does not mean we have made an error. It is the heart of the practice, not a deviation from it.
Exactly!
Through repeated practice we see over and over again that each in-breath is a new beginning and each out-breath a fresh letting go. We begin to see that the shift from one mode of mind to another can be virtually instantaneous. In this way the practice is always giving us the chance to begin again, in this moment, with this breath. If our mind wanders 100 times during a period of formal practice, then we simply, and good-naturedly, bring it back 100 times.
If we look at the whole pile, our heart sinks, our energy may fail, and the TV will suddenly seem more attractive than it had before. But we also know that if we are able to focus on the one log we’ve got to move in this moment, and give our full attention to that, and then take on the next one, all of a sudden the chore becomes doable. The point is not simply to fool ourselves into pretending the pile is not large, but to explore the possibility that we can enter a different mode of mind, a mode in which we attend to the quality of the present moment, rather than anticipating how exhausted we
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Carry one log, not the whole wood pile. We get overwhelmed by the wood pile, but if we break it down to one log and repeat that act it isn’t so terrible. We psyche ourselves out of things by looking at the whole instead of facing the parts one at a time.
If we look more closely at what is happening in the preceding scenario, we can see that if the morning starts with sensations of physical sluggishness, then thoughts about this sluggishness may surface along with emotional reactions. The effects of these emotions in the body only strengthen the sense of physical heaviness. This scenario illustrates how easily we can get trapped in a cycle in which our thoughts about our body sensations can drag us down into depression.
As we have seen, in doing mode we see the world only indirectly, through the veil of our thinking and labeling. If we think about our bodies in the usual way (from the perspective of our heads), then as soon as we feel listless on awaking, our mind fills with ideas about the body, what is going on in our lives, everything. This way of paying attention will just make things worse. If, instead, we begin to focus on the body from the perspective of being mode, we open to a direct sensing of the body itself. Moment by moment, we can become aware of body sensations but now in a new way, a way that
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Body Scan Meditation
Page 104 instructions begin
If we find the body scan peaceful and calming, we can simply be aware of these feelings experientially. To experience feelings is to know that they come and they go; they arise and they pass away. The point is to be here for them, to be directly aware of them as they are, whether pleasant, unpleasant, or neutral and barely noticeable.
It is the basis of a profound insight: when we stop trying to attain pleasant feelings, such feelings are more likely to emerge by themselves. With this insight may come another profound lesson: we already have the capacity to experience peace and happiness deep within ourselves.
stop trying so hard.
When we stop trying to force pleasant feelings, they are freer to emerge on their own. When we stop trying to resist unpleasant feelings, we may find that they can drift away by themselves. When we stop trying to make something happen, a whole world of fresh and unanticipated experiences may become accessible to us.
“Before,” she said, “I would get into a tizzy and start throwing mental pots and pans about the place—just in my mind, you understand.
Great image! Funny the stuff we do in our heads!
