Moment of Mind June 2020 – Finding Mindful Now

Moment of Mind

It can be a strange thing to live with a generalized anxiety disorder, and all the twists and turns my mind takes me on, while I run a business that provides guidance on how to support your system when you feel anxiety. It fits because I have an intimate relationship with this topic. And it’s strange because I know that what works for me won’t necessarily be where others find support. This is why the main goal I have is for people to turn toward their system and learn about it so they can choose supports. I think it’s important that we hear the truth of how people are supporting themselves right now during overlapping threats of systemic racism, economic inequities and a global pandemic. Supporting yourself is absolutely important right now.

In mindfulness you – the alive awareness that you are – is directing attention into the present. When that attention is turned inward, back to the center of what you are this is what I call presence. Presence for me is when my attention isn’t on my mind’s chatter about an imagined future or a rehashed memory, it’s in the present. What I’ve noticed in working with mindfulness practices is that these changing thoughts, feelings, and sensation experiences become containers for that attention. And when attention is contained in those thoughts, feelings and sensations it seems like I become those experiences, rather than the reality of those experiences moving through the awareness that I am. Our language even describes it this way. For example, if I say “I am afraid” my self-concept is fused with the fear concept the mind generates. Yet feeling fear is momentary and has gradations within that category. For example there’s a difference between feeling fear of getting wet when you go outside in the rain, feeling fear that you will lose your keys, and feeling fear that someone will attack you.

This tendency for the self identity to become fused with temporary states is one reason why therapists recommend people learn to identify and name how you are feeling throughout your day and in communication with others. It’s a type of taking account of these experiences, not because you forced them to be there, simply because you have more options about how to act in relation to these feeling states when you see that they don’t define you. “When I read all the news headlines today I felt helpless” rather than “I am helpless” is an example I found myself clarifying yesterday. Each time I take action on things directly in my influence – like conversations with friends, donations to non-profits, contacting elected officials and volunteering with mutual aid networks I don’t feel helpless.

Our society conditions us to think that we are the sum of our thoughts, feelings and body experiences. We aren’t taught to notice that who we are – the core alive awareness – is the same when are age 5 as at age 55 despite radical changes in the body, in the thoughts we think, in the beliefs our minds hold, and the sensations we experience. This is why aging can feel so strange – our internal core self can feel much younger, or even older, than our body’s state. It’s why an illness can be so all consuming – attention is pulled into thoughts and physical experiences and away from the core of who you are. This tendency is also why finding ways to support this system you’re in can be so helpful.

Major elements of self care for me right now include support for the what people call the “inner child”. Your self identity emerges intertwined with feelings of insecurity around the age of three years old. My invitation for you this week is to explore what it would be like for you to support that part of your self concept. What could you do for that inner toddler this week? Here are some things I’m exploring currently: 1) whenever I notice that there’s a pattern of compulsion happening – eating/scrolling/worrying/overthinking – I pause, turn toward my system, and take a breathing break where I inhale deeply through my nose and exhale audibly through my mouth 3 times – like I’m pushing out gunk through my audible sound (sometimes I make an ahhhh sound just to play with it), 2) I redirect attention away from any and all screens every day and channel that need for stimulus into movement or making something, and 3) I’m spending time daily immersing my senses in nature for at least 5 minutes at a time where I invite my mind to be curious.

If you try one of these I’d love to hear what you notice!

Love for Your Inner Science Nerd

I’m transitioning a bunch of mini-courses onto this new Podia platform, and am revisiting research on different topics related to supporting the human system when stress is arising. Earlier this year a group of researchers explored three different fields of study to understand how to best support people who experience depression to regulate, or be able to increase, their experience of positive feeling and emotion states. Since anxiety overlaps with feelings of depression for me, it seemed a worth review to read. A few newsletters ago I mentioned that cognitive behavior therapy (CBT), a form of therapy that seeks to help people train their minds to identify negative thoughts and beliefs and create new ones had not helped me much in the 15 years or so that I experienced chronic insomnia. Turns out that among people who experience depression who use the therapy, 54 percent return to a depression experience within two years of using CBT (Vittengl et al. 2007).

People who experience depression can often find sadness and negative bodily sensations (called negative affect) a primary state. They may not notice when they are experiencing a positive feeling or emotion (unless someone points out that it’s happening), and their system may have limits in generating positive feeling and emotion states (Silton et al 2020). In the literature review, researches indicate that savoring, or “to attend to, appreciate, and enhance the positive experiences in one’s life” (Bryant and Veroff, 2007, p. xi) allows people to notice that positive experiences arise, use different thinking processes (like naming it), and engage in actions (like directing one’s attention into the experience) to generate, maintain, or intensify a positive experience. The free course, The Science of Wellbeing, I recommended a few newsletters ago spends a lot of time explaining savoring and encouraging savoring practices. Stilton and colleagues (2020) bring up that although savoring and mindfulness are not the same, cultivating awareness in the present moment and allowing experiences to move through (also called nonjudgmental attention) is theorized to enhance the capacity for experiencing positive states. There are many theories about how mindfulness works – e.g. it increases the mind’s capacity for emotional awareness, expands the scope of recognized emotions and feeling states, and it shifts the tendency to judge changing states – or the habit of dampening positive experiences by focusing on negative thoughts (among other physical changes to the brain I won’t get into here). The authors conclude that more research is needed.

What I noticed in reading the review is that there’s a starting premise aimed at wanting people to be able to control how we feel. Of course! Built into this premise is the idea that outside events, or stimuli, are the primary cause of emotions – this is an outdated model of how the brain functions. Modern neuroscience indicates that the brain generates emotions based on a mixture of 4 ingredients – past experience (which is what I call social conditioning), current circumstance (which is the stimuli piece – one component), where you put your attention (which is where mindfulness can help), and affect – or physical states of the body like hunger, excitation, fatigue, interest, or pain (that are affected by what you eat, sleep, exercise and more). This is why one day you may experience eating your favorite food and feel a lot of pleasure, and the next day when your mind’s attention is in a worry loop eating your favorite food is a non starter, you don’t notice anything positive because the body is generating sensations connected to the worry loops and your mind dampens that potentially positive experience. Stress is the body’s preparation to act – and the body doesn’t know the difference between an immediate threat and one that your mind is thinking *could* happen in the future. So a mind is of course going to focus on a potential threat instead of a favorite food.

External stimuli is only one element the mind uses to generate emotions. All feeling, thinking and emotion experiences are generated inside-out. And the body will respond strongly to the thinking that’s moving through your mind as long as you give it all your attention. In those moments that experience becomes you. There is a confusion I see in the wellness field between the momentary directing of our attention – the basis of “emotional regulation” – and the idea of control. Control is this idea that we should be able to feel what we want when we want it and stop feeling what we don’t want when we don’t want it. It’s like capitalism of the emotions where you own and dominate emotions like conquests: be better! be shinier! be faster! be happier! don’t be how you are! Never mind that this is impossible. It’s like saying you can control the weather. That doesn’t mean we don’t have influence on our feeling states, it just means we can expect them to continue changing regardless of what we do. Life is running this show. My experience of emotional regulation is very different from the concept of control. In fact, it was my years of attempting to control my thinking and feeling states – and failing miserably – that encouraged a belief that something was deeply wrong with me and that I must be a terrible person. I mean CBT tells you that if you change your thoughts you’ll change how you feel right? It misses the fact that your brain creates emotions using more than only your thoughts. Nothing was wrong with me.

I now realize that this intelligence called life – the core of who we each are – is the source of resilience. It’s in everyone. It’s how we can keep getting up day after day even when we feel sick. It’s how we sleep, eat, take out the trash, even when many things in the world are terrible. It’s how we can show up for a friend even when our mind has all kinds of negative thinking. That resilience is WHY we seek to feel better. Emotional regulation for me is about noticing the weather (is it raining?), attending to the experience (noticing that this is a changing experience and not me), supporting the system when there’s a storm (do you want to put on a raincoat or use an umbrella?), inviting in new experiences because they are changing anyway without denying the storm (can you look around and see any dry spots under the trees or any rainbows at the edge of the storm?), while acknowledging that I’m not in charge of this system and the weather does not affect the core of who I am. This last one is the most challenging to recognize because it’s counter to social conditioning. It became apparent through revisiting stages of my life and asking myself – if you aren’t resilient, what else explains that you kept going? Life, this force that is the core of who you really are, continues to bring a steady stream of changing experiences. Please don’t take my word for it. I invite you to ask yourself that same question.

Sources:

Bryant, F. B., & Veroff, J. (2007). Savoring: A new model of positive experience. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.
Silton, R.L, Skymba, H.V., Bryant, F.B., Kahrilas, I.J., Smith, J. & Heller, W. (2020). Regulating positive emotions: Implications for promoting well-being in individuals with depression, Emotion, 29, 1, 93-97.
Vittengl, J. R., Clark, L. A., Dunn, T. W., & Jarrett, R. B. (2007). Reducing relapse and recurrence in unipolar depression: A comparative meta- analysis of cognitive-behavioral therapy’s effects. Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, 75, 475–488.