This post is a passage from my upcoming book, Daddy.
Our minds think and feel constantly — even when we’re asleep. The internal racket can be deafening to the point that we come to mistake each of our passing thoughts and emotions for our essential selves.
If an alien landed on my rooftop and asked me for a sample of what it’s like to live inside a human mind, I would tell it to take a sixteen-hour flight to Sydney with a seatmate who won’t stop talking. That’s what it’s like to just sit and think, sometimes. Then, I’d tell the alien to imagine that a sadistic flight attendant (let’s call him Todd) allows us to change seats, but only at random and not at a time of our choosing. While we might relish sitting next to Betty White for a few hours, what happens when we’re led down the aisle to be seated beside Donald Trump? In ``Song of Myself,” Walt Whitman famously wrote, “I contain multitudes.” No doubt, we each contain multitudes, and wrangling this motley crew of fellow passengers into some sort of productive working relationship is essential if we are ever to find happiness in life.
Of all the approaches I’ve learned about (and utilized on myself and my patients), I have found mindfulness meditation to be the single most impactful and accessible.
Personally, I have found that mindfulness meditation is an invaluable tool to help calm the mind and find greater equanimity with the diverse planeload of passengers we each carry inside. Familiar to most as a component of the vast and complex system of Buddhist and Hindu spiritual philosophy, mindfulness meditation has gained popularity in the West in recent decades as a stand-alone, non-secular approach to stress reduction. First popularized by the research of Jon Kabat-Zinn, Ph.D., I had long avoided looking too deeply into mindfulness meditation because I felt it was unscientific and had negative associations with New Age charlatans and middle-aged men with ponytails. However, a few years ago, something finally clicked after I took some time to carefully examine the overwhelming empirical support for the benefits of meditation from study after study coming out of major universities. I finally had to ask myself a very rational question about something that appeared highly irrational: “If even a fraction of what researchers are claiming is true, then why aren’t you giving this a fair chance?”
Managing Mental Time Travel and Other Distractions
The most popular way to practice mindfulness meditation is to find a quiet spot where you won’t be interrupted. Then, sit in a comfortable, upright position, with your eyes closed. Next, turn your attention to the process of the exchange of air as it passes in and out of your nostrils. Don’t take deep “gulps” or try to control your breath in a forced manner. Just breathe naturally through your nose, not your mouth. When you notice that your mind has drifted off, gently guide your attention back to your breath in a non-judgmental fashion. Simply set a timer and try it for about ten minutes a day. That’s it: just sit down and shut up.
This approach is often referred to as “anchored” meditation because we are using our breath as an anchor point for our attention. Inevitably, the first thing people notice when they attempt this type of meditation is just how often their focus wanders away from their anchor point. Even under the best of circumstances, you will notice that your mind will replay events from the past or delve into future concerns. This mental “time travel” is typically layered with complicated feelings, judgments, and associations that our minds find highly stimulating. Consequently, when you sit down to meditate, you should fully expect your attention to be drawn to the voice of that talkative seatmate from your flight to Sydney. If you’re anything like me, he’ll probably start guffawing with Donald Trump from across the aisle. This does not mean it is a failed meditation: this is what meditation is. Over time, you will learn to observe your thoughts as they flit across your awareness rather than identifying with every single one.
The Goal of Mindfulness Meditation May Not Be What You Think
Unfortunately, those new to meditation are prone to regularly assessing their efforts, feeling frustrated they are not “better” at doing something that, on its face, seems so straightforward. Many people make the mistake of trying to measure the relative success or failure of a single meditation based on how long they were able to keep their minds focused on their breath and how relaxed they feel after finishing.
In my work coaching patients through the ins and outs of developing a mindfulness practice, I’ve found these judgments can often be traced to a pop-culture misconception that achieving a Zen state (an empty mind, free of worldly concerns, absent of thought and feeling) is the goal of meditation. While these sentiments may be valid in some regards, it’s important for beginners to approach this process with humility, and not to get ahead of themselves by imagining themselves to be on par with a Tibetan monk who has been practicing since childhood and has renounced all worldly obligations and belongings.
Because mindfulness meditation and most self-care strategies appear quite simple and straightforward (it doesn’t help that people who are meditating look like they are napping in an upright position), most novices approach these practices with unexamined hubris. Although we all sometimes wish for an off switch to the parade of thoughts and feelings that constantly vie for our attention, I’m sorry to tell you that there is simply no such thing: there are no grand tricks to be shared because the system cannot be gamed. What we do possess, however, are powerful self-care practices (meditation, exercise, healthy diet, psychotherapy, cultivating core strengths and positive psychological traits) that enhance overall health and well-being. Rather than an on/off switch, these practices can be thought of as analogous to a dimmer switch that adjusts our internal settings by incremental degrees over an extended period of time.
Building the Muscle of Present Focus
In many respects, the practice of meditation should be thought of as an activity like physical exercise. When we work out, we build our strength by engaging our muscles in repetitive movements against a force (weight + gravity). In meditation, the strength of our non-judgmental, present awareness (not an “empty” mind) is the muscle we are trying to build. The persistent, non-judgmental redirection of our wandering mind back to the breath might be thought of as the equivalent of doing a rep at the gym, building up the muscle of non-critical, present focus.
It’s important for those new to meditation to understand that you may or may not feel more relaxed during or immediately following a sitting — but that’s not really the point. Remember that you might feel nauseous, sore, and worn out after a particularly intense workout. Then, after some time exercising in this way, you’ll suddenly realize you can lift a couch all by yourself. What the practice of mindfulness meditation facilitates is a growing power to non-judgmentally observe each present moment without reflexively involving ourselves in the types of mental time travel to which we have become accustomed. Therefore, “mindfulness” refers to being as attentive as we can possibly be to each passing moment as they arise throughout our day-to-day life — not just during the times when we are “officially” meditating.
Mental Fusion With Reactive Thoughts Make Us Act in Bizarre Ways
Most people scarcely recognize that they live much of their lives in a state of autopilot. While our bodies are moving through the present moment, our minds are constantly engrossed in a form of mental time travel, only partially attentive to what is happening around us. When we’re on autopilot, we exist largely in a reactive state, our responses grounded in the well-defined, self-limiting schemas reflected in the select neural pathways of the brain. On autopilot, our awareness can be said to be psychologically fused with our reactive thoughts and emotions. People vary greatly in the degree to which they are fused with their thoughts and emotions, with our capacity to observe these passing phenomena fluctuating over the course of a day (or a lifetime) depending on the nature of the events and the demands at hand. Those at the extreme end of this continuum have no objective distance between their thoughts, feelings, and awareness. There is little sense of being a detached observer of one’s inner experience. Like breathing, these reactive thoughts and emotions are viewed as an automatic part of the self — they occur without warning and require no mental effort. From someone fused with their reactive thoughts, you will often hear statements like, “This is just who I am” or “I’d have no idea about how to go about things differently.”
For those suffering from PTSD, Complex Trauma, and BPD, the sense of fusion with reactive thoughts and emotions is pervasive — much the same can be said of phobias, severe anxiety, and depressive disorders. Psychological material related to traumatic events becomes the locus of all automatic responses. In the midst of my own dissociative states and traumatic responses, I treated my every feeling and thought as a fact. To understand just how problematic this approach can be, let’s return to the example of our talkative seatmate on our flight to Sydney.
Let’s say we hit some mild turbulence, and he starts freaking out, racing up and down the aisle screaming, “We’re all going to die!” Then, he starts demanding that you put on a parachute and jump out of the airplane. How would you react? If you are fused with your thoughts and feelings, it’s very likely you’d start looking for an emergency exit to pry open and anxiously wait to be suited up. Clinically, this is the definition of “psychosis.” While we all sometimes have thoughts and feelings that might otherwise be known as “batshit,” fortunately, few of us take action on these thoughts because we recognize them as dangerous extremes. Nevertheless, these types of thoughts and feelings tend to persist, causing great mental anguish and leaving us puzzled over how to calm these irrational parts of ourselves. If you take the Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy approach to manage these experiences, you would, in essence, ask your irrational seatmate to suddenly — some might say magically — become rational. You’d ask that he somehow break through his panic and logically consider the evidence that you are safe based on mathematical calculations involving atmospheric disturbances and g-force stresses on aluminum welds. Perhaps as a follow-up, you would tell him to write down the alternative scenarios where the plane won’t go down, and then ask him to distract himself with the in-flight magazine. Or maybe you’d try the “power of positive thinking” approach and tell him to “believe really hard that the plane is not going to crash.”
I don’t know if you’ve ever tried to reason with someone who is being swept under by powerful emotions, but you’re not likely to get very far if you start off by trying to deny their reality. Often, the frightened person will respond defensively and double down on their convictions. Although the CBT approach is not off target, you would first need to understand this passenger’s motivations, misguided though they may be. For example, would it change your approach to know that your seatmate has survived a plane crash? That he’d been trapped in the wreckage for days, watching his fellow passengers die one by one? Maybe he had the chance to parachute out of the plane and bring back help, but refused because he was too afraid? Would it help to understand that amid powerful emotions, our physiology is in a state of fight, flight, fawn, or freeze? There is adrenaline and other powerful hormones being released into the body, and blood being siphoned away from the prefrontal cortex (the seat of executive functioning) and into our limbs.
Self-Protective Reactions Can Spell Self-Sabotage
Considering the full context of our panicked seatmate, you can see that from his perspective, he is acting as a vigilant protector, sounding the alarm against danger. Leading with a dismissal of his powerful feelings, criticizing him, or telling him to white knuckle it until our flight attendant comes along to reassign us to another seat is tantamount to a failure of empathy against ourselves (remember, he is part of us). Besides, what happens if Todd next seats us at the side of Trump, who proceeds to tell us that he’s going to replace that “disappointing loser,” the pilot, and fly the plane himself? This might be enough for some people to assume the crash position, living out what is left of their life in a state of hopelessness (a.k.a the “living dead”).
To add yet another layer of complexity to our action-packed trip, let’s say Todd reappears with a cart full of goodies that includes bourbon, Twinkies, oxycodone, and sex. Maybe then we can settle in for a while, distracting ourselves with our smartphone (Reddit, Pornhub, Candy Crush…) or the 500 channels of free programming embedded in the screen in front of us. Sooner or later, these addictions and distractions will wear thin, and we awaken from our stupor to find our seatmate buckling us into that parachute while Trump bangs his tiny fists on the door of the cockpit, screaming, “You’re fired!”
While experiencing particularly intense thoughts and feelings, our minds and bodies enter a state of panic that tells us, “This experience must end, right this second, no matter what.” That is the moment when many of us unwittingly make decisions that compound and prolong the problem at hand. While most of us can non-judgmentally observe the personalities of many of our seatmates while the flight is smooth, building the “muscle” of non-critical focus allows us to access these observational powers more easily during times of turbulence, providing greater psychological ballast during moments when we are being swamped by thoughts and emotions.
Being practiced in mindfulness doesn’t mean you won’t experience powerful thoughts and emotions; in fact, once the cobwebs of your reflexive responses begin to be cleared away, you’re likely to notice a richer complexity and greater nuance to your inner life. And in the observing space that opens up, you’ll begin to see that all overpowering thoughts and emotions have a sequence. Like a wave on the ocean, they gather force until reaching a crescendo, crashing down on the shore only to melt away on the sand.
It’s Time for a Heart-to-Heart With Your Inner Todd
We don’t just work out to have muscles while we’re at the gym — we do so because we want our bodies to be fit all the time. In much the same way, meditation improves the conditioning of our awareness (some refer to this as “stabilizing” our awareness) and increases our capacity to sit with powerful emotions and self-soothe during times of crisis. If we don’t put the time in to mentally “work out” with mindfulness meditation, how can we expect our overwhelmed seatmates to calm themselves during moments of panic? Practicing mindfulness allows us to step outside our reactive minds and take a clear look at the operating principles of our most problematic fellow passengers. While some might appear to be villains bent on destruction, once unmasked, you will come to recognize the traumatized plane crash survivor, or the terrified, unloved little boy seated next to you. Approaching your panicked seatmate with compassion also opens the space for the physiology to return to a state of equilibrium after the release of hormones triggered by the fight, flight, fawn, and freeze reactions. If you provide yourself with greater emotional space during times of turbulence, you’re more likely to avoid fear-based, reactive decisions like jumping out of a plane in mid-flight before you’re sure it’s actually going down.
These days, when I’m feeling particularly low, I deploy a subtle, but powerful reframing of my emotional environment by recognizing that “I feel depressed,” or “I feel angry,” rather than the global statements “I am depressed,” and “I am angry.” In other words, I am a planeload full of different passengers, not solely the depressed guy in 14A. During the worst years of my crisis, Todd left me sitting with that depressed guy far more often (and far longer) than I could bear. I drank, popped pills, and slept my days away to try to numb myself to the pain. I would deny that there was anyone else on the plane to sit with and imagined most people lived their lives in first class. Whenever I happened to be briefly seated next to one of my positive emotions, I was suspicious of their motives. I’d say to myself, “This isn’t real. Don’t get too comfortable… Todd is going to come along any second and put me back with the depressed guy again.”
While it can feel truly awful to be seated next to our most troublesome seatmates, according to the Buddha, a fundamental source of human suffering is attempting to cling to the things we love while attempting to evade the things we don’t like. This evasion is, however, not actually possible. In fact, facing things that make you uncomfortable — such as change — is the only way to achieve wholeness. After all, the one certainty in life we can rely on is change. Mindfulness meditation helps us to accept with grace the fact that we have little control over what life (the ultimate sadistic flight attendant) hands us. And you know what? Sometimes, Todd does seat you next to Betty White!
Melding memoir, science, and social history to tell the story of PTSD in a new, relatable way, Daddy is out November 2023. Preorders are now available through Raab and Co.