One of the most difficult aspects of overcoming mental illness is our own relationship to our thoughts. Even just reading that first sentence, some might be going “??”. Because to a lot people, We are our thoughts. Separating the two concepts doesn’t make sense.
In practicing mindfulness and meditation, you realize that these two things (thoughts and self) are very much seperate. Our thoughts shift and change based on the content we take in from the world. If you’re in a different part of the world, or in another time, you’re bound to think differently. And yet, as our lives change and we take in new content, there’s something that remains steady inside us. That steady thing is who we are. The thoughts are mostly entertainment and distraction.
Having that separation between what we think and who we are makes a huge difference in overcoming depression and anxiety. It gives way to the idea that we can actually change the way we think. The main hurdle is that we don’t always want to change the way think.
Even when someone can recognize that the way they’re thinking is making them feel anxious, stressed, sad, depressed, etc, they’re often hesitant to change that way of thinking. Our thoughts can be so luring, so captivating. The plot lines are designed just for us, based around all our insecurities. The best kind of content we could take in is right here, playing inside our minds.
The thing is, it feels so important. The idea of living without it can actually be terrifying. It makes sense. If your thoughts are like “you’re not going to have enough money to get through the month” or “you said all the wrong things at dinner and everyone thinks of ill of you now”, it doesn’t feel like you can just let those things go. What if everyone does hate you and what if you actually do run out of money before the end of the month?
Well, those things might be true. But, if you’re someone with chronic anxiety, they’re probably not true nearly as often as you think they are. Letting go of worrying about everything means that you can actually think more clearly about the real issues in your life. I think of anxiety as an alarm that’s going off, telling us something is wrong. If that alarm is going off all the time, you can’t tell when it’s a real concern and when it’s just the breeze.
Depression feels equally as important but in a completely different way. For depressed people, to let go of the depressed thoughts might mean totally changing their self-concept. Depression comes with a lot of negative self-worth. Someone with depression might think that if they “delude” themselves into positive thinking, they’re living a lie. Because really, and only they can know this, they are unbelievably terrible and deeply unloveable. This line of thinking is so powerful for them, because they so badly want the opposite, but their thoughts have convinced them and shaped their reality. When you’re severely depressed, it’s unbelievably hard to separate between thoughts and Self. Neuroscience explains that this is because of the Default Mode Network, but we won’t get into that too much now.
The process of recognizing the unimportance of one’s thoughts is certainly not easy. Recognizing our thoughts at all takes practice, and it’s often unpleasant. (Have I convinced you?). Mindfulness and meditation are not about an easy fix, even though at a glance, they do seem easy. They’re about changing your mind in a very fundamental way so that we don’t have to live with quite as much suffering on a daily basis. We’ll always experience pain and suffering, but at least we can reduce the amount that we are causing ourselves.
