This is the second entry in an admittedly idiosyncratic miniseries about the intersection of health, anxiety, and the mind. Here's the first. To paraphrase one of my favorite neuroscientists, our thoughts chase us out of bed. They are our constant companions through the day. It can feel like our thoughts are bludgeoning us to sleep. When you stop and think about it, which you are cognitively obligated to do as you read this sentence, you probably feel more like an audience than an actor inside your own mind, more or less forced to watch helplessly as your mind's eye throws an array of images on the inside of your skull. When you consider the thoughts you have in a typical five minutes, an overwhelming percentage are probably not things you feel like you're actively "thinking," so much as commercials for various plans and anxieties. (Here's an article from PsychCentral about this.)
It's somehow trite and profound to stop and realize that you are the only one inside your head, and the seemingly random broadcast of mental events you experience in a day is, well, you, and not the equivalent of pharmaceutical commercials you sit through until the real program returns.
Is this important? If you care about your health and well-being, it is important. That's because, much like ads on TV, your mental adverts have an agenda. They are trying to hook you with a clever tactic—usually some form of fear—and make you do their bidding. The intentions of your thoughts can be pure—anxiety about an unlocked door, for instance, can come from a natural impulse to protect your family and possessions. But there is a threshold where this sort of anxiety ceases to be productive, and indeed can begin to subtly warp your relationship with consciousness in an unhealthy way. This can have a direct impact on your health. Learned helplessness a psychological phenomenon that goes a little something like this:
In
Scenario Number 1, I give you electric shocks until
you pull a lever in your immediate vicinity. When you pull the lever, I stop. You walk away
from this experience less-than-happy with me. Next time we play "this
game," you pull the lever immediately, and I stop immediately, and all is well. (Sort of.) Your feathers are ruffled, but you're prepared for the next time we play, because you've figured out the system.In Scenario Number 2, I shock you, and you pull the lever, and I keep shocking you. You are unhappy, and hate me, but that's beside the point. The next time we play the game, I've arranged for the lever to end the shocking, but you assume that the lever will perform identically to your previous experience —that it won't do anything. So you don't pull it, even though it would stop the shocking.
Sorry I had to walk you through that. I thought it would less disturbing than explaining the original 1960s experiment, which involved shocking a lot of dogs.
Consider this study, published in 2012 in Chest Journal, the official publication of the American College of Chest Physicians. (Don't act like you don't read every issue.) The study found that the friends and family of people admitted to intensive care units demonstrated significant learned helplessness, and this consequently affected their decision-making ability in regard to their loved ones' health. An overwhelming feeling of futility often breeds decisions that will birth more futility. This is common in the face of severe medical trauma. It's also common outside the medical sphere, as anyone who has hibernated in front of Netflix for 3 days with a cache of dark chocolate can tell you.
Conclusion: if you falsely determine that something is true about your health or well-being, your brain's predilection for pattern recognition will likely carry it too far. This is one way the brain magnifies feelings of doubt and failure until they metastasize into Depression and Anxiety and Frustration. (Luckily, the opposite is also probably true.)
To combat making unhealthy choices, in any context, it's important to realize something that sounds dimwitted at first blush:
YOU ARE THE ONE THINKING YOUR THOUGHTS.
This is a crucial realization if you are to become the master of your mental environment, and your health, and your well-being. This, though, is only one half of the equation, and the other half sounds almost like a contradiction, but it isn't:
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| Figure 4: a human brain (male). |
(I'm sorry. If you're an avid reader, you'll know I do not rely on capital letters for extra gusto. This questionable choice bespeaks my conviction in these ideas.) If you're interested in an extensive and fascinating object lesson on the distance between who we are and what we think, I highly recommend this episode of the NPR program Invisibilia, entitled The Secret History of Thoughts.
The word "thoughts" implies a lot of personal agency, but I think thoughts are better conceptualized as "mental events." When you realize that you are thinking your thoughts, but they're not, by default, going to generally be thoughts that are in the interest of your self-esteem/health/well-being, you have the blueprint for a new personal directive: take control of your thoughts, before they take control of you.
Like hula hooping, it seems easy, and it's not. But simply being aware of your mental passenger status is the first step to becoming the pilot.
Researching this sort of thing will send you directly into the arms of sages of very disparate quality, obviously. But if you can stomach the cheesiness inherent in fostering a positive mindset, there are some great specific suggestions tucked into these articles:
http://www.lifehack.org/articles/lifestyle/how-to-master-your-mind-part-one-whos-running-your-thoughts.html
http://mountainmovingmindset.com/blog/?p=1173
