Who is Thinking Your Thoughts?

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:

Figure 4: a human brain (male).

IT IS NOT THE DEFAULT SETTING FOR HUMAN BEINGS TO HAVE MUCH CONTROL OVER THEIR THOUGHTS.

(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

Is Venting Good For You?

How bad was the traffic, Gilbert?

Let me vent for a second. By "a second," I mean as long as I like. But then, you knew that, because I'm Venting. If you've been Vented at, you know that time is not a prime consideration of the Venter.

The title, "Is Venting Good For You?" promises another piece of pop quasi-science. Since frustration (and the need to communicate it) is universal, the title attempts to wrangle the human condition for its own ends. The title is also posed as a question, which implies that 1) the author has not reached a conclusion, or 2) the author has reached a conclusion and is holding out on you in an attempt at suspense, and/or 3) the author hopes to convey his even-handed approach to a legitimate investigation.

In my view, this sort of title is ubiquitous because, 4) it has proven to generate traffic, despite the fact that it is artless, and deftly avoids doing what titles have done historically: indicate the thesis or thrust of the article, because the author is compiling a sloppy hodgepodge of extant information on a well-worn topic and dressing it up as an earnest inquiry.

Phew. Do I feel better? Not really. I have vented, and the conventional wisdom says I should be relaxing about now. But upon rereading what I've just typed, my rhetoric inspires in me the same feelings of discontent that prompted the words in the first place. My cortisol levels remain dangerous, I can tell. Where there should be dopamine, there is only a dusty twister. 

This interaction is missing something crucial: you, or someone like you. (Obviously, you're irreplaceable. I'd rather have you, but I'd make do with anyone.) A good venting session is incomplete without some sort of validation. This seems to spread a finite amount of angst across a psychic space twice the size; any engineer will explain that the pressure on the venter will accordingly decrease. (Meanwhile, it increases on the ventee, as any ventee will tell you.) If you were listening, and said something like, "Yeah, I hate vacuous click-bait articles with silly titles too," then I might feel better. Right? I'd feel less alone, because what felt like an irritation borne of the friction between me and the world would become something shared, and the resulting solidarity would diminish said friction to an acceptable level.

But what if venting was not a release at all, but rather a reinforcement of our own rage? What if the seemingly-healthy act of simply complaining about other drivers and our boyfriends and Congress and people who smoke too close to the building is fortifying a rampart of gloom deep inside us somewhere? I have tried certain gripes on for size, found I liked the fit, and purchased them. They become mine, and eventually graduate to the status of Pet Peeve, even though I avoid the phrase "pet peeve" because it's gleefully precious and self-indulgent. In fact, I'm forcing myself to use it, because the phrase itself is a Pet Peeve of mine, and Pet Peeves themselves are exercises in self-indulgence.

Sometimes a simple scalp massage will do the trick.

What's wrong with self-indulgence, ergo, what is wrong with venting? It's not my job to tell you that, or even arguably to be talking about this at all. But after years of selling extracts and tonics to calm people down, help them sleep, manage stress, and all the rest, I thought it would be novel to try examining the roots rather than pruning the branches.

So, like I was saying, what's wrong with self-indulgence? Well, if you're going to indulge, it should be fun, at least. Venting is less like candy, and more like anesthetic. When the numbness disappears, the pain will still be there.

So please, do try kava kava. Do enjoy the benefits of Omega 3s, and restful sleep, and the proper quotient of Vitamin B12. But consider, for instance, what this article from Psychology Today tells us: venting feels good while it's happening, but has very little lasting benefit, and generally negative psychological consequences. If you like, here's another interesting article with a similar take. I'm feeling generous, so here's another, from livescience.com. Perhaps you'd like to peruse this lifehacker.com article, which espouses the same idea. 

This temple is like, way too loud, and I'm going to snap.

Obviously, not all venting is the same. Stoicism has its place, but people need to share their feelings.* But there's a Pettiness Threshold™ that an event should cross before we decide to begin chattering to ourselves and our fellow humans about it. Not because venting is "wrong," but because we'll actually feel better in the long run by showing some restraint and pursuing reflection, and feeling better is what this blog is all about.

Frustration and anxiety are natural symptoms of living, but they can have a big impact on both health and well-being. I'll be examining the issue of frustration and its effect on health further in the coming entries. If you like what you read, tell a friend. If you don't, keep it to yourself—for the sake of your health.

Before we see each other again, I challenge you to listen to this the next time you find yourself in a tizzy. I promise I'll do the same.



*I guess.