Is Your Brain Stuck in the Wrong Gear?

“Well don’t ya go thinkin’, and thinkin’, and thinkin’
And thinkin’ so much ’till you’re stranded behind
Don’t ya go thinkin’, and thinkin’, and thinkin’
And thinkin’ so much ’till you’re losin’ your mind”
Steve Forbert

As we have 2000-3000 thoughts per hour, we are not aware of most of our thoughts. Thoughts are simply what our minds do, they are neither good nor bad. About 90% of the thoughts we have are reruns, rehashing the past or stirring up anxiety about the future. We can’t control what thoughts come up. Our brains are designed to have thoughts. What we can learn to have control over is our relationship to those thoughts. It is essential to be aware of these thoughts, as they are a driving force in our mood, behavior, and, ultimately, our life.

“The mind can be a dangerous place or a great gift.” Michael Singer

We practice mindfulness to reduce the danger and enable it to be a great gift. The mind is dangerous when we are not aware of what we are thinking, or when we let our thinking go into a never-ending loop. It’s a great gift when we use it to see reality, problem solve and determine the right next step.

“Human Iceberg Effect – Most people can explain their beliefs that are above the water line but are unconscious to the 95% of their thoughts that are underwater. That hidden 95% is what runs most of their internal dialogue.” David Emerald and Donna Zajonc

If you have not paid attention to the thoughts that are underneath the waterline, you may not be aware of the stories you tell yourself about life. They poke you multiple times a day, calcifying that thought into a belief. You will recognize the unconscious thoughts poking you by the uncomfortable feeling they generate that you can’t explain.

Our goal in meditation is not to stop our thoughts, but to change our relationship with them. Meditation is about seeing into this stream of thoughts. When we see the thoughts, we become the master, and the thoughts lose their power over us.

With practice, we can choose what we do with those thoughts. If we are aware of the thought, we can choose whether we want to remain lost in the thought, whether we want to believe the thought and whether we want to allow that thought to influence our words and our actions.

Most of the time, our inner voices function well. However, when we are stressed and emotional from facing high stakes, our inner voice can turn to chatter. The chatter may be rehashing the past, worrying about the future, or making up stories about what others are thinking. Sometimes we jump from one negative story to the next. When that chatter takes over, we torment ourselves and often feel paralyzed.

We tolerate this constant chatter in our minds telling us how horrible we are, we eat too much, we are fat and lazy, and we will never be able to meditate. We think about how we screwed up, said the wrong thing, or mistreated someone. Then we think about it again. And again. And this negative thought tends to activate another negative thought, which triggers another, and so on. We are so busy running from one negative thought to the next that we lose sight of the big picture. So instead of moving past, we are stuck in rumination.

“It is as if your brain is stuck in the wrong gear and the judgments are quietly whirring just below your perceptual threshold, gnawing away at you and draining precious mental resources. In this state of mind, it can be difficult to think clearly or make decisions. It can feel like your brain is frozen and you’ve lost the antifreeze.” Mark Coleman

By the time we become adults, we have a whole collection of thoughts that define us. Parents, teachers, friends, and culture have told us who they think we should be or who we are. What they don’t tell us is that those are just suggestions, not rules we have to live by. And we let those thoughts play in our head over and over, sometimes without even realizing it.

Calcification is a process in which calcium builds up in body tissue, causing the tissue to harden. When something becomes calcified, it becomes fixed and difficult to change over a period of time. When you repeat the same thought over and over, sometimes unconsciously, our thoughts become inflexible or unchangeable. Thoughts then calcify into beliefs.

We let that mental chatter go on and on until we somehow come to believe that these ruminations, judgments, and worries are an accurate representation of how our lives and the world ‘really are.’ Thoughts are really just figments of our imagination.

All these negative thoughts hog our neural capacity. Our attention narrows to the thoughts that cause us the most distress. We use our brain to listen to our inner critic instead of solving the problem or doing what we want to be doing at that moment. Try reading a really good book when you are ruminating about being mistreated. Your mind can’t stay on the story. Each time you think you have read a page; you can’t remember what you read. That is how our chatter divides and blurs our attention. We lose the ability to step back and see the bigger picture.

When we are lost in chatter, our thinking mind stops working and our emotional brain pushes us onto the hamster wheel of reactivity. The wheel spins round and round and we can’t get off no matter how hard we try. And each time we spin, we strengthen the neural pathway of that negative thought. Then we often act unskillfully and sabotage ourselves.

Mindfulness practice allows us to look deeply at our thoughts in a kind and nonjudgmental way. If we judge our thoughts, we are practicing judgment, and we can get really good at judging ourselves. If we are kind to ourselves, we are practicing kindness, and we can get really good at being kind to ourselves. Mindfulness is not just about seeing the thoughts, it is about looking at them in a curious, kind, nonjudgmental way. We learn that thoughts and stories are always present but not always true.

One of the reasons we practice mindfulness is to see under the waterline. Seeing the thoughts and stories that have given us identities, and beliefs we hold on to whether they serve us or not. Some beliefs are positive, creating joy or making us productive citizens. Others create dependence, anxiety, inauthenticity, or suffering. We tend to take each identity to be who we are, but in truth we are not limited by the beliefs and identities we hold on to. We are much more than the identity we use to define ourselves. They are only little pieces of ourselves. But our beliefs lead us to believe that is all we are.

Reflection:

How have you been managing your relationship with your thoughts?

Mindfulness Practices to Work with our Thoughts:

1. First, become aware of the constant torrent of thoughts cascading through our mind.
   With mindfulness we can become more aware of our thoughts and the contents of our own thoughts. We need to notice our habits of mind and how repetitive our thinking is. Simply listen to your thoughts with mindful awareness. It is like you are watching that thought on a movie screen. Here it is again. You will see the evanescent nature of thoughts, that they are fleeting ideas, all impermanent.

“What is going on right now? What am I seeing? What am I hearing? What am I feeling? What am I sensing?”

Pay close attention to whether you are adding on to the thought. Typically, we add the thought “something is wrong”—either wrong in general, or, more likely, wrong with another person or with ourselves. Looking at the sun we start to think tomorrow is supposed to be gray. We are no longer in the present moment enjoying the sun, we are in the future seeing the gray sky.

2. Second, we learn to extricate ourselves from the stories we are constantly creating.
   We must develop the skills to disentangle ourselves from all of our thoughts. We can realize that just because you have a thought doesn’t mean you have to believe it—much less act on it—and certainly not get caught up in the whole stream of thoughts. WE can look under the stories to see what we are believing. We discover with great relief that our thoughts do not fully define us.

We need to acknowledge the experience of a story unfolding and feel the emotions and body sensations related to that story. If we can feel the body sensations, that can be our bell of mindfulness. We can stop and take a breath to look at things more clearly. This allows us to not identify with or become lost in the thought. We can transform one-sided thoughts of certainty into a world of liberating possibilities. Instead of thinking “I am a bad meditator.”, we can think when our minds wander again and again, “I am getting more practice bringing my mind back.”

Meditation is a tool to get intentional use of attention and awareness. We want to see what we are paying attention to and be aware of what is going on. All we are doing when we are meditating is choosing what we are going to attend to, and how we are going to attend to it. Remember the point of mindfulness is not to get rid of thoughts, but to learn to see thoughts skillfully and change our relationship to them.

So, don’t you go thinking and thinking and thinking, thinking so much you are losing your mind. Instead, may your mind be a great gift.