In a previous lecture, I pointed out that if left to its own device, the mind will habitually wonder away from the present moment. If you've been practicing regularly, you may be beginning to notice just how much time you spend replaying the past or projecting into the future fixated on some aspect of experience that you wish or want to be different than it is. We spend an exorbitant amount of time in our day lost in a virtual reality with pretty limited awareness of what's actually happening in our lives on a moment-to-moment basis. One of the primary reasons for this, and a powerful influence that takes us away from being fully present in each moment, is how we judge our experience as being not quite right in some way. We think this isn't what should be happening, or this isn't good enough, or a situation isn't what we wanted or expected. Most of these thoughts are in voluntary, like a reflex almost. They happen quickly and with little conscientiousness. These judgments can lead to a series of thoughts about blame and what needs to be changed or how things could or should be different. Often these thoughts will take us quite automatically down to some fairly well-worn paths in our minds. When we get caught in these narratives and they can have quite a bit of momentum, we lose awareness of the moment and of what's actually going on in life all around us. The ironic thing is that even though we think we engage in this type of rumination and analysis in order to figure out how to fix whatever aspect of experience we've problematized, what we actually do is take away our own agency. When we lift out of the present reality, we diminish our freedom to choose what or if any action needs to be taken. But this tendency to continually judge our experience as not being quite right, does more than just lift us out of the present moment. Our thoughts and the mental filters that we have for interpreting and labeling events have a direct impact on our internal emotional experience. There's a saying in psychology, "What you think is what you feel." I don't know about you, but when I think something should be different than it is, what I feel is bad. Whether it's anxiety, frustration, resentment, or disappointment, my internal experience isn't a pleasant one. There's a circular relationship that exists between what you think and how you feel. Negative thinking feels negative emotion, which feels negative thinking and so on. If you find this hard to imagine, try this exercise. Imagine yourself walking home or to your car one dark evening. You're alone, lost in thought about your day and just wondering what you're going to have for dinner. Suddenly, your thoughts are disturbed by a quiet rustling noise in the bushes. What is it? Option number 1, your thought is, "Well, it's a small animal." What's the effect on your emotions? What does this thought cause you to do? Not much, "Okay, it's an animal. I wonder what kind." You can relax and carry on, walk into your car. What do you decide to have for dinner again? But what about option 2? What if you thought was, "maybe it's a robber?" How does that affect your emotions? What would you do differently? So this is probably making you feel something quite different. You may feel tense, anxious, or fearful. You might experience sensations in your body, your hands sweat, or your heart beats faster, your breath quickens, and what do you do? Maybe you walk a little faster, or look for somewhere to run, or see if anybody's around to help. There's quite a difference between these two mental paths. This simple example shows us how just a thought, not a fact, a thought changes how we feel and what we do. The link between our thoughts, our emotions, and our behaviors was first highlighted by an American psychiatrist named Dr. Aaron Beck. In his clinical practice, Beck worked with individuals with depression, and he noticed that negative thinking was a core aspect of depression. He proposed that negative thinking made people feel depressed, and that feeling depressed filled negative thinking, and that the combination of both of those things made it hard to actually recover from depression. I mentioned a minute ago that our automatic thoughts can take us down some well-worn paths in the mind. This is due in large part to the fact that in the brain, immaterial experiences like having a thought leave material and enduring traces behind. When we think about something, various components of the brain are activated including nerve cells or neurons. Those neurons fire and then send impulses to other neurons, causing them to move into action as well. To quote psychologists Donald Hebb, "Neurons that fire together eventually wire together." This expression describes how pathways in the brain are formed and reinforced through repetition. The more the brain produces a thought or performs a certain task, the stronger their neural network becomes, making the process more efficient each successive time. Every time you engage in a particular line of thinking, you're strengthening the neural circuits that support it. So if your mind's running themes of threat, personalization, and defeat, those neurons are firing and wiring together, making it easier and easier for those themes and their associated emotions to pop up whenever you have an experience. When people are depressed, the themes of rumination are typically about being inadequate or worthless. The repetition and feelings of inadequacy raise anxiety, and anxiety interferes with solving the problem and then depression deepens. But this psychiatrist, Dr. Beck, proposed that because the relationships between thoughts, feelings, and behaviors was interlinked, changing just one of those parts would have an effect on any of the others. The first focus is often on thoughts, images, beliefs, and attitudes, or a person's cognitive processes, and how these processes relate to the way a person behaves. As you've just seen from our recent activity, it's not life events in and of themselves that are so upsetting to us, it's the meaning that we give them that causes us emotional upheaval. Disrupting our cognitive processes can seem intimidating, believe me, I've been there. But it's possible to transform ways of thinking that just don't serve our lives. Included with this module is a worksheet about common thinking styles or common cognitive distortions that cause us to perceive our reality inaccurately. Typically, these cognitive distortions reinforce negative thinking and negative emotion, and they end up making us feel bad or inadequate. This worksheet will help you get a sense of any unhelpful mental habits that you might have and will help you know what to look for as you begin to monitor the self-defeating ways in which you respond to situations. The second step is to catch ourselves in action. This is really where our mindfulness practice steps in. Even though thoughts can feel extremely powerful. In reality, they're just simply activities of the mind. When we fuse to a particular line of thinking or take thoughts as literal truth, we can end up walking down a very dangerous path. Our mindfulness practice teaches us to become observers of the mind, which gives us a little distance from our thoughts. This helps us see them for what they are and gives us a chance to ask ourselves, "Is this current line of thinking helpful or unhelpful?" If they're effective, go with them. But when they're ineffective, let them go their own way. If we start to make a habit of regularly pausing and asking ourselves, "What's really going on right now," then tuning in and listening to the answer, we can begin to recognize the patterns of thinking that just don't serve us, and adjust them accordingly.
