Using Mindfulness to Deal With Anguish
Question:
Roger, I suffer from chronic depression. I’m not sure what triggers it – it can happen anywhere. All I know is it usually happens when I’m among crowds of people. When it happens I become clumsy, my breath shortens, and if someone speaks to me, I’m hard pressed to respond without seeming like an idiot. I’ve tried everything to change this – affirmations, ‘reframing’ – but nothing works.
I brought your book and I’ve started meditating but I’m not sure how that will fix what’s wrong. I understand mindfulness and the distinction you make between meditation and mindfulness – but I’m wondering if you know of any handy strategies that would help me with this condition when it arises. Something that doesn’t entail me suddenly sitting down and meditating in the middle of a crowd (joke).
My reply:
It’s an interesting question, which also applies more generally to all those instances when we’re caught in an emotional storm and struggling to find a way out of. Whether it’s the aftermath of a relationship break-up, depression, anger, fear, grief, jealousy or any painful emotional hole we get stuck in – it can all be grouped beneath the umbrella term of ‘anguish’ – because the way to deal with anguish in all its forms is much the same, to different degrees.
So let’s talk about anguish, and how to calm its fires.
An anguished state appears when the mind and body get caught in a reactive loop with each stimulating the other.
The initial spark for anguish arises from an ‘initiating event’. Our mind registers a threat, or hurt of some kind. Our body instantly reacts with a flood of hormones specifically designed to energize us to take action.
From there the reactive loop begins to spin – our energized body stimulates and affirms the story in our mind, which further stimulates the body, reinforcing the need for action to resolve whatever is causing the anguish. And if we don’t take action, this loop of mind-pushing-body-pushing mind gets ever more frantic – the story becoming ever more insistent, and the body ever more charged for action – and we experience it as anguish.
Now, if we were any other creature on the planet, the solution would be easy. Let’s take the example of anger, or fear – in the instant the initiating event occurs, an animal will obey the hormonal rush in its body, instantly attacking or attempting to escape. In that sudden shift to explosive action, the charge of cortisol and adrenalin is instantly used, such that when the action is complete, the animal’s metabolism easily reverts to a relaxation response, and everything goes back to normal.
We humans don’t do this. In most cases, we don’t take overt action. We’re more likely to struggle with how we feel – trying to rationalize our way out of it. We do this because we’re civilized, and very aware that there is a social cost to acting out how we feel. This struggle occurs when we experience most kinds of anguish – whether of rage, fear, grief, jealousy, humiliation, whatever.
As such, we rarely get the benefit of a resolving action that would process the hormonal charge in our body. Result being, we get stuck in a reactive loop of a mind frantically trying to spur us into action, and a body raring to go – but the brakes are on, so we remain suspended in a very unpleasant place.
In the human culture we live in, there are a lot of situations where we feel like this – where we get triggered but we cannot take action – especially in the work-place, or in a relationship. Or when we’re being messed about by a more powerful entity like a bully, or a government body or corporation. Result being, we do the next best thing – we suppress how we feel. We deny it and try to live past it. Forget it.
And that’s okay for a one-off event. Eventually we calm down. But if the event is ongoing, as happens in a toxic relationship, or a destructive workplace, that’s when anguish begins to make us sick. With the metabolic energy of an anguished reaction being continuously triggered but not processed, it eventually morphs into what I call a ‘grey state’ – depression, or chronic anxiety, or an illness of some kind. I call these illnesses ‘grey states’ because, as painful as they are, when they’ve been going on for so long they lose their emotional identity – the mental part of the loop. That is, the ‘story’ of how we feel, whether because of denial, trauma or suppression, has receded into the unconscious. So even though we still feel the anguish in our body, we have no ‘story’ to apply to it because our conscious mind has forgotten it.
As such, with no ability to take action, we remain paralyzed and in pain.
Depression is a typical grey state. It’s an overt emotional artifact in our body whose story has been lost in the unconscious – yet it remains able to be triggered by anything resembling its original cause – even though we have no idea what that cause is.
So that’s the problem. Now – how to deal with it.
Most people, when they’re caught in an anguished state, whether of anger, fear or depression, will struggle to calm their mental reaction. They do this in any number of ways – by denying they’re angry, or they get paralyzed by a storm of self-justification, negative thoughts and blame. Or they try to re-frame by focusing on something positive.
Put simply, they try to calm how they feel by battling it out in their mind, while their body rages on. And it doesn’t work. It doesn’t work, because the actual source of how we feel is the body – not the mind. That’s where the hormones are raging through our blood.
So, if we want to change the situation, it’s to the body we must go.
A while ago I wrote a post titled ‘It’s the Body, Stupid’, in which I quoted a teacher I practiced under, Acharn Tippakorn, who once told me:
‘Beneath all thinking are feelings. Feelings create thinking. If we did not have feelings, we would not think. Sometimes the feelings are subtle, so the thoughts are also subtle. But if the feelings are very strong, then the thoughts will also be strong, and very hard to let go of … so look past the thinking into your heart and into your body … in this way, you go to the cause, not the effect. Look for the feelings that are causing the thoughts, then work with those feelings.’
What he prescribed is the way to deal with any anguished state.
Regardless of how it happened, when our body is charged and aflame with an emotion and we feel overwhelmed, whether it’s with grief, anger, anxiety, depression or some other anguished state, we must go to the body – and only the body.
Though the mind may be making a compelling story reinforcing the anguish, nothing can change if our body is aflame with anguish of one kind or another. Not only that, but we cannot trust an anguished mind to be telling us the truth. It’s been hijacked by how we feel – its perception of reality distorted by the lens of the hormonal charge in our body. As such, listening to the mind, or trying to argue with it, or to try to rationalize with it is pointless.
We need to go to how we feel – not how we think. Ignore the thoughts and go to the body.
And what do we find?
We find simplicity. We find patterns of tension, or maybe physical pain – which, as uncomfortable as it might be, is definitely more able to be worked with than what’s happening in the mind. If we can focus your attention on those tensions, and patiently work at unwinding them, we’re doing two things:
- We’re removing our attention from the story that’s raging in the mind, which weakens the coherence of everything it’s telling us.
- We’re deconstructing the anguish at its source – because at this point, it’s our body that’s sustaining the storm – the mind is simply making the case.
I’ll give you an example – when I am angered, there is a noticeable configuration of sensations in my body – things which, in combination, I recognize as ‘anger’. My breath shortens, I feel tightness in my belly and my shoulders and neck, as well as my cheeks and behind my eyes.
As such, if I find myself in this state, I will immediately disengage from whatever is causing the anger, and try to ignore the thoughts it’s creating. Then I consciously pay attention to the anger as it’s appearing in my body – working to unwind the tensions that are there and removing the walls that have appeared around my breath. Relaxing my shoulders and neck, and my face, and cheeks and eyes. It usually takes about ten to twenty minutes to process an emotion in this way.
With depression, it’s a similar process. It just takes a bit longer.
In this case, what you’ll find as you work with the tensions in your body is, initially, the mind will scream louder, and the sensations of discomfort will become a little more intense. You’ll think it’s getting worse but it’s just the first effect of letting go.
Then, as you keep paying attention to what’s happening in your body and your breath and unwinding the tensions you find, gradually the pain will fade, and the thoughts will become softer.
You’ll know when the anguish is passing away – you’ll begin sighing, and sometimes tears will come. The breath will slow and become deeper, and you’ll feel better.
Try it out. For sure, like meditation and mindfulness, it takes practice, but you’ve got to start somewhere.
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