Mindfulness: An Eight-Week Plan for Finding Peace in a Frantic World (4 page)

Although persistent periods of distress and exhaustion often seem to arrive from nowhere, there are underlying processes going on in the background of the mind that were only unraveled in the 1990s and early twenty-first century. And with this understanding has come the realization that we can “step outside” of our troubles and liberate ourselves from unhappiness, anxiety, stress, exhaustion and even depression.

If you’d asked Lucy how she felt when she was staring at her computer, she’d have said “exhausted” or “tense.” At first glance these feelings seem like clear-cut statements of fact, but
if she’d looked inside herself a little more closely she’d have realized that there wasn’t one single thing that you could label as “exhaustion” or “tension.” Both of these emotions were actually “bundles” of thoughts, raw feelings, bodily sensations and impulses (such as the desire to scream or storm out of the room). This is what emotions are; they’re like a background color that’s created when your mind fuses together all of your thoughts, feelings, impulses and bodily sensations to conjure up an overall guiding theme or state of mind (see diagram, “What makes an emotion?” p.
20
). All of these different elements that make up an emotion play off each other and can end up enhancing (or tempering) overall mood. It’s a phenomenally intricate dance full of subtle interactions that we’re only now beginning to understand.

Take thoughts as an example. Several decades ago, it became apparent that thoughts could drive our moods and emotions, but it’s only since the 1980s that it’s become clear that the process can also run in reverse: moods can drive our thoughts. Think about that for a moment. Your moods can drive your thoughts. In practice, this means that even a few fleeting moments of sadness can end up feeding off themselves to create more unhappy thoughts by coloring how you see and interpret the world. Just as gloomy skies can make you feel, well, gloomy, momentary sadness can dredge up unsettling thoughts and memories, further deepening the mood. The same goes for other moods and emotions too. If you feel stressed, then this stress can feed off itself to create more stress. Likewise with anxiety, fear, anger and such “positive” emotions as love, happiness, compassion and empathy.

But it’s not just thoughts and moods that feed off each other and end up wrecking well-being—the body also gets involved. This is because the mind does not exist in isolation; it’s a fundamental part of the body and they both continuously share emotional information with each other. In fact, much of what the body feels is colored by our thoughts and emotions, and everything that we think is informed by what’s going on in the body. It’s a phenomenally complex process full of feedbacks, but research is showing us that our whole outlook on life can be shifted by tiny changes in the body. Something as subtle as frowning, smiling or altering posture can have a dramatic impact on mood and the types of thoughts flickering across the mind (see box above).

To get a flavor of how powerful this feedback can be, the psychologists Fritz Strack, Leonard Martin and Sabine Stepper
⁶
asked a group of people to watch cartoons and then rate how funny they were. Some were asked to hold a pencil between their lips so that they were forced to purse them and mimic a
scowl. Others watched the c
artoons with the pencil between their teeth, simulating a smile. The results were striking: those who were forced to smile found the cartoons significantly funnier than those compelled to frown. It’s obvious that smiling shows you are happy but it is, admittedly, a bit strange to realize that the act of smiling can itself
make
you happy. It’s a perfect illustration of just how close the links are between the mind and body. Smiling is infectious too. When you see someone grin, you almost invariably smile back. You can’t help it. Think about that for a moment: just the act of smiling can make you happy (even if it’s forced); and if you smile, others will smile back at you, reinforcing your own happiness. It’s a virtuous circle.

But there’s an equal and opposite vicious circle too: when we sense a threat we tense up, ready to fight or run away. This so-called “fight-or-flight” response isn’t conscious—it’s controlled by one of the most “primeval” parts of the brain, which means it’s often a bit simplistic in the way it interprets danger. In fact, it makes no distinction between an external threat, such as a tiger, and an internal one, such as a troubling memory or a future worry. It treats both as threats that either need to be fought off or run away from. When a threat is sensed—whether real or imagined—the body tenses and braces for action. This may manifest as a frown, the churning of the stomach, tension in the shoulders or the draining of blood from the skin. The mind then senses the tension in the body and interprets it as a threat (remember how a frown can make you feel sad?), which then makes the body tense up even further … A vicious circle has begun.

In practice, this means that if you’re feeling a little stressed or vulnerable, a minor emotional shift can end up ruining your whole day—or even tip you into a prolonged period of dissatisfaction
or worry. Such shifts often appear out of the blue, leaving you drained of energy and asking, Why am I so unhappy?

Oliver Burkeman recently discovered this for himself. He wrote in his column in the UK’s
Guardian
newspaper about how minor bodily sensations sometimes seemed to feed back on themselves to tip him into an emotional spiral.

I think of myself as generally happy, but every so often I’m struck by a fleeting mood of unhappiness or anxiety that quickly escalates. On a really bad day, I may spend hours stuck in angst-ridden maunderings, wondering if I need to make major changes in my life. It’s usually then that I realize I’ve forgotten to eat lunch. One tuna sandwich later, the mood is gone. And yet, ‘Am I hungry?’ is never my first response to feeling bad: my brain, apparently, would prefer to distress itself with reflections on the ultimate meaninglessness of human existence than to direct my body to a nearby branch of Pret A Manger.

Of course, and as Oliver Burkeman has repeatedly found out for himself, most of the time such “angst-ridden maunderings” soon blow over. Something catches our eye and makes us smile—a friend calls and cheers us up or perhaps we’ll watch a movie and go to bed early with a cup of hot chocolate. Virtually every time we’re buffeted by life’s ill winds, something crops up to redress the balance. But it’s not always this way. Sometimes the weight of our own history intervenes to whip up an emotional squall because our memories can have a powerful impact on our thoughts, feelings, drives and, ultimately, our bodies too.

Take the case of Lucy. Although she describes herself as being
“driven” and “mostly successful” she’s acutely aware that something fundamental is missing from her life. She’s achieved most of what she wanted, so finds it perplexing that she’s not happy, contented and at peace with herself. She constantly tells herself, “I should be happy,” as if saying this alone is enough to drive away unhappiness.

Lucy’s bouts of unhappiness began when she was a teenager. Her parents split up when she was seventeen and the family home was sold, forcing both parents to move into apartments that were barely adequate. Lucy surprised herself, and her family, by toughing it out. Sure, she was initially devastated by her parents’ divorce, but she soon learned to distract herself by working hard at school. This was her life-saver. She achieved good grades, went to college and got a decent diploma. She surprised herself again when she got her first job as a trainee buyer for an international clothing chain. She then spent most of her twenties climbing the promotion ladder until she was managing a small team of buyers.

Work gradually took over Lucy’s life, leaving her with less and less time for herself. It happened so slowly that she hardly realized that life had begun passing her by. There were high points too, of course, like her marriage to Tom and the birth of their two daughters. She loved them all to bits, but she still couldn’t quite shake the feeling that life was something that only happened to other people. She was walking “through slowly thickening syrup,” she told us.

This “thickening syrup” was her current busyness and stress, together with the older patterns of thoughts and feelings from the past. Even though Lucy was outwardly successful, her thoughts were often dogged—deep down—by fears of failure. This ensured that when an entirely normal low mood appeared,
her mind would spontaneously begin digging up memories of when she felt similarly in the past, while a harsh “inner critic” told her that it would be shameful to display any weaknesses. Vague feelings of fear or insecurity ended up triggering a cascade of painful feelings from the past that felt very real and visceral, and that quickly took on a life of their own, activating another wave of negative emotions. On the surface, these seemed to have little connection with each other; however, these emotions
were
connected because such feelings often come in constellations, with one part of a pattern triggering the rest.

As Lucy will testify, we rarely experience tension or sadness on their own—anger, irritability, bitterness, jealousy and hatred can all be bound up with them in an uncomfortable, spiky knot of pain. These feelings may be directed at others but, more often than not, they are aimed at ourselves, even if we’re not consciously aware of it. Over a lifetime, these emotional constellations can become ever more closely coupled to thoughts, feelings, bodily sensations and even behavior. This is how the past can have an all-pervading effect in the present; if we trip one emotional switch, the others can follow behind (and likewise with bodily sensations such as an ache or a pain). All of these can trigger habitual patterns of thinking, behaving and feeling that we know are counterproductive, but somehow just can’t seem to stop. And between them, they can create a very large net that will catch any slight emotional turbulence and whip it into a storm.

Gradually, the repeated triggering of negative thoughts and moods can begin wearing grooves in the mind; over time, these become deeper and deeper, making it easier to set off negative, self-critical thoughts and low or panicky moods—and more difficult to shake them off. After a while, prolonged periods of fragility can be triggered by the most innocuous of things, such
as a momentary dip in mood or the slightest flux in energy levels. These triggers can be so small that you might not even be aware of them. To make matters worse, negative thoughts often come in the guise of harsh questions that beg answers. They nag. Grind away at your soul. Demand an immediate response:
Why am I unhappy? What’s up with me today? Where have I gone wrong? Where will it end?

The close links between the different aspects of emotion, stretching back into the past, can explain why a small trigger can have a significant effect on mood. Sometimes these moods come and go just as quickly as they arrive, like a squall blowing over; but at other times, the stress and fatigue, or the low mood, seem adhesive—they stick around and nothing seems to get rid of them. It’s almost as if certain parts of the mind switch on, then get stuck and refuse to turn off again. As it turns out, this is what seems to be happening: sometimes the mind automatically switches to full alert, but then
does not switch off
again as it’s meant to do.