Better Mental Health Part 1: Mindfulness and its Limits

Disclaimer: The first thing I need to be clear on is that I possess no qualifications relevant to clinical psychology, which I hold to be the gold standard, first resort for any mental health issues, followed by social workers, depression help lines etc. I am also not a life coach, but would point out I have all the legal requirements to be a professional life coach, being none, much the same as being a nutritionist or psychic. 

Despite things like the replication crisis effecting psychology in particular, and it's tarnished history particular regarding sexual orientation and conversion therapy but other prominent failures like the suicide of Marylin Monroe. Psychology is still having contemporary controversies like the APA guidelines for practice with men and boys based in part on the research methodology exposed in grievance studies affair; And that like all professions, competency is variable; I still advocate in general that speaking to a qualified clinical psychologist is the first thing to try in devising strategies for addressing mental health issues. The form of treatment to try first before all other alternatives, as the alternatives generally break down to 'here's what I reckon, based on how I feel'.

So everything I say here should be taken as speculation, informed by personal experience. I'm sharing my opinion, I'm not an authority on anything but my own experience. This is what I reckon, based on how I feel though I've tried to read up and defer to experts where I can.

I've decided to begin with Mindfulness. Here is why, I am a fan of the books of Dr. Gordon Livingston M.D. who in 'Too Soon Old, Too Late Smart' defines mental health as 'requiring freedom of choice'. Eg. Someone in the grips of psychosis cannot choose to not be experiencing psychosis. One cannot choose to opt out of auditory hallucinations, nor choose to ignore the symptoms of clinical depression. Even (to my limited understanding) with a condition like OCD, PTSD or Generalized Anxiety Disorder that might be treated through Exposure Response Prevention (ERP) programs, one might be able to train oneself out of a habitual response to stimuli, but cannot simply choose not to have intrusive thoughts, implicit memories, anxiety responses.

Looking more at ordinary psychology though, and in my case reinforced and in part informed by Stoicism (which Darren Brown claims influenced Cognitive Behavioral Therapy) I follow the general rule that: it is better to act, than to react. 

Excluding fight or flight type circumstances, or drinking water when thirsty etc.

Meditation is a good place to begin in obtaining the ability to choose to act, rather than react. Without mindfulness we are unlikely to be able to 'flip the script' or do something different, particularly in how we relate to others if we aren't conscious of what we are doing.

As my High School Principle repeated ad nauseum: 'You'll always get what you've always got, if you always do, what you've always done.' somewhat inline with the meme 'definition of insanity: trying the same thing and expected different results.' the inverse of which is the basis of the gold standard of epistemological soundness: empiricism. 

So meditation has been (to my layman satisfaction) demonstrated empirically to improve concentration, attention, awareness, stress-reduction etc. Claims I have seen like 'heightened creativity' I'm more skeptical of.

But for me and my personal experience the direct benefits were in order of significance:

1. Stopped my practice of Catharsis, permenantly (the subject of the next post)
2. Immediately realizing that I am not the author of my own thoughts, I am but a witness.
3. Better aware of my emotions as and when they arise, and increased ability to identify the physical state of a given emotion.
4. Calibrating down, what I require to feel safe.
5. The ability to temporarily stop my own internal monologue for a few seconds at a time.
6. Improved listening skills.
7. The emotional state of boredom is now permanently optional, if my train gets cancelled/delayed I can choose boredom, or to meditate.

These benefits, for me, qualify a practice of meditation as a tool for better mental health in my own case. 

You may not for example, have no problem with catharsis, but it was the most significant beneficial change I noticed. It completely transformed permanently my relationship with running, something I've done since my early teens. I no longer run 10kms having an imaginary argument in my head addicted to anger and it's expression. I would guess across the board, benefits 2 downward are more universal, and more frequent.

Meditation is a path to getting an emergency break on our minds, so focusing on benefit 2 above, this is for me profound because it is a benefit that is immediate it just requires the simple experiment of trying not to think for a period of time. As Sam Harris puts it, you will notice that thoughts emerge unbidden in your conscious. You have agreed with yourself that the point of the next 5 minutes is to stop thinking, ruminating, introspecting, daydreaming etc. 

Unless you are Ron Swanson, you should discover, very quickly, what for me was the counter intuitive conclusion that thinking is automatic and not thinking requires effort, effort your mind at first may feel too feeble to make. The persistence of thought is what makes meditation difficult, and I'll describe the (I feel) very accessible practices I tried later. For me though, this is counter intuitive because 'thinking' sounds grammatically similar to 'walking' and walking requires conscious effort, I don't find it difficult at all to stop walking.

Steering back to achieving better mental health through availing oneself of choices, mindfulness is a probably path to buying precious seconds between an automatic response like 'oh my god she's going to leave me...' and having the awareness of the present moment to choose an alternative response, and action instead of a reaction like asking yourself a question 'is she going to leave me, or is she just asking me to pick up my laundry and put it in the laundry basket?'

Reactions I would define (a personal, rather than general definition) are by nature a process of leaping almost instantaneously to a conclusion. A positive action to take is to ask a question - generally 'what is actually happening right now?'

That general form question is applicable in scope to emotional states. As in, what is actually happening right now is that I am going into a fight, flight, freeze or appease state, which will both impair and inform my thinking and behavior, for better or worse. Hence the 3rd benefit I listed. 

Just a brief comment on sex differences or the lack thereof - my assessment of the sum total of my interactions is that emotional competence is rare. I am not very good at it, but if one verbalizes (communicates?) a judgement about someone's emotional state and how it is effecting them the most typical response regardless of gender, sex etc. is defensiveness. eg. 'you're being emotional.' 'NO I'M NOT!' and secondly when I learned more about and accepted my own problem of emotional competence and started asking people 'what emotion are you feeling right now?' when I notice changes in affect, the question stumps most people I talk to across the board.

Better mental health, in my opinion should not be focused on others, but on yourself, so I make the above point just to entertain that the stigma against 'being emotional' is widespread and in the cultures I have access to, most people regardless of gender are susceptible to the same beguiling illusion I am, that I am being rational and reasonable when in fact, it is likely that I am being emotional.

So mindfulness as a practice, helps, mostly by making me more familiar with my own mind and body, and crucially buying me space. To literally stop my thoughts though, I find much simpler than most meditation practices to simply touch the tip of my tongue to the roof of my mouth and maintain the contact. 

In an incredibly flawed experiment, I'll do that now, and since it works to the extent that it prevents me from even counting, I'll run a timer on my phone and stop it, roughly when I have a concrete intelligible thought - 12.98 seconds. I rarely need that much time to arrest an impulsive thought chasing after the one before it.

Here is where I would like to switch to touching on the limits, in my experience and subsequent opinion of meditation.

Meditation has many benefits, but it is by no means is it a panacea, and it is having a moment right now where I worry about oversubscription. It also carries a lot of spiritual baggage and that is always a risky baggage to pick up for anyone with weak critical thinking skills. 

I would offer as a schema the following analogy: you have finished a stressful day at work, and returned home from a stressful commute. To 'take the edge off' you pour yourself a stiff drink, the alcohol gets into your bloodstream and clogs the receptors in your brain, depressing your cognition and relaxing you in a pleasing and intoxicating way. Benefits include the pleasure of drinking itself, the relief of stress and anxiety, calming affect and more relaxed disposition, less inhibited and more open and creative communication style.

Then the next morning, you are sober, and you still have your stressful job, and your stressful commute. Alcohol relieved the symptoms of your stressful life, but did nothing to cure them.

Similarly: you have finished a stressful day at work, and returned home from a stressful commute. To 'take the edge off' you do 15 minutes mindfulness meditation, it punctuates your day, lowers your heart rate and cortisol levels and whatever other stress hormones, it helps you be aware and center your thoughts that you are in your home environment and not at work, nor behind the wheel of your vehicle in traffic. Benefits improve relief from stress, more relaxed disposition and better presence in home life communication.

Then the next morning, you still have your stressful job, and your stressful commute. Meditation relieved the symptoms of your stressful life, but did nothing to cure them.

Meditation is in my opinion, clearly a superior form of self medication than alcohol. It should also be noted that while one is generally not allowed to drink and drive, or drink on the job, you can meditate in bumper to bumper traffic, or anytime in the office you are not in conversation or deep in an excel spreadsheet.

My personal prejudice is, that evolution by natural selection is non-arbitrary, and mindful of the naturalistic fallacy I am not persuaded that the environment has changed enough, even with the advent of smart phones + social media, to say that introspection has no value.

I do not share a view that the 'ideal' is cessation of thought. That is to live permanently in the present moment, as big a fan of capital 'C' Cynicism (lit. dog-like) much, for me, as the ideal of nervous health is to be unable to feel hot, cold, pleasure, pain, itchiness etc.

Given that for me, I do not find the company of my own mind unpleasant, I made the individual decision to drop my regular practice of meditation. Running I tend to use breathing exercises, and there's certain sections of trails that prompt me to still my thoughts and be present. I use the tongue touch technique to gradually arrest my thoughts if my thoughts are chasing themselves around in circles, overstimulated, in a manner similar to ABS breaks. I also will from time to time chuck on a guided meditation on youtube.

I am happy enough, even in the current world, with climate change, political polarization, economic mismanagement, radical 'social justice' etc. going on that I do not need to escape the company of my own mind. 

I can think about even the most distressing topics, reasonably comfortably in part because I know I have recourse to meditation should I become too distressed. But much of the heavy lifting is all the work I have done on my mental health that addresses the things that meditation is too limited to address. This will be the subjects of subsequent parts in this series.

Meditation, builds brain muscles to enable that primary choice though that at any given moment you can choose to have a distressing thought or not.

That is the end of my case, I'll now for the interest of anybody who has never tried mindfulness, or is just curious as to what I practiced and why, detail my practices and influences. 

I hope this has given you some ideas as to how to pursue better mental health through meditation, please consider speaking to a qualified clinical psychotherapist to devise a more personal strategy. The above is just my unqualified opinions.

[pause]

A little background to my experience: Half a decade back a had two significant events cascade into each other over the space of a few weeks. My young cousin died accidently, and I got myself ostracized from my then-best-friends life by criticizing her life decisions, and passing judgement.

For me this was tragedy stacked on tragedy, and it took me some time to connect the two events. My cousin's death had made me angry, and I wasn't aware I was angry when I then criticized my friend. I (eventually) diagnosed myself as having low emotional competence - the ability to recognize my own emotions as and when they arise. Any self diagnosis I would generally advocate running-by someone qualified, I do not want to live in a society where people diagnose themselves and act thereon. This is my usual practice but at the time of the events, my best friend and I shared a psychologist and given my ostracism I chose not to see my psychologist so as not to compromise my friend's therapy sessions or trust in her therapist.

In all seriousness, up to that point I didn't really think of myself as getting angry, ever, it was a part of the emotional spectrum I didn't bother with.

Unaware of my emotional states I was operating under a delusion, that I was motivated by pure altruism and thinking rationally. My behavior in hindsight was motivated by misdirected anger, and channeled into rationalization - or motivated reasoning, starting with the conclusion of my critique and working backwards attempting to justify it.

This was unsettling for me, being 'out of control' even in the context of sitting and writing a carefully thought out critical email, doesn't sit well with me and why I generally prefer sobriety to intoxication.

As a result, I adopted a regimen of 30 minutes meditation every day. I kept this up for something like 100+ consecutive days, mostly using guided meditations off youtube as the easiest way to maintain the discipline. I typically did my meditation laying on my bed, but sometimes would do so sitting in my chair at my desk. 

If you haven't tried a practice of meditation, Sam Harris' (whatever you think of his political and philosophical views) is a good place to start, I find it particularly insightful as to the nature of consciousness. The Honest Guys Youtube channel is the one I most frequented, and sometimes nowadays return to, good for guided meditations to aide with going to sleep.

For me, my guided meditation black diamond run is this Body Scan Guided Meditation. I generally lose consciousness reliably at some point into it, though I find it extremely useful to pay attention to my ability to move my conscious attention around my body at will. It is an excellent exercise.

I guess at this point I should point out that meditation is a practice that comes in many flavors, and not just with the advent of a content explosion on Youtube. Loving compassion meditation is a traditional practice, you can meditate on forgiveness, or use meditation to envision your guardian spirit, chakras, or other visualization exercises.

I have also over the years come across what I am tempted (and will) charecterize as a kind of meditation snobbery, the same consumer behavior (I have a marketing background) that causes amateur joggers to buy the same running shoes and gear as Eliud Kipchoge uses. Which is people going on 13 day silent meditation retreats, and while I believe testimony that the experience itself is profound, in my experience I am thoroughly unimpressed that it delivers any significant long term benefits to take meditation this seriously. These observations that 10x the meditation with a diet of lentil gruel while wearing roughspun cotton garments does not yeild 10x or even 1.1x the benefits that using guided youtube meditations do. 

Furthermore, I'm tempted to entertain, that such consumer preferences regarding meditation, yoga, spiritual practices could be used as a diagnostic tool as to whether people are high in neuroticism and suffering from having their esteem being contingent on being esteemed by their peers... yes, to say that meditation practices could be equivalent to image crafting on fb, or even part of imagecrafting. Nobody escapes my all judging behavior scrutinizing eye! 

The basic practice though is generally to sit in a chair in a quiet place and pay attention to your breath. Feet flat on the floor, sitting upright but not tensing hands in lap and breathing in through your nose and out through your mouth, counting up to 10.

Thoughts will arise in your consciousness unbidden, Jonathon Haidt puts it well I feel 'Consciousness thinks it is the Oval Office, when in fact it is the Press Secretary.'

By the end of my hundred consecutive days of meditating 30 minutes, I tested my progress by quieting my mind while running. Between the ages of 13 to 31, running had primarily for me been an exercise in catharsis (the subject of Part 2 in this series) I simulated arguments with people I was frustrated with in my head such that I could run 14, 21, even 50km on occasion without noticing the time. 

My biggest windfall from my meditation practice was it ended my catharsis practice. I will justify this as a benefit in the next post, but instead of running with the illusion that it cleared out my head and caused my anger to subside (catharsis), I gained the ability to clear my head by clearing my head. (bare attention)

The practice of meditation is not the brake itself, it builds a brake for your thoughts that is probably the hippocampus or some other piece of brain anatomy. 

Eventually my chain of days of meditating broke, and I've never really picked up a regular practice again. 

Running I find breathing exercises easy and effective, and time saving because it doesn't require me to spend time each day meditating on top of the time I spend running. The one I've used and tried is from Matt Kama's youtube video, that not only arrests cathartic thoughts, but improves my running performance.

The tongue trick to the roof of the mouth I learned from a book called iBrainmap recommended to me by my dear friend who is a social worker. My girlfriend tells me she was taught this in yoga, so apparently it's out there.

The explanation from the book though is that when we think, our tongue does a lot of sub-vocalizing, it is twitching around making muted versions of the shapes and contortions it would if we were speaking audibly, kind of like when you scratch a dogs belly and it's hind leg kicks involuntarily. By arresting the movement of your tongue, I at least can stop my thoughts.

And of course, when I have the presence of mind to notice how nice it is outside, or flowers are in bloom etc. I'll sit down and just meditate with my eyes open to soak up the scenery.