Finding the Center Within: The Healing Way of Mindfulness Meditation. (27 page)

Again, while we cannot control our emotions directly, there is a lot we can do about them. We are never helpless in the face of emotion. It is at least as false to say we have no influence over our emotional life as it is to say that we can completely control it.

Look Deeply at Your Behavior

In the behavioral approach to depression,
doing
is the way out. The idea is to see the behavior patterns that support a depressed mood, and change the pattern. Depressed people tend to stay isolated and inactive. They eat too much or too little, sleep too much or too little, and refuse to participate in fun activities that are inconsistent with their mood. Even if you are not depressed, you would begin to feel depressed if you were to do these same things. If you started eating too much or too little, sleeping too much, staying alone too much, and so on, you would get depressed also, no matter how temperamentally resilient to depression you may otherwise be. But the reverse is also true: If the depressed person can somehow participate in fun things anyway, often the mood shifts to match the activity. Getting yourself to engage in some enjoyable activity may go against the grain, but it can be very effective in bringing about a shift of mood. It is like jump-starting a car: The initial resistance of the motor to turning over must be overcome with a jolt of electricity. But once this happens, the motor can keep running quite nicely on its own. Similarly, once you break up a bad mood by engaging in a reinforcing activity or “pleasant event” (as these have been called), the mood shift can sometimes sustain itself without further effort. Sometimes people try a reinforcing activity and, because the change is not dramatic or immediate, declare that it “didn’t work.” Such a view 07 BIEN.qxd 7/16/03 9:58 AM Page 170

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is of course part of the hopelessness of depression. Chances are good that when someone says this, one of three things is at work. First, the person may not have chosen an activity that is sufficiently reinforcing. It can sometimes be a matter of trial and error to find activities that will help. Sometimes things we think of as being fun are not really as much fun as we imagine, and some things we think are not fun actually are. For example, when I was a theology student and felt stressed, studying ancient Greek vocabulary always had a calming and soothing effect on me. This is not a task that I would have thought of as “fun,” but it occupied just enough of my attention, without being too difficult, that it allowed a space for a shift in mood. On the other hand, in our culture, going to a party is supposed to be fun. But the truth is, especially if you are introverted by nature, parties may actually be more draining than helpful. The behavioral approach is empirical: That is, do not assume what will be helpful, but try and see which things really are. This attitude is quite compatible with Buddha-dharma (the pragmatic teaching of the Buddha).

A second difficulty is that sometimes the person may not have persisted long enough in the reinforcing activity. Even if you are doing something that you truly love to do, five minutes of doing it may not be enough to reverse a negative mood that has lasted for hours or days. A third difficulty is that, while a change in mood has occurred, it is not total or dramatic. And since people who are depressed think in black-and-white terms, they may not notice a more subtle change. One way to overcome this is to rate your mood before you engage in an activity and then rate it again afterward. For example, you could rate your sadness on a scale of 0 to 10, with 10 being the worst imaginable sadness, and 0 meaning the total absence of sadness. Perhaps, before engaging in an enjoyable activity, you rated your sadness as a 7. Afterward, you rated it as a 5. You can conclude from this that the activity was helpful because it moved your emotions in the desired direction. If you were thinking more globally about it, you might have missed this change. You might have just said to yourself, “I feel sad” before beginning the activity and “I still feel sad” after it. Rating a level of emotion or mood in this way is a psychological device to help you be more mindful, so that you notice shades of gray and subtler shifts. If your negative mood state has not reached clinical levels, it is relatively easy to change. Instead of a jump start, you may just need to turn the key to get the motor running again. The less intense the negative 07 BIEN.qxd 7/16/03 9:58 AM Page 171

Twenty-five Healing Things

What are some of the things that you do for yourself that are nurturing and nourishing? It is impossible to prescribe these things for another person, because what is nourishing for one may not be nourishing for someone else. The best answers are sometimes the simplest. You could take a slow, hot bath, doing this in a meditative way, keeping your attention as much as possible on the pleasant sensations rather than on your problems and worries. You might also try reading a little in one of your favorite meditational or inspirational books. Sometimes a good book—perhaps passages that you have marked or copied that were particularly helpful to you—can be the best of friends. I keep a notebook of favorite quotations for both writing and personal inspiration in difficult times. You might also call a close friend or family member who is good at listening and not too quick to offer easy advice, spurious solutions, or judgment. Or you might listen to a familiar, uplifting or soothing piece of music. Every so often, for example, I will listen to Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, and by the time I get to the

“Ode to Joy” chorale in the fourth movement, I almost always have tears of joy on my face, no matter what mood I was in to begin with. Fix yourself a cup of tea or coffee, and breathe in and out and meditate on the experience. There is no end to simple, nourishing things that one can do.

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On a piece of paper, list as many enjoyable, healing things as you can. Try to come up with at least twenty-five, but don’t be limited to that number. Keep coming back to the list to review and add to it. Don’t be too critical of your ideas; let them flow.

The next time you are a little out of sorts, take out your list and try a few things that appeal to you.

Send Yourself a Love Letter

It is a great victory, a true miracle, when you can respond to negative emotions in positive ways. Changing a negative mood is a greater miracle than walking on water or telepathy. Realistically, it is sometimes hard to motivate ourselves to do one of our healing things, however much we know we should. It may be all you can do to simply choose some form of
distraction
to at least help interrupt a negative cycle of worry or sadness. By distractions we mean things that are entertaining, but that may not be purely nourishing, or that may have limitations and difficulties attached to them. For example, a glass of wine (if you are not addicted) may be a form of distraction with some benefit. But there are difficulties. If one glass of wine becomes too many glasses of wine, the destructive aspects outweigh the helpfulness. Similarly, you may go to a movie, read an exciting novel, watch television, or go to the mall and buy yourself something special. However, each of these things has potential problems and difficulties. The movie or novel may take you away from your concerns for a while, but may fill you with disturbing images. Television, unless done selectively, may leave you bored and frustrated. Some research indicates a positive correlation between time spent watching television and depression: People who watch television more tend also to be more depressed. And buying yourself something may dig you deeper into indebtedness, causing more problems in the future. Still, as stopgap measures, these may be better than permitting a destructive spiral of thought and behavior to continue. If you are prone to negative emotions and moods, it is best to prepare ahead of time. There are many ways of doing this. In addition to your twenty-five healing things list, you could write the following on an index card and promise yourself you will take it out and read it the next time you feel down:

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Two women got angry at each other on the road one day. The anger escalated into a horrible episode of road rage. When it ended, one woman had shot the other in the head, killing her.

Road rage is always shocking, perhaps particularly so in this case since it is rare that women are involved. Both of these women were nice people, loved by their friends and families, and good workers. Now one is dead. And the other faces the prospect of life in prison. Anger is a signal that we perceive something to be unfair. The sense of unfairness causes us to focus on the perceived external source of our troubles, which can lead to destructive action. Anger will come up in all of us from time to time. You cannot avoid it. The Dalai Lama admits that he feels angry sometimes, and so does Thich Nhat Hanh. But they know how to take care of their anger. And that is the most important thing. Unless we take care of this painful emotion, it becomes a destructive force. Far too often, that is just what happens. Psychology used to teach that expressed anger is good, and that the most important thing about anger is to not let it get bottled up. Bottling our anger was thought to be destructive; releasing our anger was thought to be positive. Many therapists still continue to teach this, having their clients scream or beat pillows or hit each other with Nerf “swords.”

Psychologists have learned more about anger since then. And as is 07 BIEN.qxd 7/16/03 9:58 AM Page 174

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generally the case, we have discovered that anger is a far more complex phenomenon than the simple “let your anger out” model would imply. For one thing, the consequences of anger depend in part on who gets angry at whom. It is very different if you express anger at a young child than if you express anger at your boss and will have different consequences. For another thing, while there may be people who need help to feel and cope with anger, for the most part, when we beat pillows and so on, we are
practicing
being angry. We may feel some relief from the pleasant fatigue that follows the physical exertion, but it is not helpful in the long run. The next time we are in a similar situation, we only become angry more quickly
.
We cannot stress enough that unattended anger is destructive. It may be that anger is a signal that we cannot do without, just as we cannot do without sensory signals of pain. But if we do not take care of this feeling, or worse still, if we fan it into flames, it will cause a lot of suffering. The person who suffers the most from your anger is you. Anger puts your body on the alert. The hormones epinephrine, norepinephrine, and cortisol are released into the bloodstream, preparing you to fight or run, shunting blood away from maintenance processes like digestion and toward the large muscles, leaving you with a knot in the stomach. But while these hormones prepare us for an emergency, they come with a high price tag. Chronic release of these hormones has been implicated in hypertension and heart disease. And when the anger subsides, you are left exhausted and depleted.

We have known for some time now that there is a connection between coronary artery disease and a pattern of behavior called the type A personality. This type of person is characterized by a constant struggle to achieve, time urgency, irritability, anger, hostility, and impatience with anyone who gets in his or her way. While initial findings linked this personality with increased risk of heart disease compared to the more easygoing type B, subsequent studies have revealed the real culprit to be the hostility component. One major study found that men who were chronically hostile and angry were five times as likely as nonhostile men to develop heart disease and other ailments. Another study of anger compared styles for dealing with an angry and arbitrary boss. Those who said they would express their anger by immediately protesting and then informing their union (the “anger out” group) had the highest blood pressure. Those who said they would just walk away (the “anger in” group) had somewhat lower blood pres-07 BIEN.qxd 7/16/03 9:58 AM Page 175