Get out of your mind and into your life

I'm seeing how a good default for helping me do more getting out of my mind and into my life is to shift to practicing mindfulness whenever I'm being unduly influenced by anxiety-driven concerns. I want to keep bringing myself back to a value-driven way of being, and mindfulness practices seem like a promising strategy for helping me disengage from anxiety-driven thoughts and behaviors.

Deliberately doing an activity that will slow me down

Notes from talking to a residential counselor at the Houston OCD Program

Supposed to be faster for "generally want everything to be faster" sake e.g. walking her dogs

When finding herself unduly influenced by efficiency concerns

She will go do a task that will force her to slow down

Water the lawn by hand

[Gardening is something she used to enjoy more often, this task helps her enjoy valued things.]

Enforced slowness to enforce awareness

uncomfortable to do this

perhaps especially so when unduly influenced by efficiency concerns

uncomfortable but will slow you down

which can facilitate “twice as slowly” and “twice as calmly” mentality that I want to adopt as often as possible

Take time to do something

Art exercises I could do:

Blind sketching - keep eyes on the thing you’re drawing and don’t look down at paper

Use non-dominant hand to draw an object 

Intent to hold while doing the activity:

Cultivate awareness

Really look at the object I'm drawing 

Really experience the experience I'm having

Value the process of doing the activity and having the experience

Get to know something and engage and participate in doing something with it

The last item on that list provided an answer to a question I asked at the end of our conversation: "What is it all about anyway?" with "it" referring to life.

In response to this she talked about the River and Tides documentary about Andy Goldsworthy, and that provided an unbelievably (in terms of who would’ve guessed that my posing this question would actually yield an answer that really resonated so well for me) satisfying answer: 

Getting to know things and engaging and participating in doing something with them.

Tonglen

I was just talking through how to do an upcoming exposure with a residential counselor here at the Houston OCD Program.

At the end of the conversation, she was talking about accepting that things will just happen as they happen. My reaction to this was to yell "Ahhhh  Ahhhh" in response to this. My thoughts quickly turned from ideas around how a physical therapy appointment might go to tornados destroying everything in their path. Mayhem Mayhem Mayhem.

So, I stayed with the sensations that went with the utter chaos that I associated with her words about things just happening as they happen. What then ensued turned into a tonglen meditation. By the end I was imagining myself being able to sit with the ideas of things just happening as they happen more like my partner Peter would.

What I want to confront

Whatever causes the most anxiety, whatever is the thing I most want control over. These are the things I want to confront.

I've been working through how I want to be using the ratings I'm being asked to give my anxiety levels here at the Houston OCD Program. These ratings are called SUDS, Subjective Units of Distress.

1 - 3 Mild
4 - 7 Moderate
8 - 10 High

It seems like it'll be helpful to keep in mind the helpful guidance that you see above in italics. So, things that are TOO IMPORTANT!!!! definitely fall under the category of things I most want control over. Not wanting to be party to the spread of Molluscum is an example of that. So, how do I confront this thing?

[Molluscum (Water warts) is something that my 5 year old has on different parts of his body for 3 months now that can last for months to years and is itchy for him.]

Okay, so when I'm concerned about it, my SUDS are super high. The goal is to have things be more No Big Deal. So, one goal is to be able to go about tasks where I'm anxious about Molluscum with lower SUDS. Another goal is to not be over the top about the measures I take to prevent the spread of Molluscum.

So, perhaps one route* to achieving these goals is to write scripts about the spread of Molluscum and use them to get to a point where I can hold the idea of preventing its spread more lightly rather than with a death grip with the idea that it must be prevented at all costs.

I don't want to be unduly influenced by my anxiety. I want to be able to hold its concerns more lightly.

Perhaps, with SUDS, it might be easiest for me to rate things based on the degree to which I am feeling unduly influenced by my anxiety.

If I'm not being unduly influenced then I'll be able to go about things from a settled place. If I am, then "Ahhhh Ahhhh" is the energy that I'll be bringing to things. The gesture that goes with "Ahhhh Ahhhh" for me is waving my hands in front of my shoulders. So, my SUDS can be ratings of how much of that energy I've brought to what I've experienced.

Another thing I could do is rate things based on how able to be with a values-driven approach to things and to be more process-oriented.

Another thought is to think in terms of tonglen...

Yet another thought is to think in terms of how able I am to resist doing what my OCD bully is saying I must do...or how easy it is to shrug off the thing I wish weren't so.

*It's about being able to experience feeling super anxious about it without giving in and doing what would make me feel less anxious. One route to getting there is to spend time hanging out with high levels of anxiety about it while trying to dial the anxiety up with the goal of habituating to it.

If getting depressed or if overthinking or if feeling shame or guilt predominantly

Helpful suggestions for what to do when doing exposures and not able to be mainly working with anxiety:

If I'm mostly feeling shame or guilt, try mindful self-compassion. Write out what I would say to someone else in my shoes. What would I want someone to say to me?

If getting depressed while doing exposures, try cognitive restructuring.

If getting depressed while doing obsessional exposures, switch to behavioral exposures.

If overthinking, then go to obsessional exposures. Just say the same sentence over and over again.

Struggle makes it worse - believing it's not gonna be better until I feel good

It's not gonna be better until I feel good.

That's a belief that keeps me stuck...like I'm struggling in quicksand...the struggling makes things worse.

With both depression and anxiety, I can see how this belief has made things harder.

Feeding the desperate need for relief leads me to be more stuck.

Climbing a mountain

I'm finally committing to investing a lot of time and effort in working on my anxiety issues by doing exposure and response prevention. Someone described what I've been doing for the last year as circling a mountain that she and others have been encouraging me to climb.

I want things all figured out before I try them. I spend far more time thinking about doing things than actually doing them. Hence all the circling of this mountain that I've finally started climbing.

As with other things*, I'm finding with doing exposures, actually doing them is very instructive. I'm making far more progress and am more able to get things figured out now that I'm actually doing the exposures.  Even having experienced this and seen just what a profound difference it makes, I still find myself tending toward too much thinking about how to do them and which ones to do, etc. etc. etc.

I'm hoping that starting this blog will help to remind me of this and the other things that help so much to keep in mind...like the big picture goal with all this...I want things to be less of a struggle in my life. I want there to be more ease. So, that's how I came up with the name Ease for this blog.



*My advisor used to point out that I needed to do more with actually writing rather than all the time I was spending thinking about writing. I tend to want things to spring perfect from my head. Getting stuff out onto paper and working with it there works far better than trying to do too much of it in my head.