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The Dark Side of Mindfulness

Mindfulness has been important for my OCD and anxiety management. When used in the right amounts, the tools are immensely helpful. But mindfulness has a dark side, too.

Mood music:

Dawn Foster points out the dangers in a post she wrote for The Guardian that asks “is mindfulness making us ill?”

In the article, we hear from a 37-year-old woman named Claire, who started suffering from panic attacks and depression when she started taking a mindfulness course. The mindfulness training dregded up childhood traumas, which in turn sparked panic attacks and depression.

I didn’t start taking a mindfulness class until eight years after I began to tackle my demons. Had I taken the class at the beginning of the journey, I think I would have had the same reaction as Claire. Luckily, I had peeled back the onion layers of my past long beforehand, which saved me from a fresh deluge of bad memories.

As it was, the mindfulness class I took in 2012 was overwhelming in some spots and boring in others. The yoga and the role-playing games for conflict resolution bored me. I found that trying to spend blocks of time on mindful exercises each day was unworkable. If I was having a busy, stressful day, blocking off the 30-40 minutes for yoga and breathing exercises simply stressed me out more. The reason, I realized, was that the only remedy for the stress was to tackle the root challenges head on.

All in all, mindfulness training was good for me. I just had to find a way to integrate the techniques into my life. I learned to break things into smaller pieces. Instead of doing multiple exercises in large time blocks, I found that spending two minutes here and five minutes there worked better. Ten minutes of guitar playing helps to keep me in the moment. Breathing exercises in the car help me deal with the stress of traffic jams. These things have made a positive difference.

Some exercises I dispensed with entirely. The whole business about chewing your food slowly and silently, pondering the taste and texture with each chew? That did nothing for me.

When we’re desperate to fix ourselves, we look for a silver bullet. Maybe it’s a new workout craze or a mindfulness training course. In my experience, however, the bite-sized techniques always work better. When broken into pieces, the effect is less overwhelming. But I’ve also learned that there is no silver bullet.

If someone pitches mindfulness classes as a useful tool in a bigger toolbox, great.

But if they tell you they’re THE SOLUTION, walk away.

Savage Namaste by Eddie Mize, 2009
Savage Namaste
by Eddie Mize, 2009
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My Problem with “One Day at a Time”

“One day at a time? You wouldn’t believe the crap that swirls around my head one day at a time.”–Anonymous

Recovering addicts have a saying burned into their brains: “one day at a time.” It’s important wisdom to live by. But when the recovering addict has OCD, there’s a big problem.

Mood music:

In the world of 12-step recovery programs, the idea of “one day at a time” is not to be overwhelmed. Instead of trying to get your arms around everything necessary for recovery inside of a week or a month or a year, we subscribe to the idea of just focusing on what we have to do today. Doing this a day at a time makes the clean-up tasks seem a lot less overwhelming.

It’s a good way to be in all aspects of life. Plan for the future, but stay focused in the present.

The problem with an OCD case is that the disorder forces you to do nothing but stew over the future. You look at the next week or the next month and relentlessly play out the potential outcomes.

The first time someone told me to take it a day at a time, my instinct was to punch him in the face. I had a business trip three weeks away to worry about. I had a medical test scheduled for the following month and had all kinds of potentially grim outcomes to worry about.

That’s how guys like me roll.

Still, I decided to give “one day at a time” a chance. I even took a class of mindfulness-based stress reduction to that end.

I learned that it absolutely is the best way to go about life. When I’m able to focus on the present, I’m happy and successful.

But I’ve also learned that it’s hard as hell to pull off. My OCD often reasserts itself and I dive back into long-term worries, which lead to present-day failures.

The whole concept fell to ashes this past autumn as I slipped into one of the deeper depressions I’ve had in a long time. The depression has lifted significantly, but I remain scattered.

This past weekend I was so all over the place that my lapse from mindfulness became too big to overlook, and I find myself looking for ways to get it back. I feel like Bill the Cat from the “Bloom County” comic strip: flopping about and yelling “Ack!”

I played guitar both weekend days, which helped. More daily walks would help, too. It might also do me a world of good to go to confession sometime this month. Emptying the trash that builds up in the soul is a good way to move on.

In a perfect world, I would probably do well to take a refresher course in mindfulness. But this isn’t a perfect world, and there’s no time or money for such an endeavor.

Somewhere in my house is the packet of papers I collected during the mindfulness course. I plan to tear the place apart until I find it.

Stay tuned.

Bill the Cat

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The Worst Abuse of All

I’m taking a lot of abuse lately, the kind that leaves me mentally tired and physically aching. It’s not abuse from family, work colleagues or law enforcement, however. I’m doing it to myself.

Mood music:

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In the past, I’d binge myself sick in times of uncertainty, but these days the abuse takes other forms: I allow myself to get lost in the deep weeds of worry. The kicker is that I’m not worried about anything bad. No medical scares or fresh family strife in my world. Deep-fried worry over those things would be more understandable.

In this case, I’m worrying about potentially awesome changes in my life. Someone with a more balanced mind would enjoy the potential for good things and take it a day at a time. But when you have OCD, anticipation is the spiked club you use to repeatedly club yourself. We crave control like a newborn craves mother’s milk. In reality, however, there are few things an individual can control.

So here I am, walking around in a daze, waking up in the middle of the night and having trouble going back to sleep, checking my computer way too often for some sign that answers will come.

I keep repeating a phrase that I learned in a recent course I took on mindfulness-based stress reduction: “The past is history, tomorrow is a mystery, and the present is a gift.” I know these words to be true. Knowing them and living them isn’t necessarily the same thing in my world.

Eventually all this will pass; it always does.

I’ve been praying a lot. Some of you scowl at the idea of praying, but it really helps me. If nothing else, it calms me down and reminds me that I’m not a soul adrift or alone. I have all the support I could ever ask for, and that’ll see me through.

I did a lot of house cleaning this weekend. Ironically, this activity, often conducted in OCD overdrive, helped me wring out some of the anxiety. I guess I needed the exercise that comes with running up and down three flights of stairs all day.

I played a lot of guitar, too. Few things have been better at helping me stay in the moment. And I feel younger when my kids tell me to turn it down.

I used to be a mental mess most of the time, so I’m grateful that these worry binges only come in waves now. The trick is to take them from frequent or even infrequent events to absolutely rare moments.

Out of control

Art by Bill Fennell
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Time for Tea

This is going to shock a lot of you, given the steady flow of coffee you’ve watched me drink day after day, but try to stay calm.

I’m drinking tea, and lots of it.

Mood music:

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This change wasn’t planned. No doctor told me to do it or risk a heart attack. And I haven’t given up my beloved java.

In recent days, I’ve started splitting the day between coffee and tea: coffee in the morning, tea in the afternoon and evening.

For whatever reason, I really started to crave tea Saturday afternoon. It could be because my mindfulness teacher keeps telling the class to “have tea with your problems” or “tea with your dragon.” When you have an addictive personality like mine, the more someone repeats something like that, the more you start to want it. It’s why I can’t hang out with people who want to talk about nothing but boozing. Before long, I start jonesing for a bottle.

I got home that afternoon and had some green tea. Later, I had some chamomile. It felt good. I felt more at ease. A new afternoon-evening habit was born.

Those who know me well know how much I love caffeine. Coffee is the main delivery system, along with Red Bull, though I haven’t had the latter for a couple weeks now. I simply haven’t felt like having it.

There’s a stupid part of me that sometimes resists change because I’ve spent so much time building up an image. Admittedly, I like the sober, bitter-coffee-swilling hardcore image I’ve built for myself. But the smarter part of me knows that it’s always best to try new things and expand one’s horizons. That’s why I started playing guitar again after nearly 20 years. Playing is quickly becoming my main addiction and I’m fine with that, because it means I’m not burying my face behind the laptop screen as much as I used to. I discovered Saturday that tea goes really good with guitar playing.

So here I am, drinking tea and coffee. Turns out, there’s plenty of room in the day for both.

Just as long as the writer doesn’t drink all the editor’s tea. —The Editor

Green Tea

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Stop Thinking You Have the Whole Story

I’m watching a lot of people go apeshit this morning over a restaurant receipt someone posted online. Apparently a single mom was too poor to tip her server on a meal that cost $138.35. Have a look:

Restaurant receipt

Mood music:

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It looks real enough, but I’ve grown skeptical of most online pics these days. It’s easy to fake images these days. But real or not, somebody posted it to get a reaction, so I’ll take the bait.

My first reaction is that this single mom didn’t think things through, and some hard-working waitress got shafted. Surely, if she’s struggling financially, she shouldn’t have gone to a restaurant. She certainly should have aimed cheaper. McDonald’s, for instance. It’s horrible to skip the tip, especially when service is top notch.

That’s what people are saying, anyway.

On that I agree. I always try to leave a tip above the baseline percentage simply because waiting on tables looks like hard work and my kids always leave a mess. The bigger reason, though, is that something inside me wants to do something nice for someone, even if they don’t deserve it. I’ve had plenty of shitty service in my day, but I still left a tip. Have I ever stiffed someone on the tip? I can’t remember, but I’m sure I have.

There’s a bigger point, though. When we see these things online, we instantly assume we’re looking at an accurate, honest picture, and we can’t contain our outrage. I’m certainly guilty of it.

So for the sake of being nicer people, let’s consider some things.

Whenever we see or hear something, we’re only getting a piece of the story. If someone cuts us off in traffic, for example, we’re pretty sure we’ve just suffered at the hands of some asshole with reckless driving habits. What we may not know is that the driver is rushing to the hospital after getting word that a loved one is dying.

If this mom took her kids to a restaurant despite the lack of financial resources, maybe she felt she didn’t have a choice. Maybe she lost power days ago from Superstorm Sandy and all the food in her fridge spoiled.

Maybe she skipped the cheaper restaurants because they had no power either or because one of her kids has allergies that make fast food a dicier proposition.

Maybe she walked in there thinking she had enough money to cover everyone, only to receive a bill that was a lot higher than she expected. I’ve run into that scenario before.

There are other questions for which we lack answers. For example, how many mouths was she trying to feed?

If you’re getting pissed at me for spoiling your moment of self-righteous indignation, I don’t really blame you. Nobody loves wallowing in self-righteous indignation more than me. But ever since I started taking a class on mindfulness-based stress reduction, I’ve been thinking about something the teacher said: “We spend most of our days making judgments, but we never know the entire story.”

Whenever I see all the outrage on Facebook and elsewhere and feel tempted to join in, that statement keeps coming back to me.

It makes it harder for me to get angry.

But then I’ve never been a server in a restaurant, so if I’m not feeling an adequate level of outrage, it’s probably because I don’t have the full story there, either.

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I Was Tricked Into Yoga

I’ve long balked at the idea of doing yoga. Frankly, it always looked boring to me. It didn’t fit the tough-guy image I have of myself, either. Tough guys don’t do a bunch of poses. They lift heavy things. Yet here I am, doing yoga.

Thing is, I’m starting to appreciate and respect it.

Mood music:

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How did I reach this strange place? My therapist tricked me.

For years, he’s been trying to push yoga on me as a tool to reduce stress and get out of my head. For years, my response has been “no fucking way.”

I recently signed up for my therapist’s Mindfulness-based Stress Reduction class because for a guy trying to manage clinical OCD, you need as many tools as you can gather. I’ve gotten the upper hand over the more insidious byproducts of my OCD in recent years, particularly the fear, anxiety and inability to go about my day because of the worry spinning in my brain. Now I enjoy many of the things I once feared, including travel, and I’m able to truly live. But I still get stuck in my head, which is bad when someone’s trying to talk to you. So I signed up for the class.

My therapist didn’t mention there’d be yoga involved. The bastard.

I knew I’d been duped when I walked into the first class and saw yoga mats carefully placed in a circle. He finally sprung it on us at last week’s class, and last night we really got into it.

My first thought was that the beginner’s positions were a lot like the exercises I used to do for a bad back. My second thought was that the poses were a pretty strenuous workout. I didn’t expect to break a sweat, but I did. There was something satisfying about it.

I’m supposed to do this once a day as part of my homework. That’s going to be tough, given my schedule. But I’m sure there’s a way.

Erin has done a lot of yoga in the past but not much lately. Maybe I can get her to do it with me.

If someone told me a year ago that I’d be pondering this stuff now, I’d have laughed in their face. Actually, I did just that to my therapist.

You won’t find me wearing yoga pants, though. That would be gross.

Crazy Yoga Pose

Ouch.
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Out of My Head

Like anyone with a mental disorder like OCD, I spend a lot of time locked in my head. My thoughts will be on what I’m doing the next day or a year out. Or they’re in the past, replaying scenes from long ago. Last night I began the mission to get out of there.

Mood music:

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It was the first night of my Stress Reduction and Mindfulness class. The instructor is my therapist, though the other students don’t know that. He tells me this is the first class to include one of his patients. I entered a room full of yoga mats, cushions and funny little benches that look like the kneelers they put in front of the coffin at wakes.

“Fuck,” I thought to myself. “Right out of the gate we’re doing yoga.” I’ve resisted doing yoga forever. I don’t have a good reason for that. I guess I think it will just bore me.

In the end, we used the mats for a lie-down exercise designed to make us aware of our bodies and what they’re doing and feeling. A couple people fell asleep.

We practiced eating mindfully, taking a single raisin and staring at it, rolling it in out hands and keeping it in our mouths for a while before swallowing.

We left with homework. Among other things, I have to eat an entire meal mindfully instead of scarfing it down per usual. I also have to take an activity I do almost daily and do it mindfully, taking note of every aspect of the activity as I proceed. For fun, I think I’ll try this while shaving my head.

I can stare at the razor and look at its detail, stop every time I cut myself and study the pattern of the blood dripping from my scalp before washing it off. I’ll take note of how the water feels when rinsing off the cut. I can note the difference between the feel of a clean razor and one that’s getting clogged with my stubble.

I could also practice my guitar mindfully, noting the feel of the strings and the sounds I get as I randomly launch chords from up and down the neck. I’ve already discovered that you can’t really play the guitar without being mindful of every step. I can’t, anyway.

The ultimate goal is to be able to pay attention to every detail when I’m talking to someone or doing any number of other daily tasks where my mind tends to drift.

This should be interesting.

Mindfulness

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I’m Stressed About My Stress-Reduction Class

Tonight is the first of eight weekly stress-reduction and mindfulness classes I’m taking. I have to admit the whole thing stresses me out a bit.

It’s not that the description is bad. In fact, it sounds delightful. I’m going to learn how to use yoga and other techniques to keep my thoughts in the present, where they belong. Here’s a little background from the Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction website:

Dr. Jon Kabat-Zinn developed the Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) program at the University of Massachusetts Medical Center. Since its inception, MBSR has evolved into a common form of complementary medicine addressing a variety of health problems … MBSR is an 8-week intensive training in mindfulness meditation, based on ancient healing practices, which meets on a weekly basis. Mindfulness practice is ideal for cultivating greater awareness of the unity of mind and body, as well as of the ways the unconscious thoughts, feelings, and behaviors can undermine emotional, physical, and spiritual health.

I certainly qualify for such a program. I have a history of stress-induced maladies — Crohn’s Disease, OCD, ADD, depression, fear and anxiety, migraines — and I’m still in the process of making peace with a lot of what happened in my past.

For my back story, check out “An OCD Diaries Primer“.

I’ve gotten pretty good control over the anxiety and OCD in recent years. Heavy therapy, medication and spiritual growth have all played a role. And work, once the biggest source of stress in my life, no longer rattles me. Having a job I absolutely love helps on that score.  I’m also much healthier in my 40s than I was in my 20s and 30s. Crippling back pain is years into the past, and I’ve maintained a significant weight loss. I don’t eat flour or sugar and weigh just about everything I eat. I no longer drink, and cigars and cigarettes have been replaced with e-cigs. I’m also playing guitar again. Making music has been more appealing to me of late than staring at the Internet for hours, which is another addictive behavior I’ve struggled with.

But I still experience stress. There’s a lot of family drama, including a long estrangement from some parts of the family and an erosion of patience that intensified when my father had a stroke last year and we really began the work of helping our younger child manage his ADHD.

No surprises there. That’s the garden-variety stress everyone experiences. Only the names, dates and circumstances change.

While these things no longer incapacitate me, they still make it difficult for me to keep my mind in the present. When your mind is in the past or the future, it makes it very difficult to listen when people are talking to you in the present. The result is that you don’t retain important information like dates, appointments and the like. Worse — much worse — is that you’re robbing the people you love of your undivided attention.

My therapist once told me that there’s no better gift you can give a person than your time and attention. A lot of what he says annoys me. But on this I think he’s right.

That comment from the therapist is what compels me to take this class. I want to be a better listener and less scatterbrained when the house chores stack up.

So why the stress?

It’s yet another appointment to keep every week, shoehorned into the schedule between all my kids’ Boy Scouts activities and various family check-ups, school activities and an awesome but demanding job.

Of course, that’s me thinking in the future instead of the present, which just makes me more comfortable with the notion that this is the right thing to do.

I’ll report back to you on all this tomorrow.