Blowing My Own Mind

Holy crap, it's been more than two months since I last wrote here.  My moods have been all a-dither, up down and around and around, and I haven't felt inclined to pin my thoughts and feelings down long enough to write something.  I started a new medication, a twice-daily pill, to replace the every-other-monthly infusions I'd been getting.  One side effect is depression. And under directions of my new physician I changed the dosing on my anti-depressant from two pills in the morning to one in the morning and one in the evening.  The chaos of rapid cycling and mixed episodes ensued. 

My ups are never very up; I don't go on grand spending sprees or lose all inhibitions.  I just feel like a normal person, how I used to feel before I got sick.  I have the stamina to exercise, I want to and can write philosophy without my thoughts getting muddled, I sometimes smile at people in the grocery store, and I even make chit chat with people I don't know.  But the ups are interspersed with downs: crying spells, strong feelings of hopelessness, disconnectedness, alienation, and guilt.  Tormented feelings, when all I want to do is make it all stop. It's not that I want to kill myself when I feel that way, I just want the psychological nightmare and agony to end. 

I'm more in control of my thoughts and feelings than I used to be, though.  Now I can sometimes step back and ask myself if the thoughts underlying the feelings are rational, and I can evaluate the evidence.  This settles me down because I inevitably conclude either that the conclusions aren't warranted or if they are, that I can handle them.  But it's difficult, because the emotions aren't caused by the thoughts in the first place.  I have the fucked up emotions, and then I cast around for explanations about things in my life that are responsible for causing those emotions.  I then fixate on the things in my life and think that they are the cause of the emotions.  It's hard to jump out of that, to tell myself that my explanations aren't valid, that things in my life didn't create the emotions, my messed up brain chemistry did.

And in that messed up state of mind, it's hard to know what's true.  I don't make up the explanations out of nothing, there's usually a seed of truth in them, I'm just interpreting them catastrophically.  For instance, it's true that my family does not connect to me in a meaningful (never mind a loving) way.  But when my brain chemistry is funky, I take that fact and dwell on it, deepen its importance, and believe that it means and matters much more than it does when my emotions are stable.  I conclude that there must be something fundamentally wrong with me that's responsible for a lack of tight family bonds.  When the fact of the matter is that two of my close family members are schizophrenics and the third has many of the traits of a sociopath.  Sure, there are things that make me difficult to relate to (introversion, for one), but I'm not responsible for the traits that make them difficult to relate to (paranoia, hallucinations, and delusions, and lying and a lack of empathy).

The actual facts of the matter can be difficult to determine when I'm caught within a maelstrom of emotions.  But I do have the presence of mind to cast doubt on my more extreme thoughts.  But thinking about thinking is confusing.  If I have the emotions and then distort facts to fit the emotions, how can it be that thinking about the distorted facts calms the emotions?  That is, if thinking about things isn't what causes the emotions in the first place, why would thinking about these facts calm the emotions?

I think the error here is believing that discovering the facts, discovering that the thinking is distorted, is what causes me to calm down.  It's not finding the truth and realizing that I was distorting it that changes how I feel, it's the change that I induce in how I'm thinking and feeling.  I begin to bring a self-awareness to what's happening in my head, I take a psychological step back and assume a distance and a self-directness that is itself calming. This distancing gives me a feeling of control over my psychological state, and the turbulent emotions recede.  So, it's not my discovery of the wrongness of my thoughts that leads me to conclude that my emotions are not warranted, rather it's the redirection of my attention away from my all-consuming emotions toward my more rational way of thinking: it's the resumption of self-control.  

I think it's fascinating that consuming chemicals can change our thoughts, feelings, and behaviors.  Even more fascinating, though, is that we can change our thoughts, feelings, and behaviors by thinking, and thus change the chemical activity in our brain.  And we can learn how to deliberately change our thinking through things like meditation, cognitive behavioral therapy, and yoga.    That blows my mind.

Some research-based resources about the use of meditation, cognitive behavioral therapy, and yoga to control moods:

Cognitive Behavioral Therapy for Depression Technique from eMedicine

Yoga for Anxiety and Depression from Harvard Mental Health Letter

Meditation for Anxiety and Depression, Johns Hopkins Medicine