During the last few weeks I’ve been tally clicking my pessimism. It culminated in a fantastic long weekend with family and friends. While the postcard image of a Thanksgiving feast is family seated peacefully around a dinner table expressing gratefulness, the actuality is saturated with worry. This was definitely the case with me. I clicked away while fretting constantly about the cook on the turkey or if the guests would socialize well.

Here’s my data so far:

On Day 5 there were two mental moments that I can only describe as a coalescence - a gathering feeling of subtle mental tensing that is a precursor to a thought. As I automatically zoomed in to observe it, it dissipated, not quite crystalizing into full blown negativity. This happened a lot in my first attempt at “dynamic meditation” 5 years ago. While the original experiment didn’t last very long, I started constantly noticing these precursors and dispersing them. My friend once described something similar. He said he sometimes had the ability to banish negativity by what felt like relaxing the “muscles” of the brain.

TANGLED TIME AND IDENTITY

The other interesting issue was entangled timelines.

The flow of how anxiety progresses is fascinating. I’ll get frustrated, future project how bad my life will be, then dip into the past and cherry pick evidence for that failed future. This happens in an instant, and it takes practice to zoom in and untangled that web.

Loneliness came up a lot in these two weeks. If I zoomed in, it unfolded as a sadness of how this time in my life is devoid of any of the rich sense of community it once had. But if I look even more deeply it’s the future projection of a life of where I’m always lonely that’s so difficult to bear. 

This is a point where depression and anxiety merge with identity issues. It makes me understand why Eastern religions are so obsessed with the sense of self as the root of all suffering. All these pessimistic projections rest on the belief of a persistent identity that’s not good enough.

Thanksgiving really is a great metaphor for this. Someone once said that anxiety is looking towards the future with worry, while depression is looking towards the past. I tend to agree. The antidote to depression appears to be gratitude. It underscores past experiences that were good instead of what most of us do, which is artificially emphasize the bad. Once gratitude gets going, it feels like counting blessings that we haven’t earned, and we begin to feel lucky.

Affirmations as I’m doing them now appear to be the antidote to worry. In the absence of evidence, you can equally reframe the current situation as turning out well.

It is supremely ironic that giving thanks is a solution to a problem that doesn’t actually come up on Thanksgiving. No wonder people are so stressed out.

But anxiety and depression aren’t all there is - there are outliers in the tangled knots of negativity in my head.

OUTLIERS

The first is jealousy, which can be an issue with the present. I’ll scroll on Instagram and won’t like how I measure up to what I see. Gratitude is good for that, but a really good counter is metta - essentially wishing people well as people who, like us, just want to live a good life free from suffering. It’s a knack - and for me it’s a practice of understanding them as complete people rather than snippets we’re given glimpses of on social media.

This is also temporally entangled. When I zoom in to observe the emotion, I’m not just comparing my current state to them; it’s also a future projection of how I will never be the person I’m jealous of, a future lens to judge the present.

There are moments of anxiety and sadness that are even more difficult to parse. There was a moment while I was driving around before Thanksgiving where I looked up at the sky, with its expanse of clouds slowly moving in the distance, and felt utterly overwhelmed with a deep sadness. 

In this Men’s Health article, Michael Behar discusses awe and its powerful effect on humans. I’ve personally felt this sense of glory and wonder on my travels. It’s both deeply healing and life affirming. The Stoics might call it a view from above - a realization that what I’m worried about is like making a mountain out of a molehill. 

But sometimes such experiences give me the feeling that I will never be anything but insignificant. It reminds me of my mortality, frailty, and lack of true agency. Is this pessimism? I don’t know.

NEW REFRAMES AND SPONTANEOUS OPTIMISM

In the past weeks I’ve found new reframes to match these unusual outliers. Some great ones come from Arnold Schwarzenegger in the documentary Pumping Iron. In it he says that sometimes he feels the pain he experiences in the gym is overwhelming, a pain few people will ever endure. But that’s how he knows he’s going to be one of the greats. I like this idea of loving pain as a harbinger of better times.

Another reframe is a simple question that’s particularly salient on thanksgiving - “What if it all turns out perfect?” Lydia has posed this question a lot, and it makes my brain hurt. For a moment it’s as though my mind is trying to hold both modalities – the negative and positive – at once. I can only assume this is a good thing.

On day 8 I had several spontaneous moments of utter optimism. They’ve periodically come up since then, but it reminds me of an old Reddit thread describing a girl click training happiness. This is much more in line with how classic click training works. It also makes me wonder if there are two separate trainings here: 1) what I’m doing now, clicking AWAY negativity and 2) what this girl was doing - increasing and rewarding the act of having good thoughts. There seems to be an overlap, but only time will tell which one is better.

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It’s been a struggle changing the course of this river of worry. I was distraught about my cooking and if it would turn out well. It did, and all the tension was needless. My mind has already turned to new fears. But what if, as Lydia is so eager to remind me, those also turn out well?

photocred: turkey by Carol von Canon