Almost every day, what I want the most is to stop thinking, if only for one second. At any given moment — until the time I finally fall asleep after an hour of trying and as soon as I wake up in the morning — my mind is overflowing with thoughts. I’m either fixating on an unimportant thought or endlessly jumping from one thought to another, and sometimes both at once. When I’m still, it tends to be the former — concentrating on one thought and overthinking the situation; whereas when I’m walking, it’s the latter — making rapid connections between ideas that are tangentially related, ideas that oftentimes have no significance on my life and that I don’t even know why are in my memory. When I take walks in the morning, my mind traverses so many unpredictable paths that when it’s over, my brain has already expended so much energy on entertaining those thoughts; within a few hours of waking up, I’m already drained. In any case, it’s nearly impossible for me to have an empty mind, and at the rare moment that I do, it feels strange and that I should be thinking about something. The foreign feeling of having an empty mind is the result of a) being so accustomed to having something pressing to worry about (e.g. a task or deadline) and b) several years worth of forcibly inserting thoughts into my brain and letting those thoughts control my attention. At those moments where I have nothing pressing to think about, I tend to start fixating on trivial matters such as responding to a message or engaging with a tweet. I’m seriously puzzled by the absurdity of this situation — these are the thoughts that prevent me from sleeping at night?
Once I’ve latched onto such thoughts, they tend to bother me throughout the day; they’re constantly active in my consciousness, ready to remind me of their existence at any moment. When this happens, I feel like I’m experiencing the cycle of unwanted thoughts again. I consume essays to try to think of something different, but even while reading, those bothersome thoughts periodically reenter the fore of my consciousness. I try to redirect my attention to another thought that’s similar in substance but not bothersome itself. I try to stop thinking by listening to music and letting that fill my attention. But based on my past experiences, I know that none of these methods work. None of them will allow me to forcibly eject a thought from my consciousness. Instead, I need to accept those thoughts and let them pass by, knowing that as long as I don’t fight them, they will eventually quiet on their own. Nicole’s analogy (see below) applies perfectly to this situation; my thoughts may be irritating for a few days but they will gradually diminish as I think about other things in my life. I need to trust that after a while, they will no longer disturb me even if it’s difficult for me to believe so in the moment. That their disturbance is temporary, no matter how painful they are right now. Rather than judging these thoughts every time they arise, I should simply observe them, allow them to be as they are. So far, reminding myself of these truths has been effective over the past few months: when I’ve had a bothersome thought, it has usually subsided after a few days, one week at most. Later on, that particular thought may arise again, but by then it’s become so inconsequential that it no longer affects me at all. The mind eventually becomes weary of repeating that one thought that it naturally wants to concentrate on other things. Hence, whenever I find myself irrationally fixating on a thought, I remind myself of past instances: if I’ve effectively dealt with such thoughts in the past, I should be able to do so this time around.
Given that these thoughts tend to be about social interaction, I’ve also been reminding myself that people don’t think about me as much as I think they do. For most of my life, I had minimal interactions with people, so I assigned a huge significance to each interaction and believed that the other person concentrated on our interaction as much as I did. Only in the past year did I realize that was far from the case: people likely have dozens of interactions per day and are generally too occupied with concerns in their own life, both of which mean they’re not going to fixate on my particular interaction with them. Whereas at first I only recognized this truth on a theoretical level, recently I’ve begun to see so for myself. As I’m interacting with more people and starting to use twitter actively (posting and replying instead of lurking), I’ve noticed that I simply do not have the energy to worry about every little interaction or engagement. Whereas I used to shudder at the idea of following up, I now understand that something truly isn’t significant unless people follow up. As a result of having more interactions with people, the potency of these bothersome thoughts has been decreasing: in most cases, the interaction isn’t important and people will have likely already forgotten about the matter that I tend to irrationally fixate on. Thus, to lessen the anxiety associated with such thoughts, I’m going to continue placing myself in situations where I interact with a lot of people per day and in doing so, continue to unveil the nature of social interaction.
As for slowing my mind’s constant swirl of thoughts, I’m still working on that — I don’t yet have a solution other than regularly reminding myself that it’s okay to do and think about nothing. Usually, the only time my mind feels cleared of thoughts is when I’m excessively drained throughout the day — those odd moments where it’s easier to sleep than to think because sleeping is so effortless. But it shouldn’t take extreme fatigue for my mind to stop racing. Instead, I should be able to access that state whenever I want to. Even when my mind is ablaze with thoughts that make it seem impossible to relax, I don’t have to act on those thoughts immediately. If my thoughts arouse anxiety or frustration or self-consciousness, I should allow myself to sit with those feelings rather than engaging in some action to distract myself from them. When I’m walking, I should observe and appreciate the scenery around me rather than following all the miscellaneous directions that my mind takes me and being mired in my sinew of thoughts. That’s a general intention I have for this year: striking a better balance between being attuned to the real world and my inner world of thoughts and ideas. I want to create more opportunities to engage with real life, to bask in my surroundings, to be present — moments where I’m so engaged in an event or activity that I forget all the trivial worries that typically occupy my consciousness.
