Never mind
Metaphors are perhaps the most potent yet overlooked antidote to depression and anxiety.
We have all struggled/are struggling against some form of depression and anxiety in our lives. Sometimes it can be overpowering, weighing us down under its self-enlarged image. The on-going COVID-19 pandemic and the uncertainty and distress it has brought with it is certainly not helpful. We all know how living in the present can help us detach ourselves from over-thinking about the future (anxiety) or excessively indulging in reminiscing the past (depression). Increasingly, people also appreciate how meditation and exercise can help create much-needed headspace in our lives and ease tension in our body.
But we sometimes overlook the power of the words we use to describe our feelings. Like in any situation in life, reframing is a powerful tool that we can use to rehash and dial down our “amygdala hijack”. Brian Pennie, who motivated himself to turn sober after 15 years of chronic heroin addiction (now an author, speaker, and a PhD candidate), has mastered the art of employing metaphors as a tool to shift to a positive mindset. Here are some metaphors and cues, from him and others, that I have found useful in dealing with my emotional spillovers:
- ABCD technique
Brian posits this simple technique to challenge our negative self-chatter. The negative thoughts we experience can be categorized as A, B, or C i.e. it could be viewing an event or a person as an adversary, these views could sprout from our beliefs or the fear of unforeseen consequences. We could either get bogged down by the barrage of these invalidating thoughts or dispute them by presenting a counter-argument as to why these could be untrue.
- Zoom out
It’s as if we are reading a newspaper about the latest happenings of our lives, named pretentiously after ourselves (say Myself Times or Myselfist — wherever you get your dose of geeky terms from). The brain, while performing its most elementary function of keeping us safe, zooms in on what’s wrong in our lives right now or what went/could go wrong in the day, as if that incident or feeling is the only article worthy of making news. We can reframe this chain of thought by gently prompting ourselves that these negative thoughts are footnotes amongst all that is good in our lives, not the headlines.
- You are the sky behind the passing clouds
The underlying idea here is to separate ourselves — as a person with all our intricacies, complexities, and beauty — from the passing thoughts in our minds. Our minds might wander into thoughts that are overly morose at times, but these thoughts are akin to dark nimbus that is floating along with its fluffy white peers. We are not the thoughts that occupy us, we are what lies behind them. We existed before these ideas and will remain after they have crossed — we are the ever-enduring calmness of the sky.
- Minimize the screen
As soon as we realize that these patterns of gloomy reflections are just in our minds, we can program them the way that suits us. We can conceive our mind as an operating system (macOS or Windows — depending on your tribe) and all our underlying thoughts as the various applications that are installed in it. Now, one could relate the ongoing spell of pessimism as the program that is actively running on our OS. What if, we could minimize the screen our mind is projecting and rid ourselves of the thumping sensation emanating from it, and treat it not nearly as significant or urgent as we originally conceived it to be.
- Escaping quicksand
We could also associate our effort to instantly rescue ourselves from these depressing schemes with hurried strides of someone who is stuck in quicksand or is drowning — in both instances; the calmer the reaction, the better.
- Drop the rope
At times our anxiety feels like an ugly monster that makes us seem frail and vulnerable and it appears as if we are competing against it in a tug of war. It is pulling us towards it with all its might and muscle and we seem to be losing the ground. Now imagine this strife is taking place on a cliff edge and instead of us exerting all the force we have to pull this unruly monster towards us, we drop the rope instead and let it fall. It relieves us of employing our force at it and depreciates the self-inflated monster to its rightful place.
By lessening the chatter of our perpetually worried sympathiser (amygdala) and dialling up the measured tone of our calculated adviser (prefrontal cortex); we can sail the ever-vacillating tides of our lives, for extended steadiness isn’t as lively anyway.
