fandomsecrets | [ SECRET POST #3056 ]

[ SECRET POST #3056 ]

⌈ Secret Post #3056 ⌋

Warning: Some secrets are NOT worksafe and may contain SPOILERS.

01.

__________________________________________________

02.

__________________________________________________

03.

__________________________________________________

04.

__________________________________________________

05.

__________________________________________________

06.

__________________________________________________

07.

__________________________________________________

08.

__________________________________________________

09.

__________________________________________________

10.

Notes:

Secrets Left to Post: 03 pages, 062 secrets from Secret Submission Post #437.
Secrets Not Posted: [ 0 - broken links ], [ 0 - not!secrets ], [ 0 - not!fandom ], [ 0 - too big ], [ 0 - repeat ].
Current Secret Submissions Post: here.
Suggestions, comments, and concerns should go here.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

It's a meditative exercise derived from Buddhist practices. The gist of it is that you focus your awareness onto your present experience in the moment (in the form of your breathing mostly, but you can also do it via any tactile sense) and to practice simply feeling those experiences without judging them.

So if an anxious thought comes into your head while you're practicing, you just notice it's there and don't beat yourself up about it. The idea is that with time, you learn to do this automatically any time you have anxious thoughts and by doing so you reduce the impact they have on you.

Like instead of tuning OUT your itchy bra strap, you tune into it and get the whole experience. Or NOT trying to ignore the whiny brats on the long bus ride. Or truly reflect on the deeper meaning of what your mother in law is saying to you, or...

Depression, here I come!

Partly, but in your examples you're still feeling a response to those things. You're still annoyed by the itchy strap, or the whining brats.

The point of mindfulness is to experience those things, acknowledge that they're there but not let them get to you by not attributing any judgemental feeling to them whatsoever. It's the complete antithesis to depression.

So you focus until you go numb? Isn't it easier to just ignore annoying stuff in the first place?

DA

Don't do this man. Seriously, what do you get out of this? Pick your trolly battles.

I wasn't trolling on purpose. I should perhaps have phrased it more politely, but I genuinely don't get the point of this exercise. It might be me of course, but if someone could explain it in a more logical way I'd appreciate it.

Sounds to me like it comes down to "this is a good mental exercise for some people but maybe not for you".

It trains you to be able to let go of shit that's bothering you so you don't obsess over it.

In case you twist that into, "oh so you shouldn't deal with your problems," no. That's not it, just like it's not learning to go numb. You can deal with your problems without dwelling on them.

You know the non-serious "Don't think about pink elephants!"
Or "Hold perfectly still" and it makes you want to move? "Don't yawn. Don't scratch your nose."

This is the opposite of that. Being anxious about having anxious thoughts makes you more anxious so you have more anxious thoughts and you have mroe reason to be afraid of them and so on. You get stuck in a feedback loop. So you try to break the feedback loop by not being frightened of your own anxiety anymore.

Keep it up, you'll master it eventually.

You don't focus at all, that's the whole point. You notice. You acknowledge. You don't dwell, and you don't judge.

When you have anxious, obsessive, intrusive thoughts etc., then one of the problems with them is that once you get that thought you fixate on it, drag it out and extrapolate and make everything worse. You do that because you don't just see it as a thought, you add in value judgements about yourself as a person for having the thought.

Ignoring is counterproductive, because by telling your mind not to think about something you're placing all its focus onto that thing. Even if you've never suffered from any kind of mental health issue, I'm sure there have been times when you've tried not to think about something only to then notice it, or tangential references to it, absolutely everywhere. Notice the thought, don't fuel it, and it'll drift away to be replaced by something else -- as thoughts do, naturally, when you don't have issues that disrupt that pattern -- without escalating the anxiety.

I'm sorry if that's not logical enough for you.

I'm speaking from a place of ignorance here, but is that as "nuclear option" as it sounds? It sounds like how my immune system wants to kill me, so I take medicine that makes it overall less effective. (I know my nightmares and negative thoughts happen most frequently when there's a problem that I urgently need to deal with.)

Not sure what you mean by "nuclear option"? It's not about sitting there stewing in your panic, if that's what you mean? It's not usually practiced at times of great anxiety or panic in the first place; you practice the habit in as calm and relaxed circumstances as you can, with the idea that with time (and for some people that's a lot of time, even if it works for them at all) you'll be able to apply the same tactic in situations where you're not.

It's not about enduring; enduring just keeps you embedded in the thoughts and feelings you want to just let drfit, the way thoughts usually do. It's about retraining the way we think so that the anxious or obtrusive thoughts we do have don't affect us as deeply. In your example it'd mean you look at that problem you need to deal with, maybe break it down into components or steps, and work through what you need to do for each one. During these steps, chances are a lot of negative or anxious thoughts and feelings will come into your head ("What am I even doing? Am I doing it right? Will it work out? Will it not working out mean I'm a failure?"). The point of mindfulness is that you don't recoil from those thoughts but you don't give them any extra attention either. You notice they're there, you acknowledge they're there, and you gently turn your attention back onto whatever you need to be doing instead of letting the thoughts snowball into panic. At a very basic level, it's grounding yourself so you don't let your thoughts run away with you.

By focusing on just experiencing here and now, on acknowledging any thought that comes to you without judging it or yourself, you're teaching your thought processes not to be as trigger-happy as they can be when you're anxious.

I just meant that it sounds extreme. Like trying to deal with chronic pain by making it so that you have less of a response to pain in general, or trying to prevent sensory input overload by dulling your senses. I feel like if I stopped being so scared of failing, I'd let myself fail a lot more often, just like I'd keep staring at screens during headaches if I dulled my sense of pain.

Edited 2015-05-18 02:22 (UTC)

I genuinely don't know how you managed to get that out of anything I've said.

Hey, if I don't get it, I don't get it. I was just trying to interpret what you meant by "reducing the impact every time you have anxious thoughts." (I'm apparently pretty terrible at interpreting things, given how often anons on FS have told me I completely misunderstood everything.)

It's not about stopping you feeling stuff; it's about stopping you being completely overwhelmed by negative emotions. Which, incidentally, would allow you to deal better with the problem that's causing the anxiety/ depression/ etc, because sitting there overwhelmed with anxiety or panic can be almost guaranteed to make whatever it is you're dealing with worse....

So with the headache thing, if you have a really bad headache, do you never take anything for it? If you broke your leg, would you insist on not having it in a cast because that would make you, I don't know, try to walk on it sooner? I don't even understand your thought process here.

But look, mindfulness is about this, pure and simple: learning to let go of intrusive thoughts so you're not obsessing over them. It's fine to feel anxious, angry, sad, yadda yadda, and the point isn't to make yourself stop feeling all of it. The point is to make it so that, when you have a negative emotion, it doesn't take you over to the point where you can't function. Like, it sounds like you're arguing that it's actually BETTER to not be able to function, because otherwise you'll, I dunno, keep touching the stove or some shit, and that just doesn't make sense.

Exactly! It's definitely not about trying to achieve Kholinar /gratuitous Star Trek reference.

Maybe I'm misunderstanding what's meant by anxiety. If you only mean that this mindfulness thing kicks in during full-blown panic attacks, then I'm not going to really 100% understand because I don't have those. I thought you meant that it lessens "anxiety" in general. (To continue the painkiller metaphor, I'd take painkillers if I broke my leg, but not if I stubbed my toe.)

NAYRT

This is just my own personal experience, one of the many features of my anxiety is constantly turning anthills into mountains. To take your stubbing your toe analogy, I stub my toe, my brain thinks my whole foot is broken.

What mindfulness training does is help teach a person how to scale that exaggeration back down into the realm of reality. My whole foot isn't broken. My toe isn't even broken. Does it hurt like a son-of-a-gun? Heck yes. But there is no permanent damage, no matter what my irrational thought process is trying to tell me right now. I may have a bruise. I might have broken a nail. I did NOT break my foot.

Hope that helps explain things a little more. :)

Fair enough. Sorry for all the pestering.

DA

It's not that you're pestering, it's that you're wholly disregarding all the good explanations you've been getting because the uninformed assumptions you have in your head are apparently more valid to you than the experiences and knowledge of the people who actually know what they're talking about.

DA

Here's a link that might help you understand more:

http://www.mindfulnessmeditationinstitute.org/

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

[ SECRET POST #3056 ]

Re: sorry sorry sorry

Re: sorry sorry sorry

Re: sorry sorry sorry

Re: sorry sorry sorry

Re: sorry sorry sorry

Re: sorry sorry sorry

Re: sorry sorry sorry

Re: sorry sorry sorry

Re: sorry sorry sorry

Re: sorry sorry sorry

Re: sorry sorry sorry

Re: sorry sorry sorry

Re: sorry sorry sorry

Re: sorry sorry sorry

Re: sorry sorry sorry

Re: sorry sorry sorry

Re: sorry sorry sorry

Re: sorry sorry sorry

Re: sorry sorry sorry

Re: sorry sorry sorry

Re: sorry sorry sorry

Re: sorry sorry sorry

Re: sorry sorry sorry

Re: sorry sorry sorry