When the mind starts beating us up.

“I’m selfish. I'm lazy.”

There my mind goes, starting to beat me up again. It's latching onto the fact that I went back to sleep this morning - after dragging myself out of bed and getting my daughter to nursery, I returned to bed. Now I've got 30 minutes to get everything done before I have to go and pick my daughter up again. So my mind is blaming me - if I'd just muscled through, I could have got a lot more done. I'm lazy. I'm selfish. It's easy and somewhat automatic to treat these thoughts as truth - certainly, I could have got more done if I had chosen to use my time differently. But I didn't choose to do that. My stressed mind is very quick to forget why I did something, it just focuses on where I am left now, on all the things I am not going to get done today, on what I should have done.

At moments like these it is important to catch the mind at its games. I turn my attention to the memory of myself choosing to go back to sleep with compassion in my heart. I know that my decision wasn't coming from a place of laziness or avoidance of the tasks I had to do, but because I had woken up feeling exhausted and that feeling just wasn't fading away. So I chose to find out if a nap would help me to feel more awake. That decision came from a place of self-care, not selfishness. Yes, that choice resulted in me not getting as much cleaning done as I would have liked but I let go of that alternative version of events because it is just unhelpful right now. “What if it's my depression coming back and by sleeping I'm giving in to it?” Thanks for your help mind, but I remember what trying to sleep off depression feels like and this wasn't it.

I continue to get on with what tasks I can in the time I have left. My mind pipes up a few more times trying to hook me, but I just notice it and let it be while I carry on with my cleaning. I leave the house without the burden of self blame weighing heavily on my shoulders. I hold my expectations of how much I will achieve today lightly and acknowledge that it's ok to put myself first once in a while.

Thanks Mind - an ode to defusion

The mind demands to be heard

In the car today my toddler was saying "red car, red car, red car" again and again to me and it was only when I acknowledged her by saying "yes, there was a red car!" that she stopped saying it over and over.

This is a lot like dealing with our minds. When the mind comes up with a thought it demands to be heard - it will bring that thought up again and again no matter how much you try to ignore it. The best way to handle your mind is exactly the same as I handled my toddler - notice and acknowledge it. By acknowledging a thought you don't guarantee that it will stop straight away but it will pass in its own time and possibly more quickly than if you tried to ignore it. By ignoring it you are likely to get repeated occurrences of that thought until the mind feels like it has been heard. Acknowledging the thought doesn't mean you have to believe it or do what it says - it's simply noticing it's there and what it's saying. A simple "thanks mind" can help you defuse from the thought while acknowledging it.

When I acknowledged my toddler's thought about the red car she stopped repeating it over and over. However, just because you've acknowledged one thought doesn't mean the mind is finished with you, like my toddler, who after a short pause said, "orange car, orange car, orange car".

Finding purpose in pointless thoughts

Sometimes we have pointless thoughts pop up in our heads. Often these kind of thoughts pass quickly but sometimes they might linger and get you hooked up in them.

Yesterday I had one of those thoughts. On the weekend we had friends come to stay in our house with their children. The children were older than my daughter but she really loved playing with them. She copied everything they did and followed them everywhere they went. This thought came to mind and caught me in its net: "I wish I had children earlier so that my daughter could have an older brother or sister to play with like this." What a pointless thought! Nothing I do can change the past but I still managed to make myself feel bad that things weren't different.

By labelling the thought as pointless I had already done a shortened version of helpful questions for unhelpful thoughts but to be a little more kind to myself I asked if there was anything I could learn about myself from this thought? It confirmed for me that I wish to have more than one child and although my daughter won't ever have an older sibling to look up to, she could be that for another child if I do choose to have one in the future.

So just like that I had found purpose in that pointless thought and I was ready to defuse from it and carry on. I do find that there is often purpose to the thoughts my mind brings up, even if it does so very ineloquently and requires a bit of digging to discover the core idea it might be trying to convey. A word of warning though, be careful that your reflection doesn't turn into rumination. If you find that you are getting dragged in deep and can't find any purpose then maybe it is just time to defuse from the thought and let it go. Everyone's mind is different and you may find that more often than not there is nothing to find in your pointless thoughts. Just do what works best for you.

When disaster strikes - how I've changed.

Look what happened to my phone the other day - I wasn't holding it firmly and the cat, being too friendly for his own good, knocked it out of my hand. "So what?" I can hear you say. "Happens to people all the time." Indeed it does and my intent is not to moan about it but to share with you how my response to such an accident has changed since practicing ACT.

In the past this sort of accident would have knocked me for a hell of an emotional loop. I would have spent ages internally screaming at myself for being so stupid and clumsy. I would have called myself an idiot and all other manner of hurtful names. I would have shouted angrily at the cat and probably ignored him for days. I would have felt a burning fury at myself and got caught in a loop of trying to will it not to have happened with a kind of temple popping, breath-holding intensity. It would have brought up intense feelings of worrying and distress about money (regardless of how well or poor our finances are at the time). There would have been a lot of inconsolable crying. This cycle of emotion and hateful self-talk would have continued at varying intensity for several days minimum, if not weeks.

But all that didn't happen on this day and I think it really nicely demonstrates how far I've come and how much emotional resilience I've managed to build up through using ACT techniques. What actually happened is at first there was the inevitable string of expletives and then I could feel a surge of emotion coming my way so I called through to my husband for support (mainly to look after my daughter while I had what I thought would be a little break down). Once my daughter was safely being looked after I allowed myself to feel the feelings of frustration and sadness at breaking my phone and accepted that it was an accident which I can't change. I spoke to my husband about our finances and yes, this came at a really unfortunate time and I'll have to wait a few months until we have enough spare cash for a new phone. This brought up a very old and familiar story for me - the "we have no money" story which always brings along a host of uncomfortable thoughts and feelings. I acknowledged it for what it was - just a story my mind was telling me and let it pass in its own time. The amazing thing was that the turnaround from the upsetting event to me getting back on as normal was under half an hour. I was prepared to get further waves of turmultuous thoughts and emotions about the phone later on - I was ready to defuse and accept - but very few even turned up and the ones that did I dealt with almost automatically. Defusion and acceptance can be quite a heavy going conscious effort when you are first practicing and I previously doubted that they could become automatic but it seems that I have actually managed to start retraining my brain in this way.

So I guess the point of this post is to say keep on practicing ACT in your daily life because it really is making a difference in the long term, even if you can't see the immediate effects right now, you may well see how far you've come further down the line.

The Mind - I Love...

     My mind surprised me today with a simple sentence out of the blue. It said “I love being a mummy.” What surprised me most is that this was the first time my mind had said this to me unprompted. I've been a mummy now for nearly two years and it has been amazing - there is no doubt in my mind, despite all the inevitable ups and downs, I absolutely do love being a mum. But my mind, doing what minds do, tends to always emphasise the negative. I've lost count of how many times my mind has told me that “I hate being a mummy”, “I don't want to be a mummy anymore”, “I'm a bad mother” etc. This is why it was such a pleasant shock to hear the opposite today.

     So why is this? Why does my mind always barrage me with negatives rather than bolster me with positives? Well it goes back to our 'stone-age minds’. Back in prehistory our minds evolved to be a very effective don't-get-killed device. It was useful for our ancestor’s minds to warn them of dangers - the stone-age man who is wary of potential predators when outside was far more likely to survive than the man whose mind always tells him “I love being outside”.

     Now, in the present day, our minds carry on this legacy in the form of negative commentary. That's why the mind far more often says things like “I hate being a mummy” than “I love being a mummy”. It's trying to ensure our safety by going on and on about things we find difficult, and being a parent is difficult, incredibly rewarding but at times so very difficult. 

     So next time your mind is giving you a hard time just thank it - “thanks mind” - it is just trying to do it's job after all!