” ‘Do you see over yonder, friend Sancho, thirty or forty hulking giants? I intend to do battle with them and slay them.’ (…) ‘Alas,’ said Sancho, ‘those be not giants, but windmills.’ ” Cervantes, Don Quixote
One thing we love about electronic devices is the certainty that, by pressing a single button, we get what we want – from making a cup of coffee to opening our Instagram account or getting to the 10th floor of a building in a lift.
Let’s imagine there is such a thing as a Mind Button, and when you press it, ta dah, your wish is granted.
That would come in handy on one of those days when you desperately try to cut down on sweets. In vain do you imagine yourself enjoying your ideal weight on a tropical beach in three months’ time. In vain do you picture yourself eating only crisp, vibrant green salads tossed in a simple vinaigrette – the images that obstinately pop up in your mind are those of the warm, buttery, flaky croissants you had with your coffee one week ago when life was so much better.
Truth be told, all you want is to delight in every bite of a croissant every single morning until doomsday.
You will reach for the Mind Button hesitantly, but you know in your heart that you have to do it: the crescent-shaped pastry with its delicate scent curling through the morning air has already started following you in your dreams.
Wouldn’t we love to have a magic device that makes life effortless, painless and other meaningful words that end in -less?
Of course we would.
In the meantime, when life gets tough, overwhelming, scary, we make it even more complicated by trying hard (too hard) to suppress our undesired thoughts.
It was obvious to Dostoevsky that such an endeavour is meant to fail: if you decide not to think of a polar bear, he said, “the damned animal will be constantly in your thoughts.”
He couldn’t have been more true.
The Russian author inspired Daniel Wegner, the Harvard social psychologist, to look into the process of thought suppression. In the “white bear” experiment he conducted in the 1980s , participants were instructed not to think of a white bear for five minutes and many found themselves focusing on the white bear despite trying not to.
This is the “ironic rebound,” as Wegner called the process of thought suppression: we essentially want to be free “from traumatic memories, from unpleasant emotions, from hateful addictions or untoward impulses, from fears, obsessions, worries about the future,” but, when we keep suppressing our unwanted thoughts, they will keep plaguing us.
Pushing away our thoughts is incredibly difficult and tiresome, argue Nobel laureate Elizabeth Blackburn and psychologist Elissa Epel, as our mind has to “constantly monitor your mental activity for the forbidden item” and the brain “can’t sustain the work of monitoring. It fatigues.”
So, how do we manage an unwanted, and most likely recurrent thought?
A healthy approach is to first acknowledge the thought’s presence. Exactly how does it sound? Is it, “I want to eat croissants daily, but I know they’ll get me fat.” That’s fine, don’t judge yourself for it. Notice it from a distance knowing that your thoughts do not define who you are.
Next, identify the thought’s emotional charge. Is it guilt, shame, fear? Again, do it without self-judgement.
And here’s the hardest part, the one that requires a lot of courage: stay with the discomfort, the hurt, the pain.
This is where true change begins.
Your anxious feelings will begin to soften, making you see your circumstances more clearly. Your disturbing thoughts may not vanish immediately, but they will begin to lose their power over you, giving you the freedom to choose.
Only when the mind calms down will you stop being a Don Quixote, battling windmills.
Resources:
Fyodor Dostoevsky, “Winter Notes on Summer Impressions”
Daniel Wegner, “You Can’t Always Think What You Want: Problems in the Suppression of Unwanted Thoughts” https://scholar.harvard.edu/files/dwegner/files/wegner_1992_you_cant_always_think_what_you_want.pdf
E. Blackburn & E. Epel, The Telomere Effect
What kind of relationships do you want? 