Communication in Marriage Part 3: How to Dissolve a Negative State of Mind

The other day I was in a bad mood. It was the middle of the afternoon when it slowly dawned on me that I was feeling down.

I didn’t know how it started. It just descended on me somehow.

Does this ever happen to you?

What do you do?

Most people try to ignore it or distract themselves with another activity.

Which is great, as long it works, and it works best with low-level bad moods. Ones that are easy to snap out of.

But when it doesn’t work, what do you do then?

Let it run its course?

That’s also fine, as long as it doesn’t last too long. But these moods tend to determine your reality while they stick around.

What do I mean by “determine your reality?”

If you’re anxious the world looks scary. If you’re depressed, the world looks bleak. If you’re angry, the world looks faulty. That kind of thing.

These moods can also affect your behavior and your relationships. You might drink, smoke, or eat too much. Maybe you become preoccupied, disengaged, or disagreeable.

But that’s not the worst part.

The worst part is that, because we instinctively recoil from bad moods, we also engage in a variety of mental behaviors that prolong the bad mood instead of shortening it, and make it more likely to recur in the future.

Wouldn’t you like to stop doing that?

You can! If you are willing to put in the time to master a few basic techniques, you’ll never look at your moods in the same way again.

Read on – here’s what you’ll learn:

·       How we get stuck in bad moods by concentrating on the wrong things.

·       How to recognize this when it’s happening.

·       How to dissolve a bad feeling or mood by reversing our usual way of relating to our thoughts and sensations.

It’s very difficult to think your way out of a bad mood. This is because it's usually the thinking itself that keeps the mood alive.

The Mood Trap

When I get caught in a bad mood, the first thing I do is identify what I’m feeling, and where that feeling is located.

Not so much in terms of emotions, like anger or sadness, but in the roots of those emotions: sensations in the body.

Now, for this bad mood I was having. When I paid attention to my body, I became aware of some tightness and queasiness in my stomach.

In my mind, there was some foggy confusion, but I also noticed a parade of tasks marching in the background.

Then a funny thing happened, something that happens a lot.

The more I paid attention to the tasks, the stronger the unpleasant feeling got. And the stronger the unpleasant feeling got, the more I focused on the tasks.

Does this happen to you?

If you have noticed yourself doing this, you may have also discovered that it’s very difficult to think your way out of a bad mood. This is because it’s usually the thinking itself that keeps the mood alive.

The Idiot in the Infiniti

Just the other day, I was driving down Pacific Coast Highway and a car in the next lane swept past and cut through a tight space in front of me. Immediately I had a burning sensation in the middle of my chest, accompanied by the thought “Idiot!”

But let’s slow this down because what I actually saw with my senses was a silver Infiniti swerving in front of me, and all I caught was half a head through tinted windows.

So how did I get to idiot?

Simple: my brain constructed the idiot out of a prediction about what was most likely, based on my past experience combined with my bad feeling.

This is called affective realism: when our feeling about something determines how we perceive it.

Wait, what?

This is a basic fact of neuroscience, and it happens all the time, but it doesn’t make a whole lot of sense right away, check out the first and second posts in this series.

In this example, my brain showed me a guy with a smug look on his face who didn’t care whether he was inconveniencing others. My brain saw it, but my eyes did not.

So how did I get all that from half a head through tinted windows?

Affective realism: it just appeared in my mind, automatically, like a dream.

It’s a testament to our brain’s tremendous processing power that it can continuously construct reality on the fly like this, and it’s amazing that we usually don’t notice it.

Alternative Fictions

To prepare our mind to dissolve a bad mood (or in this case just a bad feeling) we need to recognize that there are any number of logical alternatives to what our mind is showing us. In my case, things like:

·       Maybe the driver had just gotten some bad news and he was distracted.

·       Maybe he was going to be late picking up his child from daycare and was impatient.  

·       Maybe his elderly parent had taken a fall and he was frantic.

·       Maybe he was a teenager and was inexperienced.

There are lots of stories that fit what little information I had, but my brain showed me an idiot. It’s a testament to our brain’s tremendous processing power that it can continuously construct reality on the fly like this, and it’s amazing that we usually don’t notice it.

In fact, the most interesting thing about this may not be whether my perception was accurate or not, but how automatic it was. And how convincing.

As soon as I felt that shot of anger in my chest, I saw an idiot as clear as day.

You might be asking yourself why this is a problem. What’s wrong with thinking he was an idiot? Maybe he was – and even if he wasn’t, who cares?

I would say it depends on what I was about to do next.

If I had been about to slow down and give the driver some room, then it’s no problem at all. But if I had been about to develop road rage and chase him down then that’s a problem.

And when this kind of thing happens in your relationship, it’s going to be a problem if you talk and act as if your simulation of your partner is the objective truth.

More on that in part 4, where I apply these principles to marital communication.

Right now, I’m going to show you how to dissolve a bad feeling, a bad mood, anger, anxiety, depression – you name it. It all works on the same principle. It just takes some time and effort to master the steps.

How to Identify a Simulation

The first step is to clearly identify the simulation, and the easiest way to do this is to follow the trigger –the thing that sets off the mood.

In my example, the trigger was the car whipping past. But a trigger can be almost anything: something your partner said, something that happened at work – even something entirely internal, like a recurring memory or worry.

The simulation is the collection of thoughts and images in your mind, and sensations in your body, that you experience in relation to the trigger.

For example, if your trigger is a colleague at work, when you think about her, your mind begins producing thoughts and images that turn into a story about who she is.

Meanwhile, you feel some unpleasant sensations in your body that give you a bad feeling.

This co-occurrence of the story and the feeling is the simulation. It feels true and totally real.

This may sound obvious, but the main thing to notice is that the character in your story is not actually your colleague. This story is inside your mind, and your colleague is outside your mind.

The simulation is just your brain’s best guess about her, supported by the feeling.

Just to be clear, I’m not saying that there is only the simulation and no real colleague. All I’m saying is that the colleague you see in your mind isn’t the external one.

The colleague in your mind is like the subject of a documentary film your brain is producing based on everything it knows about the external colleague. Like a documentary, the story is based on observations of the subject, but it’s not actually the subject, and it also has a specific point of view.

This is something we can easily check if we look at what our mind is doing. But we forget it all the time and mistake the documentary for the reality, the internal for the external, and the simulation for a perception.

How to Dissolve a Simulation

Once you have identified the simulation, you can use this process to deconstruct and dissolve it.

Check Your Body

Ask yourself two simple questions:

·       Do I feel good, bad, or neutral?

·       Do I feel calm or agitated?

These are the two questions that show us our affect, or how we feel overall. Not necessarily specific emotions, just our general feeling.

Hint: unless we’re in a deep sleep, we always have affect, so we just have to look. And, usually, when we are engaged in this practice, we’re having bad feelings.

So, where do you feel those feelings? In your body, as sensations.

In my car example, it was a burning sensation in my chest. When my wife gets angry, she often says “my skin is boiling.”

Perceiving these sensations directly may take some practice because you may not be used to looking inside your body this way. But if you look patiently and carefully you will find them.

You can practice this any time. In fact, take a moment right now to locate any sensations in your body. Sensations of breathing, tension in the neck, a feeling of hunger in the belly, how your feet are feeling. Anything.

Check Your Mind

Now ask yourself one more simple question:

What is the story my mind is telling me about this situation?

That is, what are the thoughts and images that form the basis of the narrative about this situation? In my case, it was the idiot in the Infiniti.

Seeing the story as a story may take some practice because we usually assent to its validity so readily that we do not realize its true nature – we think it is a direct perception of reality.

You may need to keep returning to this step for quite a while – months, even – before you can see through your own experience that you are interacting with a simulation rather than a perception.

You can also practice this at any time. No matter what you are doing, your mind is telling you a story about what’s happening.

Release the Story

We get trapped in a bad feeling or mood when we fail to notice that a simulation is present and instead process the story as a perception. We do this when we worry or ruminate, for example.

Very often, the simulation is then reinforced because we become so distressed by the unpleasant feelings that we avoid them by processing the story even more.

But this doesn’t work. It just regenerates the simulation even more strongly and reactivates the sensations, leaving us in the same state or worse.

To solve this conundrum, we need to reverse our usual response. Instead of trying to avoid the sensations and get absorbed in the story, we do the opposite: let go of the story and relax into the sensations.

To many people, this will seem like exactly the wrong thing to do. Why would you want to feel what’s so unpleasant and not pay attention to the problem?

Nevertheless, this is the true way out, because the unpleasant feelings are only unpleasant in the context of the story, and the story isn’t what it appears to be. When we can see this clearly, the whole simulation becomes unstable and starts to dissolve.

Just allow yourself to relax your grip on what you think reality is for a moment. Contemplate some alternative fictions. Then recall that the story is just a story, and just like a documentary film, no matter how accurate or inaccurate a representation it may be, it most definitely is not the same thing as the external object.

And then, let the story go. Make a definite decision to stop engaging with it, and instead turn your attention to the sensations in your body.

The funny thing about sensations is that when we are fully absorbed in the story, they feel very unpleasant. But once we release the story, we can see the sensations for what they are – just sensations.

Relax into the Sensations

The funny thing about sensations is that when we are fully absorbed in the story, they feel very unpleasant. But once we release the story, we can see the sensations for what they are – just sensations.

Sensations get their unpleasant quality much less from how they feel than what we think they mean – from their association with the story.

The sensations associated with anxiety feel terrible because of the story, but when you drop the story then it’s just some clammy hands, stomach churns, and heartbeats.  

So, let go of the story, take some deep breaths, and pull the breath right down into the sensations.

Repeat

Over time, you won’t even need to think about how to do this. It will happen quickly and naturally, leaving you with the clarity and energy to act when action is needed and relax when there is nothing to do.

Until then, you may have to be patient. It’s not uncommon that within about a minute of dissolving a simulation and relaxing into the feelings the simulation regenerates and we get momentarily trapped again.

But this isn’t a sign that we’ve failed. It’s a sign that we’ve succeeded. The brain is just doing its thing.

Our brain is very proactive, and it’s not going to let go of a simulation just because we’ve debunked it, disassembled it, and dissolved it. Our brain wants to keep us safe and healthy, so it’s going to try to alert us to any external problem it can identify.

Sometimes repeatedly.

One time I think I spent about two hours trying to let go and relax only to have everything reappear in full force every two or three minutes. But it was amazing because I wasn’t fooled by the simulation, so I remained very relaxed and peaceful, even while I worked to dissolve it over and over again. It became a mediation.

Over time, our brain will learn a different set of inputs from this practice. And you’ll be amazed at the number of things that will no longer bother you.

I will give a full example of how this practice can improve communication in your relationship in the next post.

In the meantime:

·       Check your body.

·       Check your mind.

·       Release the story.

·       Relax into the sensations.

·       Repeat.

If you want more information on how to apply this method to your particular situation, schedule a Free Consultation.