Step 3: eliminate your thoughts

Time to get a little more serious about this, right? You keep hearing about this “monkey mind”, meaning your brain doing random stuff and bringing up thoughts all the time and such. And that’s a bad thing and mindfulness/meditation is about stopping it. So, time to try and murder all those thoughts with extreme prejudice, right? Which means you’ll sit down and try to not think, and then those thoughts come in, and you mentally shake their fist at them and try to make them go away because the “not thinking” isn’t working for some reason!

This, of course, creates that same old frustration that you already had in the previous steps, and makes the whole experience difficult.

On top of that, you’ll still get lost in the thoughts sometimes, following them on a merry chase because it’s just so natural to follow along with a thought and create a nice chain of thoughts, maybe loop it around a bit, then eventually jump to another random thought, and so forth. Sometimes several minutes might pass until you remember that you were supposed to not think, and maybe at some point you start wondering if you’re doing it all wrong or if you’re just not cut out for this.

In this chapter I’ll depart a bit from the previous formula because I feel like separating the explanations from the descriptions of what to do would actually make it harder to understand. So, here’s a happy wall of text that does it all.

How to think about controlling thoughts and feelings

We’ve already talked about how a lot of what mindfulness is about is not trying to micromanage what your brain is doing. It’s time to get a little more “aggressive” on that general principle, by not interfering at all. This might sound stupid but bear with me.

Dealing with frustration

I implied in my explanation of the previous step that a big problem with trying to change the way you feel using logic is that it creates frustration: you know the feeling is “silly” (or, in slightly more neutral terms, unnecessary), and you keep telling yourself so, but the feeling keeps on coming. The same applies to thoughts that bother you, of course: if you try to control your thoughts but they refuse to cooperate, that too creates frustration, which is going to add an emotional charge to the whole situation that makes it even harder to actually achieve something useful. The feelings of frustration will tend add a certain tint to your whole session, and if you keep going like that anyway, you’ll quickly get very good at feeling frustrated about mindfulness (which, of course, isn’t going to help things at all).

This is the canonical experience for people who are newish to mindfulness: the attempt to do it quickly shifts into an attempt to somehow deal with the seemingly inevitable frustration, and there’s an easy opportunity for a nice vicious circle: having trouble dealing with the frustration creates additional frustration on top. It doesn’t take a genius to figure out where that leads.

Since the frustration is almost guaranteed, you need to go into this with an attitude that makes it irrelevant. That attitude is very simple: frustration is a standard part of practicing mindfulness, and you don’t need to make it go away. You don’t have to reason with it, you don’t have to try to ignore it, you don’t have to try and displace it by focusing hard on something else.

Remember how in the last steps I talked about a softer mental focus of sorts? That applies to this step too. Without mindfulness, we tend to get really focused on strong emotions and sort of lose track of everything else. The key difference mindfulness introduces isn’t that we focus on something else instead – it’s that we allow the feelings and thoughts to happen, but also stay aware of whatever else might be going on, i.e. any other thoughts, feelings and sensations. That’s literally all there is to it.

How does this help? Well, first off, it’s part of the practice: each time you feel frustrated with how it’s going, that’s another opportunity to try your mental hand at staying aware of the feeling without trying to control it and without trying to push it away (or focus away from it). On top of that, this has a subtle effect on your tendency to feel frustrated in this kind of situation.

Let’s look at a very mechanistic perspective on emotions. Step 1: thing happens. Step 2: you feel an emotion. That’s not the whole story, though. In between those two steps, the truly interesting part happens: your brain looks up whatever it associates with the “thing”, i.e. any thoughts and feelings that you’ve come to associate with it, and brings those up. How does association work? To dumb it down a little: feedback. Imagine a child who draws on the walls with markers and gets yelled at as a result. The thing is drawing on the walls; the feedback is getting yelled at (which in turn probably conjures up negative emotions). If the experience is somewhat intense for the child, this is going to encode into an association “draw on walls = bad” very, very quickly. The next time the child considers drawing on the walls, it might recall getting yelled at which, in turn, brings up those bad feelings. Repeating this cycle a few times will likely “optimize” the association to the point that the mere thought of drawing on the walls feels bad, without any obvious intermediate thoughts. This is a general pattern in the mind: repeat something a lot and it gets optimized, so that more steps happen automatically without any conscious experience (which would basically slow it down).

The same learning pattern works for adults too, of course, and the feedback doesn’t have to be someone else rewarding or punishing you. It can even be your own thoughts. If you consider trying out something new but immediately start thinking about ways in which it might go wrong, that too is a sort of feedback, and repeating it over and over will make you very good at feeling bad if you even consider trying something new.

Let’s go back to our starting point: feeling frustrated while practicing mindfulness. It’s the same thing here, right? The first bit of frustration comes from associations that you’ve already acquired in the past. Not being able to control the flow of your thoughts isn’t implicitly frustrating: the feeling comes from a clash between what you’re experiencing and what you want to be experiencing, and you rejecting that clash as, well, “bad”. Often that’s a more general pattern we all tend to have: if things don’t go your way, not only do we not get the result we wanted, but on top of that we start feeling bad about it (which, of course, is in no way helpful… but also it will never occur to most people that this feeling bad isn’t an intrinsic part of things going wrong, it’s an emotional response we’ve built over the course of our lives without meaning to).

There is no silver bullet to just delete that existing association. It’s not impossible, but challenging to do on your own and also that’s a completely separate topic that I can’t cover in depth in this book. The good news is that if you manage to mindfully let the association (feeling) happen, it interferes with the feedback mechanism that keeps it going. As it happens, feelings that you don’t keep feeding feedback into tend to dissipate. I know I’ve had many vague negative feelings that didn’t really come back the next time simply because I didn’t really care about them too much.

So, while in the past you’ve been unwittingly reinforcing these mental associations, by applying principles of mindfulness, you allow your mind to “lose” an association over time. The feeling will still come, but it will get less intense and last less long. It might never totally disappear, but it can get so close to that that it might as well be gone.

Here’s an example from my own life: at one point in university, I was just about to head home when I saw a professor’s ID card on the printer. These cards doubled as a payment system, so they were used for printing as well: you had to insert your card into a reader attached to the printer to be able to print. Just as I was passing by, the professor left his room (which was right next to the printer). Assuming that he was looking for his card, I handed it to him. To my surprise, he gave me a “what an idiot” kind of look.

At that time I was really good at obsessing over situations like this, so I ended up feeling weirdly embarrassed even after I had finally figured out what probably happened: he was doing an extended print job and so left his card in the printer while doing something else. In the meantime, someone else needed the printer, so they removed his card and inserted their own, leaving the professor’s card on top of the printer. When I handed it to him, he must have assumed that I had removed his card from the reader, and so was annoyed at me.

For quite some time, I’d randomly recall this situation and feel intensely embarrassed all over again, until finally I realized that this was an opportunity to practice mindfulness. So, while I was recalling the situation and feeling bad, I did exactly what I’ve been describing: I stopped trying to get the memory and the feeling to loop around in my mind and instead just observed what my mind was doing. Obviously that didn’t make it stop instantly, but just this attitude shift changed the whole experience of recalling: it stopped making it about me having to force my mind to stop it, and made it into more of a fun experiment of sorts where I was just seeing what would happen if I did nothing to try and change what was going on. I don’t remember in detail what happened the first time I did it, nor the next few times – probably nothing particularly interesting. What I did notice after a while was that the next time I recalled that situation, somehow it felt much less intense and it was easier to just naturally shrug it off and think about something else. Today, when I think back on this little episode, I kind of smile to myself internally, and find it kind of amusing. In a way, this thing that used to bother me has turned into a mark of progress with mindfulness. I could probably still get the feeling back to its original intensity if I really wanted to, by obsessing again about how stupid I was for not immediately understanding what had happened or something, but I’m not going to do that.

This is how things work: you get more freedom of choice about how you think and feel, by just letting things happen. It sounds illogical on the surface, but it works.

Dealing with the monkey mind

So, frustration aside, what do you do about all those thoughts that naturally happen while you practice mindfulness? Well, nothing, really. You simply let them happen, stay aware of them (and whatever else your mind might be doing), and make no effort to control them in any way. What this practice might lead to, ultimately, is a calm mind, but that’s not the primary mark of doing it right, it’s just the end result. Doing it right is giving up control and still being fully aware of what’s going on.

Be prepared to have a lot of seemingly random thoughts while practicing mindfulness. There’s nothing wrong with that. You can be thinking about a lot of stuff and still be doing it correctly.

Dealing with distraction

Another universal experience is getting distracted: if your attention gets thought on a train of thought or emotion, you will end up following along with it and forgetting to maintain that more general awareness of what’s happening in your mind. In fact, while you’re caught up in thoughts, you’ll stop having a sense of being in the present moment; that simply fully disappears from your conscious experience. All that’s there is the thoughts or feelings you’re focusing on, until something else draws your attention or you finally remember that you were supposed to be mindful.

Getting distracted is another thing you might be tempted to feel frustrated about, but it’s perfectly normal and, in fact, also a great opportunity for learning: each time you get distracted, that’s an opportunity to get better at realizing that you’ve gotten distracted (even if it takes a while). The more often you realize that you stopped being mindful, the better you get at realizing faster – and at some point, on average you’ll be so fast that you’ll be spending more time being mindful than being distracted, and then things really get going.

The moment you realize that you’ve gotten distracted is also the moment you instantly become mindful again and being aware that you’re in the present moment. In a way, the realization is going back to mindfulness. So, there’s nothing special you need to do once you realize you’ve gotten distracted: you’re already back on track.

The lure of speeding it up

In my experience, most of the time people practice mindfulness because they have certain goals in mind: relaxation, dealing with stress or whatever. So, there tends to be a subtle pressure to make certain things happen, e.g. get rid of negative thoughts or feelings. Even if I’ve managed to sell you on the general principle of “giving up control”, this pressure can still leak through in less obvious ways.

Here’s a somewhat subtle misinterpretation of how to practice mindfulness: I might observe my thoughts and feelings while mostly focusing on the comforting notion that if I just keep going for long enough, that will delete the thoughts and feelings. And this is actually sort of true, but there’s a nasty failure mode. I’ll give you an extremely contrived example.

Suppose I feel pain in my hip. I don’t like that pain, so maybe I’ll try being mindful with it and sort of looking forward to the pain going away. This might actually work, for reasons I might cover later on. Problem solved, right? Well, given this example, it’s obvious that the problem probably isn’t solved. Where did that pain come from, after all? If it’s because there’s a fracture in my hip bone, now it feels like the problem is gone but since I’ll keep doing whatever causes the pain, presumably involving putting weight and stress on the bone, eventually it will probably snap and then I’m, to use a technical term, screwed.

The problem isn’t that I was mindful, the problem was the implicit expectation that I’d make the pain go away, which is exactly what happened. Let’s step away again from this example because making the pain go away is obviously the wrong solution. Instead, let’s talk about, say, social anxiety. For example, maybe I start panicking a little when I have to talk to strangers.

So, how might the same failure mode apply to that? Let’s spin it into a little story: somehow I succeed in eliminating the sharp fear that comes with the thought of having to talk to someone. My heart still races when I approach someone to talk to them, but a bit of racing heart and such is hardly much of an issue, right? So, I consider this solved, and in fact I’m now perfectly capable of talking to strangers, but I feel this weird nervous energy whenever I do. And maybe eventually it goes away, but it might just as well get more intense over time. The feelings of fear don’t return, but maybe at some point the bodily sensations get so intense that it feels like I might pass out anyway.

Clearly something went wrong there, right? It’s easy to conclude that these sensations just can’t be helped because I’m a highly sensitive person or whatever, and if we leave it at that, there is no way to change this. But what if we choose to interpret this differently? Let’s just try the following explanation on for size.

Once again, the “trick” I used, accidentally, is to internalize the idea of the fear going away so well that it actually happened… but remember what I said earlier about the steps involved in a mental association? Thing happens – associated thoughts and feelings come up – thoughts and feelings associated to those in return come up – etc.

If all I do is delete a particular feeling from my conscious awareness, that doesn’t mean that the whole chain actually goes away by necessity. Often enough, all it means is that the chain still happens in exactly the same way, except the feeling no longer clears the threshold of consciousness. I can still end up reinforcing the rest of the chain in the same way that I used to reinforce the one link that brought up the feeling of fear.

I’ve actually managed to do this to myself several times, until I realized that I was doing something wrong. It’s just so very tempting to shoot the messenger (the feeling), isn’t it? If only I stop feeling bad, things will be great. The problem is that the feeling is just part of what’s going on, and I might not notice some of the other components. Or, ironically, I might have succeeded in removing conscious awareness of some components in the past, so now I’m concluding that the feeling that I’m still aware of is the most important part, while I’ve already lost awareness of another part that might be even more important.

This might sound a little too convenient, but it turns out that your mind is actually extremely good at figuring out what’s important and what isn’t and can course correct all on its own. I know what you’re going to say: if the mind was so great at doing this stuff, why do I have these useless feelings and thoughts that clearly aren’t important? Well, the problem is that the mind’s notion of what’s important and what isn’t is derived from feedback, and it’s not terribly picky: negative feedback signals importance too. That’s a good heuristic for life-threatening situations: if a bull is charging towards you, that should feel important, right? It should command a lot of your attention. Unfortunately it works in just the same way with “manufactured” negative feedback: if you keep telling yourself how stupid you are when you make mistakes, those mistakes will get a high importance value and you’ll get very, very good at noticing mistakes, and very intensely so.

Part of what mindfulness is about is rebalancing this importance heuristic. By not feeding into the feedback loop, the mind gets to approach conditions in which the importance heuristic actually works. Once you stop feeding into the feelings of how stupid you are, by just noticing the feelings and the associated thoughts without trying to confirm or reject them etc., the mind can evaluate and process the feelings and thoughts under more realistic conditions, and that’s what will ultimately steer it towards letting go of its current associations about them.

However, if you do mindfulness “correctly”, sometimes you experience a side of “it gets worse before it gets better”. While the mind reorganizes the chain of associations, things that you managed to erase from conscious awareness in the past might make a reappearance. Generally speaking that’s a good thing because this allows you to break the feedback patterns over time by applying mindfulness, but it will tend to feel like it’s a bad thing, because if you suddenly feel worse clearly you’re doing it wrong, right?

Well, no. If you were kind of angling for bad feelings (because of the misguided notion that you need more bad feelings before things can resolve themselves), then maybe. The true principle, of course, is that you should let whatever happens happen. Mindfully observing thoughts and emotions might result in them circling around a little more, or in new thoughts and feelings coming up – maybe better ones, maybe worse ones, or in the whole thing just fading. Ideally you assume that whatever happens is the “correct” result, because then you won’t be tempted to steer it in the direction you think it needs to go.

This is a complicated subject and we’ll probably get back to it a few times throughout the rest of this book. The overall takeaway is: let whatever happens happen. If you feel frustrated, that’s okay and you don’t have to fight the feeling. If lots of random thoughts come in, that’s okay and you don’t have to fight them. If you start feeling good or bad for no reason all of a sudden, that’s okay and you don’t have to interfere with it. If you suddenly remember that one time that that thing happened, that’s okay and you don’t have to wrench your mind away from it. If you have trouble letting the thoughts and feelings happen, that’s okay and you don’t have to try and stop having trouble – though if you feel like it’s getting harder to stay mindful, maybe take a bit of a break. Remember, just a few minutes per day can make a world of difference, and you’ll progress much faster if you stick with “slightly challenging” instead of trying to fix everything straight away. You’re trying to start an avalanche through accumulating skill over time, it’s never about getting the whole thing moving in one go with sheer force. It takes less baby steps than you might think.