Can an over-thinker quieten her chattering mind?
A psychologist explains to Kelly Dennett what to do when you just can’t shut your brain off.
Here is a sample of all the things I thought about in an hour of silent sensory deprivation: this salt is going to ruin your hair. Remember the caraway seeds on the way home. Find out what caraway seeds are. Who else has shared this pool? What if there’s an earthquake? And then, in this dark, egg-shaped pod filled with 500kg of salt, fluro ear-plugs dulling the sound of synthetic chirping birds, I proceeded to quietly write this feature.
I’d been gifted two vouchers to float in a salt pod for an hour. The experience hinted at a potential quietening of the brain (at least, that’s what I’d been told by people who’d done it, but a sign on the wall promised nothing: ‘‘don’t expect anything. This is the opposite direction you want to go’’). The idea is the salt gifts you buoyancy, and your effortlessness translates into something resembling anything from sleep and relaxation to unconsciousness or hallucination. It’s the closest you’ll feel to death, one Vogue writer mused.
The dance to relaxation was a slow foxtrot. I found it easy to float, easy to let my body soften and my fingers trail around lifelessly. On the outside looking in, there lay a woman post-yoga, on her day off, floating in the heart of a warm room inside a secure building. She had nothing to fear, nowhere to go. She should have been peaceful. But at the heart of this nesting-doll situation was a busy mind. I couldn’t stop chatting to myself.
I’d cottoned on to my restless internal monologue when I joined a yoga studio. As we sat in meditative camaraderie I’d be filled with thoughts of my last email, respelling it out over and over, imagining the moment I’d have my phone back, wondering who’d try to contact me while I was sweating in malasana. An hour later in savasana I would have skipped ahead to dinner, painting the inside of my home, and whether I should truly get a dog. (Yes, I’d decide. And then, but is that really wise?).
Despite giving mindfulness a crack – wriggling my toes, breathing deeply, taking notice of my body, becoming more deliberate, slowing down – I became no closer to quieting this Chatty Cathy. There she was during work meetings, while reading, exercising, and before I opened my eyes in the morning. To give her a break I’d listen to podcasts or artificial sounds of rain and surf before sleep. Walking in the neighbourhood, Spotify provided a soundtrack.
WActively seeking to empty your mind can backfire. Mindfulness and salt tanks aren’t for everyone.
hen we’re desperate to escape our consciousness we often put on a podcast or TV series, clinical psychologist Dr Sarb Johal tells me over two cups of green tea in Wellington this week while I nod, thinking of my Real Housewives addiction.
In an ironically busy restaurant, so loud I wondered if my tape recorder would even pick up our conversation, Johal – a ridiculously affable, successful man who endearingly confesses to imposter syndrome – gave me the best advice I could have hoped for.
Johal’s speciality is developing psychosocial responses to crises – including the H1N1 epidemic in the UK, the Kaikoura and Christchurch quakes, and most recently Covid-19. He was one of the first calls for officials wondering how to support Kiwis during lockdown, and his new book, Steady: Keeping Calm in a World Gone Viral (clever title eh?), gives simple, straightforward advice for people in the midst of uncertainty. It’s an easy, well-written read and meeting Johal in person I can see why. His explanations are derived from allegories (using a cricket batter to explain ‘‘threat mode’’; support in our lives becomes ‘‘scaffolding’’) and he’s relaxed about me hijacking an interview about his book to ask why I couldn’t silence myself.
My chatter is called the default mode network, he says, and it comes to the fore when there’s nothing else going on. It’s normal, and the fewer
things to grasp your attention, the easier it’ll be for the voices to take over. Actively seeking to empty your mind can backfire. Mindfulness and salt tanks aren’t for everyone.
‘‘Have you seen Soul?’’ He asks. ‘‘It’s a DisneyPlus movie, and – I don’t want to spoil it for you – but there’s a moment where one of the characters finds their spark and it’s a moment when a sycamore seed falls in their hand from this dappled light, and they realise, ‘that’s what I’m here for’.’’
He continues, as I cast my mind back to the plastic bag scene in American Beauty: ‘‘It’s this moment of being alive, (the) sensation of seeing it and feeling it, and so what I recommend to people is… rather than drowning (out your voice), tune into something else. Often we spend a lot of our lives in our heads – we need to spend more of our lives in our bodies, because when we sense things we experience the world in a different way, and the byproduct of that, is all this chatter goes down quite a lot. We don’t really notice it any more, because we’re so absorbed with what we’re sensing.’’
And then I remembered Jamie Oliver. The joy of finding a cookbook on my bookshelf this summer, the ensuing chopping of 1kg of tomatoes, breathing in fresh rosemary and measuring out butter, fresh pasta and spices. During a period of stress I’d converted frozen fish dinner staples to intricate fresh meals and rather than being overwhelmed by the prospect of an hour or two in the kitchen, as I normally would be, I’d sunk right into it.
Johal tells me there’s nothing really wrong with overthinking, it’s when the thinking becomes unproductive, or cyclical or negative that it becomes an issue. By my second tank experience, determined to nail relaxation, I decided to throw off the shackles of no thought and let my mind wander to the kitchen and the caraway seeds.