Day 6, in which I SQUIRREL!!!!

I daydream a LOT.

My mind will take off down fantastical roads at a moment’s notice. I’ve spent uncountable hours asking myself questions like, “I wonder what chairs would look like if our knees bent the other way?” and “If I could have one libertarian superpower (that’s one that is incapable of depriving others of life, liberty, or property), what would that be?”…and then thinking long and hard about the answers (1. Assuming our hips still bent to the front, they’d look something like a kneeling stool that we’d rest our knees on with a butt rest behind it and 2. The magical ability to look good in any clothes I put on).

This sort of thing is not just harmless and fun, it’s probably good for my creativity, but there’s a dark side to grabbing onto thoughts and letting them lead where they may, and it’s probably the single most destructive force in my own life, and (although it’s not the topic of this blog) maybe to American society as a whole.

 Yeah, it’s that bad. And it all has to do with a drunken monkey.

2,500 years ago, The Buddha, undoubtedly using his magical powers to consider the plight of American entrepreneurs who wouldn’t exist for another two and a half millennia, coined the phrase “Monkey Mind”. Well, that wasn’t the exact phrase, since I’d have to speak Magadhi Prakrit in order to say what he said, and also have some characters on my keyboard that I don’t have, but the basic idea is this:

Inside all of us, there’s an untrained, perhaps even inebriated, monkey that jumps from thought branch to thought branch, chattering incessantly about all sorts of unrelated things. 

One minute, he might be telling us how we never should have dated [that guy who’s long gone but still somehow makes you feel bad every time you think about him]). Seconds later, he might be castigating us for not being ready for a presentation next week. Then, he’ll want to find that song from the 80s…what was it? Something about being too shy, too shy…on YouTube. Next, he’ll say, “Better check Facebook and see if anyone has commented on your blog today. No, wait, has so-and-so replied to that email yet?” And then he’s off to worrying about all the stuff you’re not getting done while you’re trying to do the stuff you ARE getting done.

It would be bad enough if the monkey were just indiscriminately jumping around. But he’s not; if you listen to your own monkey for a day, you’ll find that his attentions skew starkly toward the negative. The monkey feeds on fear—he’s always scanning the horizon for things to worry about and things that could or are going wrong—and on stimulation (he LOVES the internet…so much to be concerned about!!). And while I think The Buddha was probably thinking about the monkey as being mischievous but harmless, like this, I’ve always pictured my Mind Monkey as more evil and bad-tempered, like this.  

And the worst part is, we don’t really notice the Mind Monkey. Instead, we think that the thought branches he grabs, one after the other, are meaningful reflections of reality, and we let those thoughts guide our days, and make us feel certain ways (bad, when we realize that the presentation is next week and we’re not ready. Inadequate, when we think about that guy who screwed around. Happy, when we find that song. It’s Too Shy by Kajagoogoo, in case that’s been bothering you ever since I said it. I know, because my Mind Monkey made me play it recently).

We think that because some random thought bubbles to the surface of the swamp of our subconscious mind and the Mind Monkey grabs it, it’s real and should be acted upon in some way. And it’s just not true.

Just because I have the thought "I should really start a Meetup for people who want to do a #100DaysofHealth challenge" and just because that idea immediately feels positive and exciting and just because my Mind Monkey starts swinging down the path of how that would work and who I'd invite and how easy it would be, DOESN'T mean that's a good idea, and even if it is DOESN'T mean it's a good idea for me, at this moment, given my other priorities. But the Mind Monkey isn't a big-picture primate; he's only capable of grabbing on to thoughts that are happening right now. He doesn't analyze, he urges. Maybe he can't see the jungle for the trees. Badump bump. And yet, if the Mind Monkey runs amok, my day is full of interruptions that I foist upon myself. Things I do because the thought "I should ________" pops up, and feels right, and doesn't get examined beyond that.

And just because I have a thought, that doesn't mean it's actually TRUE. True, as in, exists in reality. I have thoughts all the time that run along the line "I bet that so-and-so thinks that I won't pull the pin on that grenade. I bet he'd thinking that I'll back down. Now I'll think of 100 ways to deal with this..." and I have long, worried, doubtlessly energy-training planning sessions in my head about things that never come to pass because they never existed in the first place.

So, what’s the big deal, and what does any of this have to do with health?

Well, for me, the big deal is that I’ve spent the last 20 years of my life setting up my life so that I didn’t have to answer to anyone else. That means that my time is spent as I choose, with any deadlines I might have being totally self-imposed. There’s no one to yell at me if the project is late or, hell, if I just cancel it altogether. I’m never getting fired. As long as the paychecks come out on Wednesday, my staff is willing to put up with the vagaries of a boss who might walk into the office on Monday and say, “We’re completely scrapping the way we do business and starting all over in a new industry!” and then forget all about it by Friday.

Sounds great, right?

Not when the Mind Monkey is the one actually running the show.

 

Because while I don’t have deadlines, I do have goals and intentions. LOTS of them. My to-do list is ridiculously, crushingly, overwhelmingly long. And I use those negative words because that’s what the Mind Monkey tells me about that list, every day, even as he’s cheerfully adding more cool stuff to do AND simultaneously distracting me by telling me to check on how many people have viewed my blog today (65, which is not a number I should know, because it doesn’t matter and the fact that over 1000 viewed the first entry and the others have all gotten less than 250 does NOT mean I’m a bad writer or preaching too much or that everyone’s bored of me already because THAT’S NOT EVEN WHY I’M DOING THIS SHUT UP MIND MONKEY!!!)

My peace, happiness, and mental health suffer constantly because of the Mind Monkey. I don’t get to important things in a day because Mind Monkey sends me down track after track that becomes an hour long black hole (you know how it goes…”Just let me see if anyone has responded to my Facebook post. Oh, look at that, someone’s running an ad for software that publishes eBooks. I want an eBook.  I wonder how much that is? Huh, the next thing on that YouTube video stream is a new Tony Robbins video. What does Tony have to say? Wait, what’s this thing on the side…a video from the flat earth society? Do people really believe that still? I’m Googling it.”). I get to the end of my days knowing that I’m MORE behind than when I started, and that it’s largely because I didn’t focus on what I needed to do.

Mind Monkey also hooks me in another way: he (I don’t know why it’s a male monkey, it just is) grabs an interesting idea, heads down a path that looks like, “Yeah, and then we could do that, and then the result would be totally awesome, and then we could do the next then, and that would have these 4 really cool outcomes” and I find myself committed to yet another thing that I don’t have time to do. How do you think this blog came about? Huh?

And finally, my own personal Mind Monkey is happiest when he’s pacified by things that, when I’m lying on my deathbeach (I have pretty specific goals about how I want to go out, and who’s going to be there screaming, “Vena, no!!! I can’t live without you!!!” and be traumatized for life about what we were doing just prior.) I’m not going to be thinking, “Wow, I wish I’d spent more time…” Because those things are video games. TV. YouTube video after YouTube video. Crap, in other words, that doesn’t add to anything except Mind Monkey’s ability to grab the “You’re wasting your life” branch. Which at this point should be worn so smooth by use that it’s like glass, but he manages to hold on anyway.

For many years, I didn’t know Mind Monkey existed. I thought that the thoughts were all me, and was really disturbed by some of the ickier random ones that popped up (you’ve had them—wishing that someone would literally die, wondering what it would be like to sleep with a completely inappropriate person…please tell me you’ve had those, because if not I’m a horrible human being…). Once I learned that the thousands of daily thoughts I have aren’t under my control and don’t carry much meaning or relevance beyond what my acting on them gives them, I decided to take control and force the Mind Monkey to do what I wanted through sheer willpower, which, as it turns out, practically everyone who had ever discovered this problem had already tried and discarded. For like 100 generations. 

It turns out that that only way to effectively deal with the Mind Monkey (I’ve just decided that mine’s name is Maurice. Or, rather, Maurice has just distracted me from writing this by making me wonder what his name might be.) is to 1) recognize that it’s there 2) recognize what it is (that is, random flotsam and jetsam of your subconscious, being thrown temporarily to the surface) and 3) let that come and go without being attached to it. Or following you Mind Monkey down the rabbit hole. Or letting it effect you emotionally. Or giving in to whatever urge is at the top this particular moment.

Maybe Maurice is different than other Mind Monkeys (he’s probably super-healthy, ‘cause God knows he gets exercised enough, and that he can make HUGE leaps stimulus to response), but I sort of feel like until I can seriously tame that little shit (which would include accepting that he’s not, in fact, evil or undesirable but just…there) I’m not going to get the peace that I want or the effectiveness that I need.

 

Luckily, The Buddha (who was all full of excellent ideas, and a Libertarian to boot—seriously, read up on his teachings about the role of government vs. personal responsibility), also had a training program for the Mind Monkey. It’s called meditation, and it’s not just for hippies and monks anymore.

When I first gave mediation a serious try after reading Dan Harris’s amazing (and hilarious) book 10% Happier: How I Tamed the Voice in My Head, Reduced Stress without Losing My Edge, a Found Self-Help that Actually Works—a True Story, I discovered after a few weeks that, yes, it helps. It helps primarily by making me NOTICE Maurice, and noticing is half the battle.

In fact, at the beginning of LAST year, I got pretty serious about meditating for 20 minutes every morning, and I noticed a lot of positive changes: I was more present. More aware. Less stressed.

And despite all that, I stopped doing it consistently. Why? Well, you know. The same reason I stopped going to the gym, and eating right, and everything else that had a salubrious effect on my life (yes, I’m expanding vocabularies in my spare time. Deal with it.) but that I stopped doing anyway.

But no more. For the next 94 days, it’s 20 minutes, every day, no excuses.

Shut up, Maurice. I will too.