After all this time in quarantine you may be starting to feel that your head does not stop thinking, turning over a thousand things as if it were a washing machine, jumping from one thought to another, unable to concentrate or rest, or maybe you are feeling restless, as if you need to do something without knowing what.
In these moments, our head can become a tough enemy, but let’s see what we can do to manage our mind during isolation.
If you stay with me for a few minutes, I’ll give you some advice on how to manage your mind during isolation.
After the initial phases of shock and adaptation to confinement, where everything was new and we had a lot to focus our attention on, emotional difficulties now begin to surface with a vengeance.
On the one hand, with the drop in adaptive tension and adrenaline, with the habituation to the situation and the increase of routine and monotony, and on the other hand, with the fear of personal or external contagion, the insecurity about the labor or economic future and the uncertainty about how long the confinement will be prolonged, form the ideal breeding ground for our mind to become hyperactive.
Anxiety due to helplessness, depression due to hopelessness and friction in cohabitations due to saturation itself, are beginning to take a serious toll of quarantine.
It is important to understand something basic. Our cerebral cortex, the most extensive brain layer we have and the one that most differentiates us from other animals, is an extremely powerful instrument. So powerful that, very often, it is beyond our control.
Undoubtedly, at the physiological level, the brain has evolved much faster than our understanding of it.
For that cerebral cortex has thus developed with one basic function: to protect and defend ourselves in order to survive, using its memory to try to bring to mind past patterns, events and experiences that resemble in some way the threat that may be presented to us and projecting those patterns into the future to try to predict or anticipate what might happen and thus seek ways to avoid it.
This mode of functioning of our brain is its default mode, that for which it has evolved evolutionarily. It is a problem-solving oriented mode, which we will call the doing mode. And it must be said that, in general, the result achieved is devastating.
We are extremely good at solving problems, mainly immediate problems. Just look at the speed of expansion and development of the human species.
In fact, we are so good at solving problems that… we can hardly stop doing it! It is both our blessing and our condemnation.
And here’s an important detail. We are super effective, but from the skin out, where there are stable rules governing the world of matter, where events are predictable. But, from the skin inward, things change.
This is where the difficulties begin. When the problems we are trying to solve are inside us, when the very way our brain works is itself the problem, the paradox can occur, the more we try to solve a problem, the more it gets worse, and if we feel stressed or nervous and consider it a problem to solve, we activate with greater intensity the problem-solving mode, which stresses and tenses us to solve our problem of stress and tension, thus closing a perverse vicious circle.
A feedback loop that becomes the real problem and can continue until exhaustion. This mental mode of problem solving is also very stubborn and persistent. It gets along terribly with what it cannot solve. It gets stuck and goes into a loop.
Our mind gets along so badly with not knowing or not being able to solve something, that sometimes it transforms its perception of reality, adding or sublimating elements of its memory to make a situation seem more coherent or comprehensible, as authors such as Berger and Calabresse with their Theory of Uncertainty Reduction or Festinger with the Theory of Cognitive Dissonance have already demonstrated.
The fact is that this way of doing demands a lot of resources from people. It is very intense. And when it gets stuck and goes into a tailspin, it can leave us completely exhausted.
In short, the doing mode is a very intense mental process, which tends to be always on and almost automatic, which exhausts our resources and, by working mainly on the past or the future, is characterized by being disconnected from the present.
And then, what can you do, right? Do you have to resign yourself and live always entangled in your mental processes?
There is another way of mental functioning. A mode where there is no need to solve anything and where everything, absolutely everything, is perfect as it is at that moment. A mode that is totally centered in the present where it flows effortlessly and where there is an incomparable connection with what you are and what surrounds you.
If anything characterizes the being mode, it is precisely the non-doing. It is based on simply feeling. Feeling whatever is happening inside or outside of you, without having to look for a way to change it.
A way of being where there is no room for frustration. Where pain can appear, but not suffering, which is pain for the sake of feeling pain. Allowing us to observe, with special interest and curiosity, how the way of being tries to trap us and take us to its terrain of anxiety and fears.
In itself, staying in the being mode is already a relief, a liberation. That mode of being is what we call being Mindfull or practicing Mindfullness.
Stability is almost never an all or nothing or an either/or issue.
The importance of activating the being mode with some frequency is in having the experience from time to time of not having to do anything. To stop, to contact your existence instead of your virtual mental world, to connect with yourself.
In short, to free yourself from the chains of your mind and open yourself to the magical experience of existing.
And how to activate this mode of being?
There is no single way, but possibly meditation is one of the shortest and safest. And surely, compassion is the best traveling companion for that goal, as symbolized in Eastern traditions by the bird of wisdom that requires two wings to fly.
Fortunately, many other people, before any of us, have already started the journey of self-awareness and, thanks to them, we know that there are a series of keys that can help us to activate that way of being:
- Create an “anchor” to our present experience. Something that brings our awareness back to the “here and now” when our mind starts to trap and entangle us in its ramblings. A typical anchor is the breath. Directing our attention to the sensations that run through our body when we breathe, because we breathe here and now, not yesterday or tomorrow.
- To distance ourselves from our thoughts and emotions. Starting from the premise that we are not our thoughts or emotions, but that both dwell in us, they occur in our inner experience, but we can observe them, with distance, without getting caught up in their insecurities, broadening our perspective beyond our own navel.
- Put aside judgment and labeling about what we experience, because labeling as good or bad, positive or negative, is only an illusion of our ego, the product of our desires and attachments.
- Maintain at all times the curiosity of a child to desire to keep learning and to open yourself to who you are.
- To always maintain the tenderness that you may have felt for someone helpless or defenseless, so as not to be overly critical of whatever happens.
This kind of vital attitude, that of cultivating the connection with our experience, is a long road, possibly without end, where impatience is not a great ally, but whose reward is not long in coming and does not need to arrive at the destination to appear.
Every mindfull second is a treasure and, as soon as you try it, you begin to take care of it as such.
And in times like these, when we have so much time to be with ourselves, I think it is even more worthwhile to make peace with our life experience.
I encourage you to practice it and make your life a little more meaningful every day.