Jeremy Mohler

Writer and meditation teacher

Uncovering the cognitive distortions fueling your anxiety

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The author and spiritual teacher David Deida tells a story about being at a party and seeing his mentor’s wife talking with an attractive man.

“Aren’t you jealous?” Deida asked his mentor.

“Yes,” his mentor responded. “But that I’m jealous isn’t bothering me.”

In other words, his mentor was choosing how to relate to his jealousy. He wasn’t turning the emotion into a problem. He was allowing it to just be there.

As the therapist and meditation teacher Ralph De La Rosa says, “Our emotions aren’t up to us. What we do with them, however, is absolutely up to us.”

I love this story because it illustrates the power of mindfulness in a way that we’re all familiar with.

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve felt jealous. I can’t tell you because I’ve often been literally unaware of it.

My brain gets hijacked by stories and assumptions. Within seconds I’m the world’s most unlovable person. And the person who my lover or friend is talking to must be the world’s smartest, funniest, sexiest, most interesting person.

Intellectually, I know all of that is wrong. I know that this capitalist, patriarchal, white supremacist society tricks us into thinking that love and connection are scarce and not abundant. That love and connection will only come from finding the perfect partner, working my ass off, getting rich, buying stuff, competing with others, having the perfect body, etc.

These messages are hammered into our heads through school, TV, movies, advertising, magazines, the corporate news media, and the myths we tell each other about “just the way things are.”

“We’re being trained to be capitalists,” writes the organizer and author adrienne maree brown, “to compete, in a system of scarcity, to be better than each other to access resources to meet our basic human needs.”

I know that capitalism and patriarchy and white supremacy suck. But in those moments of feeling jealous — or afraid or lonely or [insert painful emotion here] — I’m lost in thought.

I’m numb to the love and connection all around me. I can’t feel my feet on the ground or hear the breeze moving the trees. I can’t tell whether I’m breathing in or out. I don’t remember that the person I love can love other people while still loving me.

My head is full of rigid, either/or stories about who I am and what other people are doing and how the world is.

The psychiatrist Aaron Beck called these thought patterns “cognitive distortions.” They’re basically short cuts that our brain takes to try to figure out what’s going on. They color most of our thinking, especially when we’re overwhelmed by an emotion — like jealousy.

They don’t mean we’re broken or crazy or bad. “Cognitive distortions happen automatically,” writes the psychologist Matthew Walley. “We don’t mean to think inaccurately — but unless we learn to notice them, they can have powerful yet invisible effects upon our moods and our lives.”

My go-to cognitive distortion is catastrophizing. I take things to the negative extreme in the snap of a finger. She’s going to leave me for that guy and I’m going to die alone. He doesn’t like me anymore and I’m going to have no friends because I’m getting old.

Some other cognitive distortions:

  • Displacement is when you’re feel unable to directly confront someone who has harmed you, so you pick a safe target to attack. Think of the man who takes his resentment toward his boss out on his children after work.
  • Projection is when you don’t want to admit something unacceptable about yourself, so you place it on someone else. Think of a cheating partner who suspects their partner is being unfaithful.
  • Filtering is when you notice details that support your internal thoughts and feelings while ignoring contradictory evidence. Political arguments on social media are rife with filtering.
  • Overgeneralizing is when you come to general conclusions about life from a single incident. Whenever you’re using “always” or “never” or “no one” or “everyone,” you’re probably overgeneralizing.

Deida’s mentor had simply done the inner work to get to know his jealousy. He probably had felt a familiar fireball in his chest or tension in his shoulders but was able to soothe his own anxiety.

I bet all kinds of cognitive distortions were blaring in his mind as his wife smiled and played with her hair. He just wasn’t listening to them.

From this mindful standpoint, he could decide to intervene or discuss the situation with his wife after the party. Or he could decide not to.

He could choose his response to what was actually happening instead of reacting based on the cognitive distortions in his mind.

Hi, I’m Jeremy, a writer, meditation teacher, and host of the Meditation for the 99% podcast. I’m here to help you be more mindful about work, relationships, and politics. Subscribe to my weekly email here.

Download my free ebook on how meditation can transform your life.

Photo by Sue Clark.

Like many men, it took a woman to force me to go to therapy

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This is for those who’ve never been to therapy. You’re not crazy or weird or broken. You’re just a human living in a society out of touch with its humanity.

Like many men, I probably wouldn’t have ever seen a therapist if it weren’t for a woman.

That’s because those of us who were raised as men were shamed for showing emotions. We were told to “man up” and stop acting “like a girl.” So we shy away from feeling let alone talking about our vulnerability. (Because ours is a patriarchal society, many women experience the same pressures.)

Luckily, an ex-girlfriend suggested therapy for some issues I’d been having with my parents. What she really meant was that me not being willing to talk about our growing relationship issues was a problem.

I saw the therapist, but it was too late. We broke up a few months later.

“I’m going through some uncertainty in my relationship with my girlfriend and need some help,” I emailed the therapist the night of the breakup.

The relationship never rekindled. But within a few sessions, I was hooked.

Hollywood had shown me all I knew about therapy. The Sopranos. Seinfeld. Analyze This.

Opening up to a total stranger seemed like it was for “crazy” people. Something was “wrong” with you. Or you had money to waste on making up problems that weren’t really there.

My parents hadn’t raised me to talk about emotions. There was plenty of laughter, sure. But expressing “softer” feelings like sadness or fear was often met with an eyeroll. Or at most, a “I don’t know what to tell you.”

“How do you know therapy actually works?” my mother recently asked, her nose scrunched. It wasn’t a question.

The truth is you don’t really ever know. There’s research showing that talk therapy is effective for anxiety, depression, and other emotional issues — and can even improve the structure of the brain. But I just know that it works for me.

And that’s the key: Finding a therapist that just clicks with you.

When I saw my therapist after the breakup, what stood out was that she didn’t seem to care about the details. Friends and family had asked for the blow by blow. They’d taken my side to lift my spirits or downplayed my heartbreak as just a bump in the road.

But my therapist kept asking me how I felt in the moment. What my body felt like. Was there tension. What thoughts or images were coming up in my mind.

Whenever I would ramble on about the breakup or my job or my parents, she would bring the conversation back to what was actually happening in the moment.

This annoyed me. I just wanted to talk about the breakup. And I wanted help getting my ex back. But my therapist wouldn’t let up.

“What’s going on in your body?” she asked, when I told her my ex had rejected a proposal to get dinner.

I took a few slow breaths and felt around for sensations. I noticed a familiar tightness in my throat. I was eight years old again, trying so hard to fall asleep after watching a scary movie.

“What does it feel like?” she said.

It felt like I was protecting myself from someone slashing my throat. Like all my energy was being squeezed up into my head.

My therapist said that made sense. I was ruminating about how to get my ex back. I was trying to figure out the exact thing that would convince her to love me again.

And maybe there were some things I hadn’t said to her. Maybe they were stuck in my throat, metaphorically speaking.

“Imagine there’s a spiral in your throat,” she said. “Imagine it expanding outward and relaxing your throat and neck. Feel your feet on the floor. Notice the support of the earth below.”

What is this woo woo shit, I thought. But it worked. My neck and shoulders softened. My breath slowed down.

My therapist said that relaxing tension might not take my mind off of my ex. But it could be a doorway to healing the heartbreak.

And eventually it was. Countless times I’d be in my apartment ruminating about my ex, and I’d notice my throat was tense. Taking a few deep breaths and relaxing the tension took the edge off. It’d bring me back into the present moment rather than an imaginary past where I’d been a better boyfriend or a make-believe future where I got her back.

Sure, I was sad as hell — but at least I was feeling the feelings rather than trying to think my way into outrunning them.

The heartbreak, loneliness, and fear definitely sucked for a while. But eventually they subsided, and I was able to move on.

Along the way I learned that overthinking is my go-to when I’m feeling overwhelmed by an emotion. I also overwork, people-please, self-criticize, try to be perfect, procrastinate, numb out, you name it.

I’ve learned through therapy that these are my ways of avoiding feelings. My therapist has helped me notice them in how I relate with her. It’s like she’s a mirror. Talking to her, I’m able to see all the ways I try to manipulate other people into liking me so I can avoid feeling something.

What separates my therapist from my friends — even my best friend s— is that she’s been trained to show me what the psychologist Carl Rogers “unconditional positive regard.”

She doesn’t judge me or try to make me feel better or change anything about me. She accepts me for the messy, complex human that I am.

And because she accepts me, I can show more of myself to her. More of the parts of myself that I think are dark, fucked up, gross, and embarrassing.

This helps me accept myself more. Which in turn allows me to be myself more outside of therapy. Which in turn allows me to be more authentic in relationships. Which in turn allows me to accept (and love) others more.

“People are just as wonderful as sunsets if you let them be,” Rogers once wrote. “When I look at a sunset, I don’t find myself saying, ‘Soften the orange a bit on the right-hand corner.’ I don’t try to control a sunset. I watch with awe as it unfolds.”

I plan to be in therapy for the rest of my life. At this point, once a month feels right. But if a crisis hits, I’ll do it once a week if I have to.

Not because I’m “crazy.” Because the more I do it the more I learn about all the ways I’m hiding from feeling things. All the ways I narrow myself down and miss the vastness of this weird, magical, one and only life.

Hi, I’m Jeremy, a writer, meditation teacher, and host of the Meditation for the 99% podcast. I’m here to help you be more mindful about work, relationships, and politics. Subscribe to my weekly email here.

Download my free ebook on how meditation can transform your life.

Photo by Hatice EROL from Pixabay.

How the Buddha stumbled on mindfulness

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Let’s zoom in on mindfulness to get a sense of what we’re after when we sit down to meditate.

Mindful.org says it’s “the basic human ability to be fully present, aware of where we are and what we’re doing, and not overly reactive or overwhelmed by what’s going on around us.”

There are a few interesting things here.

Mindfulness is a “basic” human ability. Meaning, it’s not some complex skill that we have to spend 10,000 hours learning how to do. It’s available to us in any moment.

You can think of the ability to stay in the present moment as like the sun. It’s always there. There are clouds in the way sometimes, sure. But the sun is still there in the background.

We can’t push the clouds away. We must accept that they’re there and wait for them to pass. Same thing with a big storm — some big trauma or emotional state. No matter how shitty it feels, it will pass.

The Buddha — the ancient spiritual master who developed mindfulness meditation — stumbled on mindfulness when he was a young boy.

His family was watching the ritual first plowing of the fields. As the sun scorched, he sat in the shade of a rose-apple tree.

Plows turned up the soil exposing worms that wriggled around trying to find cover. Other worms writhed in pain after being cut in half. Birds hovered near the ground to eat the defenseless worms and other bugs that laid bare for their easy picking. A hawk swooped down and caught one of the small birds.

The Buddha felt the striving of the man plowing. He felt the exhaustion of the water buffalo chained to the plow. He felt the pain of the worms cut by the plow and the small bird taken by the hawk. He felt the unpredictability of life itself.

That’s what we’re doing when we meditate. We’re getting out of our head and into our bodies. We’re feeling rather than thinking. We’re connecting rather than staying disconnected, caught up in the little drama in our head.

It’s like that old Zen Buddhist story about two monks watching a flag flapping in the wind. One said to the other, “The flag is moving.” The other replied, “The wind is moving.”

Another monk overheard this and said, “Not the flag, not the wind. Mind is moving.”

When we’re caught up in the drama, we’re not seeing the big picture. We’re missing the fact that everything is changing and moving and living and dying all of the time.

The other interesting part of the definition is about reactivity.

When we’re practicing mindfulness, we’re cultivating equanimity. Meaning, while we might feel things — even painful, difficult things — we’re not overwhelmed by them.

We can be with our feelings without necessarily acting on them. Which also means we can be with others’ feelings without necessarily having to do anything.

We have a little more choice. We can respond rather than react.

Say a woman cuts the line in front of you at the grocery store. You might get angry because you’re in a rush. You might yell or say something passive aggressive or stew about it for the rest of the night.

But, as the late author David Foster Wallace said in his commencement speech “This is Water”:

Maybe she’s not usually like this. Maybe she’s been up three straight nights holding the hand of a husband who is dying of bone cancer. Or maybe this very lady is the low-wage clerk at the motor vehicle department, who just yesterday helped your spouse resolve a horrific, infuriating, red-tape problem through some small act of bureaucratic kindness.

Of course, none of this is likely, but it’s also not impossible. It just depends what you want to consider. If you’re automatically sure that you know what reality is, and you are operating on your default setting, then you, like me, probably won’t consider possibilities that aren’t annoying and miserable.

But if you really learn how to pay attention, then you will know there are other options. It will actually be within your power to experience a crowded, hot, slow, consumer-hell type situation as not only meaningful, but sacred, on fire with the same force that made the stars: love, fellowship, the mystical oneness of all things deep down.

In other words, mindfulness is about remembering that everything is connected, despite our mind’s attempts to say otherwise.

Hi, I’m Jeremy, a writer, meditation teacher, and host of the Meditation for the 99% podcast. I’m here to help you be more mindful about work, relationships, and politics. Subscribe to my weekly email here.

Download my free ebook on how meditation can transform your life.

Photo by Hartwig HKD.