Book Rec: The Mindful Way Through Depression

I may have overcome my interstitial cystitis (IC) symptoms, but I’m still not out of the tangled woods of mind-body syndrome (MBS). Anxiety and depression are my latest afflictions. I am frequently taken hostage by negative thought spirals and waste a lot of my life lost in rumination, brooding over how things are not the way I want them to be.

In his book Unlearn Your Anxiety & Depression, Dr. Howard Schubiner explains that, like all MBS symptoms, anxiety and depression are warning signals that the brain produces in response to a perceived threat. He argues that these symptoms are not caused by a physical problem (e.g., abnormal levels of a neurotransmitter), and he recommends that they be treated using MBS treatment strategies. While I’ve found these strategies helpful, they haven’t been enough to eradicate my anxiety/depression. I’ve found that my anxiety response is so automatic that I’ve often spiraled into a deep dark pit before I can even register that I’ve been triggered. 

So lately I’ve been trying out some new tactics that I learned from the insightful book The Mindful Way Through Depression (TMWTD), which was co-authored by the three psychologists who founded Mindfulness-based Cognitive Therapy (i.e., Mark Williams, John Teasdale, Zindel Segal) and the renowned meditation teacher Jon Kabat-Zinn. This book supports the idea that anxiety and depression are merely “habits” of the mind, the products of entrenched neural pathways that have been strengthened by repeated use. It explains that when these pathways are deeply ingrained, they can be activated by even the tiniest puffs of fear or sadness, making it feel like our anxiety/depression has come out of nowhere.  

I love the way TMWTD breaks down the development of a negative thought spiral. It all starts when a trigger sets off some uncomfortable feelings. Our brains feel threatened by uncomfortable feelings, so to protect us from being overwhelmed by them, they either suppress them or activate what this book refers to as a “fixer response”. Fixer response is a flight-or-fight-fueled response in which we try to rid ourselves of uncomfortable feelings via problem solving. Unfortunately, while fixer response may be highly effective for solving external problems, it only exacerbates anxiety/depression because (1) it reinforces the brain’s notion that the uncomfortable feeling is a threat that must be eliminated, and (2) it causes us to become preoccupied, ignoring everything that is irrelevant to the problem at hand and thereby closing ourselves off from the world. Thus, when we respond to uncomfortable feelings this way, we only slip deeper into anxiety/depression and are left feeling unhappy about our unhappiness and frustrated with our failure to fix it. 

So how do we respond more effectively to our uncomfortable feelings? TMWTD predictably suggests that we use mindfulness. The idea is that, when we are mindful, we can separate ourselves from our thoughts and feelings and recognize that they are just transient mental states, passing through our minds like weather patterns. We can train ourselves to observe them with curiosity and acceptance rather than try to fix them, and thereby nip any nascent thought spirals in the bud. It’s a beautiful concept, right? But I’ve found that, as a wound-the-fuck-up mindfulness noob, it’s incredibly hard to observe certain types of thoughts without getting wrapped up in them. 

Fortunately, TMWTD teaches a technique that allows us to sidestep our thoughts altogether, namely “inhabiting the body”. To inhabit the body, you shift your awareness away from the chaos of your mind and focus instead on the sensations that you are feeling in your body in the present moment. For example, when you are facing something unpleasant, you can focus on the sense of contraction that is produced in your body (e.g., in your belly, chest, back, or jaw) rather than the stormy thoughts swirling in your mind. Inhabiting the body does at least three important things: (1) it anchors us in the present moment, (2) it makes us more aware of what we are feeling, and (3) it turns down the relentless mental chatter that could otherwise escalate into an obsessive spiral. 

I’ve found inhabiting the body to be a super effective way to cut off negative spirals, but I’ve also found that it’s hard to remember to do in the heat of a spicy moment. I guess that, like any form of mindfulness, inhabiting the body is a habit that needs to be built via practice. TMWTD (which comes with recordings of guided meditations) teaches several body-centric practices that I’ve been hitting hard, including body scan meditation, mindful yoga, and mindfulness of body meditation. I’ve also been dabbling with walking meditation, yoga nidra (so great before bed!), and sporadically commanding myself to “GET IN YOUR BODY.” 

I hope that, with practice, I’ll become more skilled at escaping my monkey mind and perhaps even a bit less wound-the-fuck-up. At least when I want to be (*wink*).