Hooked on a feeling

When your mind wants to change your brain

I know a man with a bonfire of discontent in his heart. He regards his neighbors with suspicion; he judges his family members; he loathes certain political leaders and all the idiots who voted for them. He moves, he quits, he severs ties. The discontent remains.

He’s also caring, generous, and kind, but the smoke from the bonfire often overpowers those qualities. It rages because he feeds it. The world and social media are full of firewood, and he’s committed to gathering it and heaving it into the flames. There’s just so much to be upset about. There are so many people deserving of contempt. It would be naive and deluded to stop being incensed—a dereliction of moral duty.

I know a woman who’s not well. She’s chronically fatigued, vibrating with pain. When she looks around, all she sees is fodder for a feeling she’s had her whole life—that she’s unloved and unlovable, persecuted, reviled, and bullied. It doesn’t matter how many people offer her love and help. Her conclusion has been reached, and only supporting evidence will be admitted.

We all know people like this. People who are addicted to a feeling, a way of being, that they find a way to perpetuate. No matter how often alternative ways of looking at things are presented to them, they insist they’re seeing things clearly, the only way things could be seen if one is perceptive and honest. The cold, hard truth might not be pleasant, but by God, it’s the truth.

Is it, though? As Anaïs Nin said, “We don't see the world as it is, we see it as we are.”

These patterns are easy to see in the people around us—the way your spouse has a recurring emotional need that requires soothing over and over again; the way that one Facebook friend is always expressing iterations on the same sense of grievance and outrage. The way so many people seem to occupy a sort of neural groove that they’ve settled into like a mattress they’ve been sleeping on for decades. 

Then the realization dawns: Of course you do the same thing. Of course you have a worldview you’re not even aware of, a feeling you feed, a foregone conclusion for which you’re always seeking evidence, a hunch you’ve never subjected to argument or examination, or even conscious awareness. 

Maybe it’s a fear you try to keep at bay, or an assurance that’s always just out of reach. Maybe it’s a quiet certainty to which you’re resigned. Whatever it is, it animates you in ways someone close to you could probably describe, but you yourself could not. Because it’s the water you swim in, the texture of reality. It’s just the way things are. 

But no, it’s not. If we see the world not as it is, but as we are, how do we start to see how we are? If our gaze is inseparable from our nature, what tools do we have to identify it?

I've been thinking about all this lately. I’m trying to dial in on the throughline of my emotional experience, see if I can suss out what invisible feeling drives me and undergirds the way that I am. You know? What unexamined belief is my most frequent source of distress? What habit of mind limits my perceptions and potential?

Another way of asking this might be: What am I here to learn? 

Answering this seems urgent not only because I’d like to feel less distress and be less blinkered, though that would be welcome. It feels somehow fundamental to my project in this incarnation. And I think the urgency itself—and its familiarity—is a clue to the answer. 

I’ve felt this way my whole life: That there’s something I’m missing, something more I need to do or know in order to be whole, in order to “be all I can be.” It’s always dangling in front of me like a carrot on a stick.

Stacks of books teeter on my nightstand. I enroll in courses and workshops. I talk to people like they hold a piece of a puzzle I’ve been tasked with completing. I collect new experiences like holes on a punch card. When it’s full, I’ll be able to exchange it for… what? 

The hunger itself isn’t distressing, as long as I have a way to satisfy it. But it’s agonizing when I feel stymied—blocked from a rung on a ladder I’m trying to climb, uninvited from an echelon I want to join—especially if it feels like a rejection based on my worth. 

A creative team or project that refuses me; a publication I want to write for that passes on my pitch (or worse, doesn’t respond at all); periods of insufficient work that leave my days open and aimless with an abundance of energy and a dearth of outlets. These are the things that make me bonkers, morose, antsy as hell. 

I want to scale new heights, keep pushing forward. I hate the feeling of being held back or retreading old, tired ground. Give me novelty! Expansion! Opportunity! Revelation!

So, this is where the lesson is, right? This is where I should be paying attention. But the question I keep returning to is: What’s the right balance between effort and ease? How hard do I need to work at changing my nature—and isn’t that goal itself just another iteration of the thing I’m trying to soften, this constant sense of aspiration, of endeavoring?

Last year I interviewed a man who suffers from functional neurological disorder (FND). What started as a couple of not-terribly-serious work injuries culminated in him being wheelchair-bound, unable to speak or use his arms. 

This turned out to be a result of miscommunications in his brain and nervous system—faulty signals being sent, normal signals being blocked, in ways that are wrapped up in attention, emotion, and meaning-making. There’s evidence that similar mechanisms might underlie other poorly understood chronic conditions, including subsets of long Covid, fibromyalgia, and chronic Lyme. 

As the man with FND put it, “The brain learns the injury, absorbs it, and then reenacts it, forever.” (He writes beautifully about his experience here.)

Even when our mental habits don’t translate into this kind of physical suffering, their intractability can feel daunting. It can feel impossible to find a way out of the rutted roads that our thoughts and feelings have traveled for so long.

So how do you go about changing your brain?

Buddhists say that awareness alone is enough to dissolve unhelpful patterns. In The Trauma of Everyday Life, author and psychotherapist Mark Epstein writes, “One of the central paradoxes of Buddhism is that the bare attention of the meditative mind changes the psyche by not trying to change anything at all.” 

Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh said that rather than trying to change or override your feelings, you should simply regard them with affection. “You need to smile to your sorrow, because you are more than your sorrow,” he says. 

I love this. If striving is the shape my sorrow takes, what better than to smile at it, pet it like a squirrely, beloved dog? That action alone helps me identify more with the petter than the dog—the smiler than the striver. It shifts the locus of awareness. It cultivates benevolence and warmth, a kind of wisdom and affection, all while letting the striving be. “There she goes,” I might say about myself. “Look at her doing that thing she does. What an adorable dope.”

You can try this too with cold or pain—discomfort that you know isn’t dangerous, just unpleasant. You can become the mind watching the experience instead of (or in addition to) being the one having it, sometimes just for a moment or two. 

Sometimes a moment or two of loving equanimity is all you need. It’s enough for the brain to start to learn it, absorb it, reenact it. You can begin to toggle between occupying your adorable, dopy self and observing it. The mental ruts and aches and bonfires start to soften, ever so slightly. 

And then you can laugh at yourself when you recognize that of course all of this is just another form of striving, another hand grasping for another rung on another ladder toward expansion and revelation. There she goes, the adorable dope. She’ll be doing this forever. Give the old girl a smooch and a scratch behind the ear.