Enjoyed this so much, Sarah! I had to laugh. Giving my mind jobs like a gratitude list can be helpful sort of like tiring a toddler out! Hehe
The whole key for me has been learning not to give the mind any power. It blathers on and on and knows nothing worthwhile. It is not me-it’s a vehicle that can be really cool when properly utilized to invent things or create but it is full of shit otherwise. I learned to say to myself when my mind attacks me “Doesn’t matter what you think or feel. Take action. Go to the meeting. Take a walk. Do the task. Write. Do what’s right in front of you, period.” This has literally saved my life. I recently started using the BEMO journal’s FUNCK process as a tool and wrote about it in my latest post Won’t You Be My Neighbor.” It’s helpful!
"The whole key for me has been learning not to give the mind any power. It blathers on and on and knows nothing worthwhile. It is not me-it’s a vehicle that can be really cool when properly utilized to invent things or create but it is full of shit otherwise. I learned to say to myself when my mind attacks me 'Doesn’t matter what you think or feel. Take action. Go to the meeting. Take a walk. Do the task. Write. Do what’s right in front of you, period.'”
I just copied and pasted it to my treasure trove of notes on Apple Notes.
I find myself genuinely grateful on an involuntary basis, not unlike the way Proust's memory of his childhood is summoned unexpectedly by the taste and smell of the Madeleine dipped in the tisane.
95% of all health problems start with what people are putting in their mouths...or not putting what our Creator intended for them to eat. If you don't feed your body right, your brain suffers too. The wrong foods can lead to depression and not eating enough can contribute to mental problems. The Recipe for perfect mentally and physically health begins with eating as our intended ...enough natural unprocessed foods. Since our soil does not contain the nutrients it should...supplements are most important, too. The brain needs the right nourishment in order to be healthy. I speak from experience...not from something I have read in a book! I am mentally and physically healthier going on 92 than I was in my 20s and 30s. I had to learn how to eat!!
I'm a therapist and I'm aware how reductive some therapeutic models can be, one size rarely fits all.
It sounds like you were let down by the system.
We are often our own worst critics and your inner voice sounds particularly mean.
In my work here, I've shared an exercise where you write the negative thought/s down, then write alternative, opposite thoughts on the other side of the paper, to challenge and develop new neural pathways and expand our mind from the fixed idea.
I am a fan of gratitude from personal experience. During years living with long Covid I swear that it was gratitude that got me through. Rather than focusing on how rubbish everything was, how my body had failed, how I lost my income and friends not caring, I switched my thoughts to gratitude of what I do have, like not feeling pain, or for the friends that do care, having enough food and a home etc. Gratitude was a reality check that shifted my mood and perceptions enough to get through it, and I did.
I wrote a fun post about 'gratitude that lights the dark' last week. Did you know that Otis Redding died soon after his famous song the Dock of the Bay? He didn't find out what a massive hit it was!
We do need to acknowledge difficult feelings, but we can also cultivate gratitude alongside it all, it stopped me falling into a deep hole. I also totally get that for some it's just too far a stretch, and feels superficial when other feelings dominate.
Thank you for reading! I always appreciate you, Kate. I'm now at a point where gratitude is an integral part of my life and I have a gratitude practice that I do every morning. I never miss a single day.
I didn't know that about Otis Redding! It's like F. Scott Fitzgerald dying with Gatsby a flop and out of print.
Oh gosh I didn't know that about Fitzgerald. And there's Van Gogh too. I think we always have to keep in mind the big picture, follow our passion and stop ourselves getting caught in pointless unhelpful thought loops! Xx
Mean? I am totally into our Creator...and ask for guidance in everything I do...without an ulterior motive. Most people have ulterior motives. "What can you do do for me? " All I want to do is help others get well and stay well...I have done research for 64 years and simply want to do my part in MAHA.
So interesting Sarah and I appreciate your sharing this process! It’s funny because I just wrote an essay on gratitude and found this challenging. Gratitude can be a form of performance for sure yet taking it from a spiritual perspective we can hold all of it at once. Keeping it real without the performance while saying it is hard at the same time works for me. Allowing the ornery mean thoughts to exist along side the small things I am grateful for works for me. We all have a process and your scientific approach is good to read.
Hi, Shelley! So nice to see you. I love this: "Allowing the ornery mean thoughts to exist along side the small things I am grateful for works for me." I have a regular gratitude practice now (I had to grow into it), and I definitely give both positive and negative equal air time.
I appreciated this piece, especially the refusal to sell a “recipe” for permanent calm. That alone cuts across a huge amount of mental health mythology. That if we just find the right method, the right journalling protocol, the right gratitude routine, the difficult emotions will stop. Your account is much closer to reality, where depression, anxiety and panic still arise, and the work is in how we relate to them, not in removing them from the human condition.
From a Stoic perspective, your focus on self-talk and writing maps very closely onto what we called attention and assent. Impressions arrive uninvited: “this is awful”, “I am going to get sick again”. What matters is not the impression itself but whether we give it our endorsement. Second-person self-talk, as you describe it, is a way of inserting that gap. “You have got this. Nothing has gone wrong. You are okay.” For me that is the rational part of us stepping in to test the thought rather than letting the first reaction dictate our reality.
The same goes for your “brain dump” on paper. Stoics wrote about taking impressions out into the open so that we can see them as impressions rather than as facts. You are doing something very similar: placing the thought at arm’s length, tagging some of it as “trash”, which is much closer to Stoic practice than the more mechanical side of CBT you rightly found unhelpful (although I do see short term benefits to these in certain circumstances). Thoughts become something to examine, not obey and not demonise.
There is a lot of magical thinking around gratitude practices, as if listing three things at night will reliably transform a life. You are right that the science is mixed and that the concept itself is often vague. For me gratitude is not a mood we are supposed to force, nor a tool to crowd out “bad” feelings. It is a judgement about how we stand in relation to what we have received, including the difficult parts. Sometimes the most honest and healthy stance is exactly what you describe: “walking, fresh air, Dad”, written without fireworks or compulsory radiance.
I think you demonstrate well that “mental health” is not a destination but a set of ongoing exercises. How we speak to ourselves, how we externalise and test our thoughts, and how we learn to relate to our lives without demanding that they always feel good. That is more realistic, and more humane, than any promise of a perfectly “healthy” mind.
Sarah, what a great read! - what I kept thinking about while reading your piece wasn’t the harsh inner voice itself but the history inside it. Our inner critics often grow out of early relational learning and emotions that often can have little room to be explored. How we were spoken to, the expectations we end up absorbing, and the conditions we grew up in all shape the internal voice we later treat as our own. It isn’t just the negative thoughts that matter, but the early environments that set them in motion.
Your reflections on self-talk and writing also highlight something often left out of the conversation. Those heavier states you describe aren’t only cognitive or emotional. They’re often physical signals that our system is depleted or has been overridden for more time than is healthy. Many of us try to out-think our symptoms (welcome to most forms of therapy), but the mind cannot regulate without the body’s basic forms of care. Adequate sleep, healthy nourishment, movement throughout our day, and rest and relaxation are not optional supports if we want to feel good. When our basic needs go unmet, the emotional and cognitive parts of the mind usually grow harsher. What feels like a failure of resolve is often the body asking for help in the only language it has.
Your exploration of gratitude opens another door. Many of us were taught that gratitude should come easily, as if good people feel grateful no matter how stretched or depleted they are. But gratitude can slip into self-abandonment when it’s used to cover exhaustion or lessen the fear of disappointing others. Gratitude without capacity is a candle burning at both ends. It isn’t about putting a positive frame over pain as you relay. When we pair appreciation with self-awareness and self-care, gratitude can become a renewable resource. It then has a chance to restore us instead of draining us, especially this time of year.
What you've written here is practically a (really good) therapy session. You're so right.
This is something I'm finally becoming wise to: "Those heavier states you describe aren’t only cognitive or emotional. They’re often physical signals that our system is depleted or has been overridden for more time than is healthy." I'm one of those people who pushes my body and mind thinking it's "healthy" without realizing how damaging it is.
And I've felt this so much in my life: "Gratitude without capacity is a candle burning at both ends."
Your willingness to share and help is inspiring, Sarah. For me, gratitude, is the spice and positive self-talk is the "protein"- I'd be "gelatin" without them.
I’m not going into details, because there’s so much out there about it, but Internal Family Systems (IFS) was a perfect fit for me—and I’m aware of and studied countless others. I don’t go into detail about it in my Substack, I’ll leave that for the clinicians, but it’s why mine is called Partly There. And that fifth grade mean girl is a part of you. IFS is the only practice of this type that has stayed with me. Maybe it’s the combination of past trauma and ADHD, but follow-through is not a strong point for me. Until IFS. Parts of mine hound me until I sit down and let them speak. I’m so grateful for Dick Schwartz and his discoveries. A good place to start is with his book, No Bad Parts. Wishing you all well…
Thank you for that story, Sarah. Very nice descriptions how our thoughts could sapped us and how we could train them with self-talk. At the end you find out what you are really grateful for, and who matters to you.
The brain dump technique you described really resonates with me. Writing thoughts down and physicaly discarding them makes the process tangible in a way mindfulness alone doesn't. Your reframe of the inner critic as an overzealous survival mechanism rather than somthing malicious is a shift that could change everything.
Not a fan of CBT either! LOL. But the positive (in my opinion) from all the gazillion studies and meta-analyses of the ABC acronyms on some such psychotherapy method or another is ONE factor that bodes well for healing/recovery = the therapeutic relationship.
Enjoyed this so much, Sarah! I had to laugh. Giving my mind jobs like a gratitude list can be helpful sort of like tiring a toddler out! Hehe
The whole key for me has been learning not to give the mind any power. It blathers on and on and knows nothing worthwhile. It is not me-it’s a vehicle that can be really cool when properly utilized to invent things or create but it is full of shit otherwise. I learned to say to myself when my mind attacks me “Doesn’t matter what you think or feel. Take action. Go to the meeting. Take a walk. Do the task. Write. Do what’s right in front of you, period.” This has literally saved my life. I recently started using the BEMO journal’s FUNCK process as a tool and wrote about it in my latest post Won’t You Be My Neighbor.” It’s helpful!
This is gold. Really.
Pure gold:
"The whole key for me has been learning not to give the mind any power. It blathers on and on and knows nothing worthwhile. It is not me-it’s a vehicle that can be really cool when properly utilized to invent things or create but it is full of shit otherwise. I learned to say to myself when my mind attacks me 'Doesn’t matter what you think or feel. Take action. Go to the meeting. Take a walk. Do the task. Write. Do what’s right in front of you, period.'”
I just copied and pasted it to my treasure trove of notes on Apple Notes.
Checking out your post now...
☺️thank you Sarah! I’m glad it resonated. It’s helped me tremendously.
I find gratitude & forgiveness challenging, which is leading me into new territory as I age.
Me too.
I find myself genuinely grateful on an involuntary basis, not unlike the way Proust's memory of his childhood is summoned unexpectedly by the taste and smell of the Madeleine dipped in the tisane.
95% of all health problems start with what people are putting in their mouths...or not putting what our Creator intended for them to eat. If you don't feed your body right, your brain suffers too. The wrong foods can lead to depression and not eating enough can contribute to mental problems. The Recipe for perfect mentally and physically health begins with eating as our intended ...enough natural unprocessed foods. Since our soil does not contain the nutrients it should...supplements are most important, too. The brain needs the right nourishment in order to be healthy. I speak from experience...not from something I have read in a book! I am mentally and physically healthier going on 92 than I was in my 20s and 30s. I had to learn how to eat!!
I wish you could tell us more! What do you eat?
My next newsletter is Going Bananas: Energy Unlimited! barbaracharis.substack.com
Absolutely.
I’d love anyone who struggles with negative talk to see my reframes Instagram.com/reframingyourthoughts
I’ve been a chronic negative self
Talker and it nearly killed me
Will check it out!
♥️
I enjoyed reading your reflections, Sarah.
I'm a therapist and I'm aware how reductive some therapeutic models can be, one size rarely fits all.
It sounds like you were let down by the system.
We are often our own worst critics and your inner voice sounds particularly mean.
In my work here, I've shared an exercise where you write the negative thought/s down, then write alternative, opposite thoughts on the other side of the paper, to challenge and develop new neural pathways and expand our mind from the fixed idea.
I am a fan of gratitude from personal experience. During years living with long Covid I swear that it was gratitude that got me through. Rather than focusing on how rubbish everything was, how my body had failed, how I lost my income and friends not caring, I switched my thoughts to gratitude of what I do have, like not feeling pain, or for the friends that do care, having enough food and a home etc. Gratitude was a reality check that shifted my mood and perceptions enough to get through it, and I did.
I wrote a fun post about 'gratitude that lights the dark' last week. Did you know that Otis Redding died soon after his famous song the Dock of the Bay? He didn't find out what a massive hit it was!
We do need to acknowledge difficult feelings, but we can also cultivate gratitude alongside it all, it stopped me falling into a deep hole. I also totally get that for some it's just too far a stretch, and feels superficial when other feelings dominate.
I appreciate you! ✨
Thank you for reading! I always appreciate you, Kate. I'm now at a point where gratitude is an integral part of my life and I have a gratitude practice that I do every morning. I never miss a single day.
I didn't know that about Otis Redding! It's like F. Scott Fitzgerald dying with Gatsby a flop and out of print.
Oh gosh I didn't know that about Fitzgerald. And there's Van Gogh too. I think we always have to keep in mind the big picture, follow our passion and stop ourselves getting caught in pointless unhelpful thought loops! Xx
Mean? I am totally into our Creator...and ask for guidance in everything I do...without an ulterior motive. Most people have ulterior motives. "What can you do do for me? " All I want to do is help others get well and stay well...I have done research for 64 years and simply want to do my part in MAHA.
Maybe, I misunderstood...I thought the comment was directed to me.
Hi Barbara, yes, I was only referring to Sarah's inner mean girl negative thoughts.
So interesting Sarah and I appreciate your sharing this process! It’s funny because I just wrote an essay on gratitude and found this challenging. Gratitude can be a form of performance for sure yet taking it from a spiritual perspective we can hold all of it at once. Keeping it real without the performance while saying it is hard at the same time works for me. Allowing the ornery mean thoughts to exist along side the small things I am grateful for works for me. We all have a process and your scientific approach is good to read.
Hi, Shelley! So nice to see you. I love this: "Allowing the ornery mean thoughts to exist along side the small things I am grateful for works for me." I have a regular gratitude practice now (I had to grow into it), and I definitely give both positive and negative equal air time.
I appreciated this piece, especially the refusal to sell a “recipe” for permanent calm. That alone cuts across a huge amount of mental health mythology. That if we just find the right method, the right journalling protocol, the right gratitude routine, the difficult emotions will stop. Your account is much closer to reality, where depression, anxiety and panic still arise, and the work is in how we relate to them, not in removing them from the human condition.
From a Stoic perspective, your focus on self-talk and writing maps very closely onto what we called attention and assent. Impressions arrive uninvited: “this is awful”, “I am going to get sick again”. What matters is not the impression itself but whether we give it our endorsement. Second-person self-talk, as you describe it, is a way of inserting that gap. “You have got this. Nothing has gone wrong. You are okay.” For me that is the rational part of us stepping in to test the thought rather than letting the first reaction dictate our reality.
The same goes for your “brain dump” on paper. Stoics wrote about taking impressions out into the open so that we can see them as impressions rather than as facts. You are doing something very similar: placing the thought at arm’s length, tagging some of it as “trash”, which is much closer to Stoic practice than the more mechanical side of CBT you rightly found unhelpful (although I do see short term benefits to these in certain circumstances). Thoughts become something to examine, not obey and not demonise.
There is a lot of magical thinking around gratitude practices, as if listing three things at night will reliably transform a life. You are right that the science is mixed and that the concept itself is often vague. For me gratitude is not a mood we are supposed to force, nor a tool to crowd out “bad” feelings. It is a judgement about how we stand in relation to what we have received, including the difficult parts. Sometimes the most honest and healthy stance is exactly what you describe: “walking, fresh air, Dad”, written without fireworks or compulsory radiance.
I think you demonstrate well that “mental health” is not a destination but a set of ongoing exercises. How we speak to ourselves, how we externalise and test our thoughts, and how we learn to relate to our lives without demanding that they always feel good. That is more realistic, and more humane, than any promise of a perfectly “healthy” mind.
Edgar, thank you. So much of this speaks to me. As does your newsletter, which I just subscribed to.
The Stoic perspective has always interested me and now I see why. You explain it in a way others don't--not "accessible," more like real.
And I will treasure this always: Gratitude "written without fireworks or compulsory radiance."
That is very kind thank you
Sarah, what a great read! - what I kept thinking about while reading your piece wasn’t the harsh inner voice itself but the history inside it. Our inner critics often grow out of early relational learning and emotions that often can have little room to be explored. How we were spoken to, the expectations we end up absorbing, and the conditions we grew up in all shape the internal voice we later treat as our own. It isn’t just the negative thoughts that matter, but the early environments that set them in motion.
Your reflections on self-talk and writing also highlight something often left out of the conversation. Those heavier states you describe aren’t only cognitive or emotional. They’re often physical signals that our system is depleted or has been overridden for more time than is healthy. Many of us try to out-think our symptoms (welcome to most forms of therapy), but the mind cannot regulate without the body’s basic forms of care. Adequate sleep, healthy nourishment, movement throughout our day, and rest and relaxation are not optional supports if we want to feel good. When our basic needs go unmet, the emotional and cognitive parts of the mind usually grow harsher. What feels like a failure of resolve is often the body asking for help in the only language it has.
Your exploration of gratitude opens another door. Many of us were taught that gratitude should come easily, as if good people feel grateful no matter how stretched or depleted they are. But gratitude can slip into self-abandonment when it’s used to cover exhaustion or lessen the fear of disappointing others. Gratitude without capacity is a candle burning at both ends. It isn’t about putting a positive frame over pain as you relay. When we pair appreciation with self-awareness and self-care, gratitude can become a renewable resource. It then has a chance to restore us instead of draining us, especially this time of year.
Cheers!
Bronce,
What you've written here is practically a (really good) therapy session. You're so right.
This is something I'm finally becoming wise to: "Those heavier states you describe aren’t only cognitive or emotional. They’re often physical signals that our system is depleted or has been overridden for more time than is healthy." I'm one of those people who pushes my body and mind thinking it's "healthy" without realizing how damaging it is.
And I've felt this so much in my life: "Gratitude without capacity is a candle burning at both ends."
Your willingness to share and help is inspiring, Sarah. For me, gratitude, is the spice and positive self-talk is the "protein"- I'd be "gelatin" without them.
I’m not going into details, because there’s so much out there about it, but Internal Family Systems (IFS) was a perfect fit for me—and I’m aware of and studied countless others. I don’t go into detail about it in my Substack, I’ll leave that for the clinicians, but it’s why mine is called Partly There. And that fifth grade mean girl is a part of you. IFS is the only practice of this type that has stayed with me. Maybe it’s the combination of past trauma and ADHD, but follow-through is not a strong point for me. Until IFS. Parts of mine hound me until I sit down and let them speak. I’m so grateful for Dick Schwartz and his discoveries. A good place to start is with his book, No Bad Parts. Wishing you all well…
My grief counselor is introducing me to some of IFS, and it's very helpful. I don't think I'll invite the mean fifth grade me to the table though :)
Thank you for that story, Sarah. Very nice descriptions how our thoughts could sapped us and how we could train them with self-talk. At the end you find out what you are really grateful for, and who matters to you.
Indeed. Well put.
The brain dump technique you described really resonates with me. Writing thoughts down and physicaly discarding them makes the process tangible in a way mindfulness alone doesn't. Your reframe of the inner critic as an overzealous survival mechanism rather than somthing malicious is a shift that could change everything.
Yes! That shift definitely changed everything for me.
Not a fan of CBT either! LOL. But the positive (in my opinion) from all the gazillion studies and meta-analyses of the ABC acronyms on some such psychotherapy method or another is ONE factor that bodes well for healing/recovery = the therapeutic relationship.
A therapist, a coach, maybe a cat or two. :)
Interesting.
https://quickshare.samsungcloud.com/kaEfBaGM41a5