Don’t Believe Everything You Think
Recently, a commenter was here and she was frustrated because her doctor told her to separate herself from her bipolar thoughts. And the commenter remarked,
How am I supposed to separate myself from my thoughts? I AM MY THOUGHTS. Everything I do, everything I say, everything I am, started with a thought.
This is true and it isn’t. I understand this commenter’s frustration and I understand how illogical it seems to suggest that you can separate yourself from your thoughts. After all, don’t you have to think about the separation? And how does that work, exactly?
What this commenter’s doctor failed to mention is probably the most confusing part of any mental illness. The mentally ill thoughts come from the brain while the ability to separate from those bipolar thoughts come from your mind. And your brain and your mind are not the same thing.
What is the Brain?
I’ve talked about this before in “The Mind-Brain Split and Enlightenment in Mental Illness.” But basically it comes down to this: your brain is an organ. It’s part of your body. It functions much like a pancreas or a heart. It does its job and its job is to think and make sense of the world. The brain is the most complex organ in the body and we clearly don’t understand it. The brain can be thought of as a black box – signals (the stimulus in the outside world) go into it and thoughts come out of it and it’s not at all clear what happens in between.
What is the Mind?
The mind is more of who you are and not what you are. It’s a concept and not a physical thing. It’s what makes sense of the thoughts that are trying to make sense of the world. If you didn’t have a mind you’d simply act on every thought you had. And remember when you wanted to kill your 11th-grade math teacher for giving you a C-? You didn’t do that, now did you?
How Does the Mind Work?
Let’s take an example.
Say you’re walking down the street and you see two people holding hands and smiling at each other. Your brain can take in that stimulus and draw the reasonable conclusion that those two people are in love. You may then find yourself thinking: “Why aren’t I in love? Everyone else is.” And then you’ll likely find yourself feeling bad about this.
You’ve jumped from what you’ve seen of the world (two people in love) to a logical fallacy that everyone is in love and that is making you feel bad.
Now, if you’re paying attention and you watch that thought cross your consciousness, you might use self-talk to battle it. You might say back to yourself: “That is silly. Not everyone is in love. I will find love in my own time.” This may cease the emotion that made you feel bad about yourself.
That was your mind talking back to your brain. Essentially your brain sent out a faulty, illogical signal that, if you let it, would make you feel bad about yourself. But you don’t have to let it. You can battle back with your mind.
The mind, when it’s trained, can watch the thoughts of the brain and make assessments about them. (Cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) teaches about this and if you haven’t had experience with this therapy I highly suggest you make it a priority.)
Because what it comes down to, especially for people with mental illnesses, is that you can’t believe everything you think. Sometimes, what you think is wrong. Sometimes, what you think is just the bipolar that’s overtaken your brain to the point where all sorts of faulty signals are coming out.
How Can My Brain Be Wrong?
I don’t know. It just can. In the example above it’s clearly wrong and in the example we can clearly correct it. Of course, things with bipolar disorder are rarely that simple. The problem with bipolar disorder is the sheer volume of illogical thoughts and the power that those thoughts have.
For example, for people who have bipolar depression, they are often suicidal and a fallacious thought I often hear is, “people would be better off without me.” This is universally untrue. No matter who you are, no matter what you do, no matter what you think, there are people who would be hurt by your death. You may not be consciously aware of this, but it’s true. Someone, somewhere, is positively affected by you. Your bipolar is just obscuring that fact and making everything seem hopeless. That’s a bad, untrue, messed up bipolar thought coming from your brain.
A Bipolar Brain Can Overwhelm the Mind
The trouble, of course, for people with bipolar disorder is that the mind is not always enough to battle the bipolar brain – if it were, we could think our way out of the illness and we clearly can’t. Unlike most people, who may have faulty thoughts sometimes, people with bipolar disorder tend to have faulty thoughts almost constantly when ill. And this is a physical problem with the organ called the brain and that’s why people with bipolar disorder need medication. They need to fix their brains to the point where their minds can handle it. Because we all have faulty thoughts sometimes, but there is a finite limit to what we can deal with.
You Are Not Your Bipolar Thoughts – You Are You
So, in short, those faulty bipolar thoughts are not you and you have to learn to separate yourself from them or they will eat you alive. All those bipolar thoughts that say, “You’re unlovable; kill yourself,” or, “It’s imperative to buy a $10,000 handbag,” or, “I want sex so I need to cheat on my partner,” can’t be believed. You can’t let them control you or your life will be destroyed. You simply cannot believe everything you think.
Okay, I’m not a bipolar. I could go a whole day without those thoughts, and then, by the end of a wonderful day ….bam! Intrusive illogical unemotional thought!It leaves you feeling negative after it happens though. Frustrated because you can’t control it and it feels bad, definitely unpleasant thoughts. While its happening I started reminding myself its , thank God, NOT REAL, an Illusion, thinking like that helped me a bit. For example if I have an involuntary violent thought about a person or myself I can always remember its an ILLUSION, the person is fine and healthy, pretty much alive.
I’m guessing there aren’t any Mahayana Buddhists in the house…
How about when you are in the deepest depression ever experienced and it goes on for months and months. WHat the?
This is so true! and so helpful. I’ve been battling BPD for so many years, it’s only in recent few months I could gain some control over how I feel about what I feel. It’s quite strange to disassociate your mind from brain, but then that’s the only thing that seems to make sense. I stopped my meds a year back, so not sure how long this “logical” explanation keeps me fine, but it has so far :)
This was a really good article that a find very true. Honestly if I listened to my bipolar thought I would be worthless, stupid, ugly anything mean really. My self estime isnt that bad I have good days where I think im great and can do great things but i guess its connected to my bipolar because on another hand i have those days where i think im worthless and so on. I still have times where i overreact to minor things to thoughts more then real event that happen and i beat myself up because i gave in to my bipolar again. I think its an everyday struggle I just never give up theres nothing that i found that works better…
“Mr. Jo Blo””: I like how you put it.
Your sentence:…I might have faith in a priest’s comforting words about God if I were a religious person. While faith is sometimes needed, knowledge is preferable where it is possible.”
I find that most people when speaking of religion usually mean Christianity. I never found this religion comforting because to me its entire premise was unjust: a sinless man crucified for the world. To me this does not teach humanity responsibility or being accountable; none of the things we are suppose to instill in our children. To my bipolar mind, this religion just would not do, inspite of my religious hallucinations as a child. As a Christian I was wild and reckless. I converted to a purely monotheistic religion (no three in one, no son of God, just God), with clearly defined rules: I was an orthodox, everything to the letter. I am no longer as strict, I converted when I was 26, I stopped drinking, my sexual escapes and all my irresponsible behavior. We lived frugally. I think it was my way of controlling my self by converting to a very structured religion. I wanted an answer to everything, I wanted knowledge. Today, I am no longer orthodox, but I am more in control of myself and I can see the purpose being orthodox had at that time in my life. I am still very religious, but it must be logical, because the Creator created everything and chemistry and the laws of physics are part if His creation. He doesn’t just carelessly through stuff together. To me religion must be logical if it comes from God. Now is that me or is that bi-polar?
zebraloo : I don’t consider myself religious. I’m a pantheist. I identify the concept of “God” with the connectedness perceivable in nature and with love. Pantheism is a way of perceiving all things as God.
I see in Jesus a pantheist misunderstood by those who created a religion around him. So I have a lot of time for the words which have been attributed to him, but, like yourself, have a problem with the concept that he was sent by a supernatural God as a sacrifice to buy forgiveness for others. My interpretation is that he was trying to tell the people of his time that God was not a judgemental supernatural being, but rather that God was nature and love, and that there was no need to fear judgement from God. In words that they might understand and accept : “God forgives your sins.” And he told them to “judge not that ye be not judged”, because judging others and judging oneself are intrinsically linked. If God is Love, then the thing is not to fear being judged by Love, but to NOT judge and thus BE love, i.e. BE God, just as Jesus experienced himself to be. He may have been killed because the world was not yet ready for his message, but his death was not the message, nor was belief in his sacrifice the path to deliverance from “sin”. The path was the message he spread while alive. His death was just what tends to happen to people who bring a message that conflicts with that of the powerful figures of their time.
But that is just my view of things. Religion is a very personal thing, and I can see that the faith it inspires and its social networks can be very helpful as steadying influences on believers dealing with bipolar disorder.
Always worth checking in for a read. You never disappoint.
This is sooo true and helpful. What Andrew said is true too, emotions sometimes come first, but than it is the old saying which came first the chicken or the egg, because ever emotion starts with a thought, but every thought causes an emotion so which came first?
That is why for me it is important as I read this, that this is a general post that it may not be the exact fix for me, but that I have to balance it with the way my thoughts/emotions work. This may not make alot of sense to you, because i’m not a doctor, but i guess what I’m saying is this is very informative, now the harder step is application of it.
Thanks again for this amazing post
An important discussion for me. Thanks.
Natasha, Its me again. I have been following this posting and the comments with interest. And my strong view is, based both from my training and from my extremely successful work with hundreds of clients over the last few years, is that the views expressed are diametrically wrong. That emotions drive thought and action (and not the other way round) and these emotions arise from metaphorical pattern matching in the REM state brain and it is when these fail to work properly, that exhausting over dreaming follows. And that this is the source of most depressions (I am excluding bipolar though) which then drives a life which which cannot work well.
I would be very happy to write a guest post for you which goes into more detail on all of this. I think that your readers would find it very interesting, albeit perhaps provocative and challenging. But that has to be a good thing surely
Very good article! Thank you very much.
I love this! Thank you!
The problem I feel, is that our minds can think very clearly sometimes -but our minds have messed up ‘messaging’ mixed with rational thought. I think the insane intrusive thoughts we weed out of our minds daily, keeps most of us from killing ourselves. We feel it, we think we want to, but in the end we talk ourselves out of it, b/c we can rationalize more than we give ourselves credit for.
Many of us can automatically tell one sick thought from a sane one. Trouble is, it’s tiring. It can make you even crazier b/c we fear it and can’t stop it. I’m afraid when I experience a violent, or twisted thought.
I rebuke it, but can’t deny it, b/c I’ve already thought it. Then I’m left thinking how or why I thought such a vile thought to begin with. It’s a job to eliminate a sick thought from a another, and this can go on a daily basis.
My psychiatrist told me that all people have crazy thoughts at one time or another. That’s reassuring.
But with bipolar people, it can go on all fkin day. That’s the part that really sucks. Many of us can’t shut our minds off to relax. There’s that little bastard in there repeating weird scenarios, and screwed up situations that don’t belong in a head. Anyones head. We get them carte blanche. I can be speaking to a person and at the same time thinking fk you, you stupid asshole. why? I bear no malice towards that person! It’s that little brain bastard messing in my thought room, torturing my limbic system with a hot poker. He’s that bipolar bastard, and he’s there to stay. btw, he says he enjoys the psyche drugs~ (there he goes again….)
It may not come easily, but for me the trick is to learn to accept thoughts as thoughts and not fight them. The problem with fighting against any negative tendency we may have is that it encourages that tendency. It is like picking at a pimple. It never has a chance to heal. Our thoughts are not a problem in themselves. What can be a problem is how we respond to those thoughts. If we fear them that gives them power. If we allow ourselves to become desensitised to them they lose that power.
I think it is probably true that everyone has “sick” ideas. And I think everyone puts on a false social front, something which takes energy. If what we are covering is chaotic and frightening that takes more energy, but our situation is not qualitatively different so much as quantitatively.
I don’t fear my “sick” ideas anymore. For me they are a source of entertainment. They have no power because I have become desensitised to them. Perhaps it helps that I’m a fan of “sick” entertainment. Take a guy like Tom Six, director of the “Human Centipede” movies. The ideas he puts in his movies are, I would bet, more bizarre and offensive than anything any of us has ever thought while suffering from bipolar disorder, but rather than be scared of thinking these things and end up in hospital he puts them into a movie and makes a career out of them.
Of course, fear of – and fighting against – “sick” thoughts may not be the only factor in the emotional destabilisation in bipolar disorder. But I still think that cultivating the tendency to sit with such thoughts and become desensitised to them is something which is helpful.
Well I think this is poignant. As a licensed therapist and participant in CBT (cognitive behavior therapy), as well as a practitioner of CBT with my own clients of CBT, Thoughts come BEFORE emotion. Behavior follows emotion (basically how you react or cope with the emotion is the behavior). Stopping or interrupting the faulty thought will create a feeling (usually more positive, calm – rational). Running with the faulty thought creates a different feeling (usually negative, sad, angry, hopeless – irrational). For example: everyone is in a relationship except me (faulty thought) which leads to: I’ll never find anyone, which leads to: I’m not good enough, which leads to: I will always be alone, which leads to: feelings of hopelessness, sadness, depression, fear, etc.
One may have been having a perfectly fine day, and then they see the couple mentioned above in the article or they catch up on the phone with friend who tells you she is dating the most amazing person in the world and they are soooo happy. And then the faulty thoughts come automatically out of nowhere: Why is she happy and I am not? Why cant I meet mr right? what’s wrong with me? Leading to: feelings of hopelessness, sadness, depression, fear, ect ect.
Sometimes, even when one is in a good mood, if the faulty thought comes and is not interrupted, the mood goes to hell. If you reinforce the thought enough (faulty or rational), you will believe it . That belief/thought directly impacts the mood — good or bad.
Thought interruption: (consider my example above about the faulty thoughts about the happy coupled friend) Well, does her happiness really mean that I wont find love someday? No. Does my single status mean something is wrong with me? No. Are there many other good people who are single? Yes. Is everyone in the world in a happy relationship? No. Am I really alone? No.
After the thought interruption: feelings of hope, comfort, relief, etc. You have challenged the rationality of the faulty thoughts and reframed them, thereby creating positive feelings..
Google CBT – Cognitive Behavioral Therapy. It’s all about thought interruption, and there is a diagram we show our clients to demonstrate that the thought comes first, and emotions are simply responding to that thought. The behaviors are how we cope (healthy or unhealthy) with the feelings
For me, I am having a particularly crappy day regarding my thoughts and sensitivity and irritability with every single person in my life. These thoughts are making me sad and anxious and frustrated. it all began with a faulty thought that has spiraled and my mind was unable to gain control and challenge it. And now I hate everyone and I am alone, and I can’t stand people, and my stupid ex is an idiot, etc, etc…. Is it true that everyone in my life sucks? No. Are they really doing anything hurtful to me right now? No. Am I just tired and having a stressful day? Yes. So, I am feeling some relief from the sadness, anxiety, ect.
I know enough about my own disorder now to know that my thoughts are not always true, and the feeling that follow the faulty thought will pass, and I need to wait until tomorrow to respond to anyone who is pissing me off right at this moment, when my mind is more clear and I am thinking more rationally.
This constant problem for me, since childhood, and I used to have very explosive reactions to very minor things. I was highly unpredictable and very volatile. My relationships were chaotic damaged and eventually dissolved. I was toxic for these people. Now I know better to wait before reacting to people and situations that create a faulty thought and to challenge the faulty thought before it creates a negative emotion – usually hopelessness, which is my default emotion.
This understanding is my CBT work and my own self awareness of my process. And tomorrow I may wake up extremely depressed, normal, irritable, angry or whacky energetic and jumpy, for no reason at all. Who the hell knows! I have more tools now to deal but my tools ALSO FAIL ME. they don’t always work. but thought interruption is what has saved all of my relationships and kept me from explosive outbursts. Thought work and my lamictal, wellbutrin, trazadone, klonopin combo…..meds that allow me to even have enough insight to stop the thought.
I am maybe 60% successful at this thought interruption. I fail all the time and sometimes my mind isn’t strong enough to counteract the faulty thought and change it. So I have to sit in hell with my feelings and use other ways to cope — sometimes the coping strategies fail me too and all I can do it wait it out. Medication saved me. Even with meds, education, using CBT in my therapy, and teaching clients about it, I struggle all the time and I am learning to accept that this will be a constant work in progress for me.
Great article!
Some “experts” claim that depression begins with chemical imbalances which create emotions which produce thoughts. Like you, I think they are wrong. Chemical changes are the medium for emotions to be expressed and thoughts, whether verbal or pre-verbal, come before emotions. The clearest example is with fear. If I’m afraid of spiders and I see a spider, I will think : “Oh, no! A spider!” This thought will cause my body to produce adrenaline and the adrenaline is the medium through which I feel the emotion of anxiety. I don’t know much about brain chemistry, but if the brain of a depressed person has less serotonin then it seems likely that a reduction in the production of serotonin is the medium through which a negative thought may produce a negative emotion. We can’t possibly feel any change of emotion without a change in the chemical balance of our body.
However, we have to also take into account that we have thoughts about our emotions, and this can lead to a negative feedback loop. Negative feedback loops are at the heart of most psychological problems. A classic example is the panic attack. I have a thought which generates the release of adrenaline and so I feel anxious. Then I think “Oh, my God! I feel anxious. Maybe I’m going to freakout and embarrass myself!” And this thought produces more adrenaline so I feel more anxious. Eventually, perhaps, I am thinking : “My heart is pounding so fast I might have a heart attack!” etc. What I need to do is to practice thought stopping. Perhaps tell myself that feeling anxious is unpleasant but that it has always passed in the past. It may also be helpful to address the problem on a physical level by practising deep breathing.
Depression also tends to be a negative feedback loop. A thought makes us feel depressed and then we think : “Oh, no! I’m depressed. How am I going to get through the day? What if this is the beginning of a slide into the depths of despair? What can I do to pull myself out?” If this encourages us to remember about the skill of thought stopping and do something practical then it is not so bad. But often our fear of our depression and our desperation to find a way out can be like a man rushing to get out of a burning building through a revolving door. He is so desperate to get out that he runs too quickly and the door propels him back into the burning building. Thought stopping is helpful, but so is learning to sit with our depression and desensitise ourselves to fear of it. We can learn to tell ourselves : “Don’t panic. You’ve been depressed before and it eventually passed.” Otherwise what tends to happen is that worry about being depressed becomes the very substance of the depression itself.
At the heart of mental health is unconditional self-acceptance. It is because we lose this ability in our childhood that we become prone to depression. It is also the source of most of the other problems of the world, individual or social, from materialism to poverty to war, etc. We “learn” that we are not good enough unless… Many things can fill that blank in the equation but none of them actually fill the emptiness it leaves us feeling. To use your example about a relationship with a member of the opposite sex – if we are miserable without such a relationship then our acceptance of ourselves is conditional on having such a relationship. If we cultivate the habit of accepting ourselves unconditionally, not only can we be happy without a relationship of this kind with a member of the opposite sex, but we are also more likely to form such a relationship – if this is what we want – and find it to be a longterm successful relationship. This is because such a relationship will not have to be burdened with the need to fill the black hole inside us. In the absence of such a black hole, the joy of companionship is not like a shot of heroin to feed a junkie but rather like the icing on the cake of an already joyful life.
Emotions come before thoughts but how you do you feel about those emotions or thoughts? Feelings judge emotions and thoughts… complicated… but I believe that how we feel about an emotion or thought determines it’s value and enables us to act or not act on the thought or emotion… But…
Lets not forget that Bipolar is an emotional disorder.
I’m not sure I would agree with your terminology. The brain is the physical organ, but I would consider that all aspects of consciousness are aspects of the mind. The brain is the television set, the mind is the program regardless of whether that program is coherent or is disturbed by static.
The way I would put it is that there are different parts of the mind which are often in conflict. What you call the mind is what I would refer to as the ego – that is the artificial conceptual structure we impose on our consciousness to give us the sense that we are a coherent individual. It is who we tell ourselves that we are.
But there is also the subconscious mind which provides the raw stuff of our imagination and which we are dumped into when we dream. That is also “us” in the broadest sense. It is an accumulation of information, sensations and ideas that originally arise in our experience of the world around us. We may dream of a dragon, but only because we have read about dragons or seen them in movies. To the degree that there is originality in the subconscious mind or in the imagination it comes from the way that absorbed ideas are combined in new ways. Where the boundary of the individual lies is a matter for conjecture. The material of our consciousness comes from outside us, but I would contend that it is all the material of who we are because we experience it with our physical body. We are the sum total of everything we have ever seen or heard or learned or experience in any way, and we are more than that as well.
At the base of our consciousness are our primary biological drives – the need for food, the imperative to survive and the tendency to seek pleasure and strive to avoid pain. In trying to negotiate our position in the world and satisfy these primary drives we are liable to experience frustration. From this frustration comes our reactive mind – our tendency to become angry if we don’t get what we want or need.
At some point we learn some system of morality and we internalise this into our ego in the form of a conscience, the guidance of which we may sometimes follow but, since it may tend to interfere with our satisfaction of our primary drives, it can also be a frustration, and because we are unlikely to be able to fully follow its dictates, it can become the source of negative feelings about our self.
The essence of mental health is unconditional self-acceptance. What causes chronic psychological distress – which may take the form of what we categorise as “mental illness” or which may just take the form of common or garden forms of selfishness – is a lack of acceptance of aspects of our self. If our acceptance of our self is unconditional then our acceptance of others will also be unconditional and our life will be characterised by love – i.e. a form of communication characterised by openness, honesty, spontaneity and generosity. It is the false belief that we need to prove our worth in some way – by “being a good person” or filling our life with material goods or winning in competition – that makes us self-centred rather than loving of others, and self-loafing instead of self-loving.
What has been important to me in my battles with endogenous depression and bipolar disorder has been to own my disturbed thoughts – to learn to accept them and understand their true meaning. If they were troubling me or leading me to behave in problematic ways, I could have simply listened to the kind of advice given by the doctor referred to here. It might have given me some superficial comfort perhaps, but I would have been perpetuating the divide which was at the heart of my condition and I would have been doing so on the basis of faith. To understand the meaning of one’s own thoughts is self-knowledge. To take the word of a doctor that they are not meaningful would be to have faith in the doctor the same way I might have faith in a priest’s comforting words about God if I were a religious person. While faith is sometimes needed, knowledge is preferable where it is possible.
I’ll give two examples of how I came to understand and accept disturbed thoughts.
When I was 17, I suffered a severe period of endogenous depression following a bout of the flu. My sister was visiting with her new baby. At a some point a thought popped into my head about picking up the baby and smashing her to death on the floor. I imagined all of the attention of my family centring on me and asking why I had done this thing. There wasn’t a strong emotional response to the thought at first. But later I started to feel horrified that I could think such a thing. And I began to fear that I might actually do it. I was tormented by anxiety as long as the baby was around, thus making this feel like a possibility. After they left, I continued to be tormented because I thought I must be an evil person to be able to think of such a thing.
Over the years I came to a deeper and deeper understand of what happened. Of course it probably seems obvious to others. I was depressed and had been through a sickness. Suffering causes us to direct our attention toward ourselves – it makes us very selfish. This is natural. In my selfish state I resented the fact that the baby was the centre of attention. For my imagination to bring forth an image of myself killing the baby and thus becoming the centre of attention was a natural response to the frustration of a psychological desire. But it was only a thought. It need harm nobody. As it is it harmed me only because I resisted accepting it as natural and healthy.
Many years later, while experiencing a bipolar high, I developed the delusion that if I took off a piece of my clothing then someone I was sitting next to – of course an attractive woman – would take off a piece of her clothing. Delusions of this kind led to me being hospitalised. Over the years I’ve learned to entertain magical thinking from time to time without acting on it. When in a severely troubled state that kind of distance is not possible. But was this delusion simply a product of my diseased brain best forgotten about? No. If we want to become less mad we need to see the method in our madness. As they say : “There is no rest for the messenger until the message is delivered.” The language of the subconscious mind is the language of symbols because we learn to recognise symbols before we learn to understand spoken language. It is the substrata on which our language-defined concepts of the world are built. One of the dangers of the psychotic state is that we have a tendency to take the symbolic ideas, which erupt into our conscious mind from the subconscious, literally. What my subconscious was telling me was not to do a striptease in public. It was telling me to pursue openness and honesty – psychological nakedness – and that I could help others to be more relaxed and open about who they are by exposing aspects of my own thinking or experience that we don’t normally talk about.
Nicely done, this was a great read and taught me some new stuff (after a day of learning stuff anyway—)
But I was never that bad at maths that I got such a thought :P
Surely feelings come before thoughts – which just tag along afterwards to make sense of what is actually much more important