How Noting Helped Me Overcome Distressing Thoughts
And How I Got Stuck
And How I Got Stuck
When I was in recovery from a mind-shattering bout of depression and OCD years ago, I stumbled upon mindfulness meditation via Headspace. At the time, my thoughts were my enemy. If not bed-bound, I couldn’t make it through the day without my anxiety crippling me. When I was up and moving I was rarely present. I’d drift off mid-conversation over dinner with friends, swept away into my head by whatever story my mind was trying to tell me.
It was bad, so when I started practicing mindfulness meditation I was relieved to find a practice that helped me.
I wanted to share this practice with you today, whilst also warning you about some of the hard lessons I learned when I took it too far (yes, you could say I “over-meditated”).
Noting: A Mindfulness Practice
Meditation can come in many forms, but the practice that was of most help to me was a practice called “Noting”.
When practicing, cross legged and eyes closed, I’d allow thoughts to come and go, directing my attention away from the thoughts each time I found myself caught in a mind-story.
Here, I’d mentally “note” that I’d been caught by a pesky story by simply saying, “thinking” before refocusing my attention on the present moment.
If I was feeling something, like anxiety, I’d note to myself, “feeling”, and again, refocus.
The aim here is to keep refocusing on the present moment each time you find yourself drifting away into thought (difficult, when you’re thoughts are attacking you, but you have to keep doing it.).
You want to avoid feeding into your thoughts with more thoughts. Simply saying, “thinking” or “feeling” to recognise you’re thinking about or feeling something is enough — you don’t need to expand further, otherwise you’ll start feeding into the thought and falling into a story.
Again, easier said than done but that’s the practice. Focus on the present, note any thought-based or feeling-based distractions, and refocus on the present.
The Benefits of Noting
Here are some of the benefits from practicing consistently:
We build an awareness over what thoughts we’re having.
We start noticing patterns like, for example, how often we’re worrying about ourselves or thinking we’re unworthy. This is good for understanding more about yourself and how your brain works.
We learn to disengage from our thoughts, meaning we are less likely to get caught up in distressing stories that risk effecting our mood and lead to unhealthy coping mechanisms/behaviours.
We learn to be more present, and more focused on the world outside our heads.
We recognise that our thoughts don’t always need attention. We can break away from them, when inconvenient, disruptive, or harmful. Just because you have a thought, this doesn’t mean you need to drop everything and go into a spiral.
We build a tolerance towards our uncomfortable thoughts.
We learn that our thoughts are uncontrollable, many are invasive and unpredictable in nature.
During my OCD/Anxiety recovery, I realised the more I fed into my thoughts the more of them I’d have and the more they’d bother me.
With mindfulness meditation and noting, I became less reactive to my thoughts and their presence/intensity decreased.
As a result, I could then step back and focus on other things, like how good it felt to be alive, and healing.
When you’re in a rut, you’re likely feeding a cycle. You’ll have negative thoughts that tell you stories about yourself and the world around you, you you’ll feed into those thoughts (by thinking more), which only reinforces your habit of overthinking and getting lose in your head.
Thinking can become a habit, and a bad one, too. Chew on a thought enough times and you’ll just chew automatically. Leave the thoughts alone, and they’ll disperse like waves on an ocean.
That being said, I do have some words of caution.
The Downside of Noting: Avoidance.
I found out the hard way that there is a fine line between distancing yourself from your thoughts and avoiding them completely. By practicing often — and not knowing better — I fell into the latter category. I became very good at avoiding my thoughts, to a point where I wasn’t actually addressing the problems beneath them.
Maybe it’s because the thoughts I had distressed me so much that when I found a way to not pay attention to them, I ran with it. Only suppressing thoughts doesn’t get rid of the reason they might be there in the first place.
I was holding trauma, and ignoring my thoughts entirely was me missing the big picture: That my distressing thoughts were the expression of the unconscious trauma I held.
To me, OCD and anxiety don’t just show up — they have a root, and their manifestation (feelings and thoughts) are the leaves on the tree. They’re the tip of the ice-burg.
Whilst distancing ourselves from our distressing thoughts is part of the healing journey (we can’t see clear if we’re knee-deep in distressing thoughts all the time), more is required.
Even if we cut the leaf and remove the thought, our actions can still be guided by our trauma, which is why I still found myself behaving in unhealthy ways and then wondering what was going on thinking I’d healed.
My thoughts didn’t bother me anymore.
Did that mean I was healed or just avoidant? I leaned more avoidanct.
Don’t get me wrong, I’d taken big steps, and one of those was beginning to learn what type of thoughts I was having and how they impacted me; how to distance myself from them and be more present.
From there, I had to dive in:
In to the trauma and to the root.