Mental Workouts

Learned something useful yesterday. As I left work, I was feeling more than a little depressed. No, depressed is not the best word. More like, despairing. Bleak despair. Negative. Pure negativity. Wanting to escape, to do something, anything, to ease the pain. What pain, you ask? Well, how about a life regulated by a biometric hand clock (punch in, punch out), pointless work, constant distractions and interruptions, babysitters that chew my ear off with gab, financial difficulties that seem to always get worse before getting better, day after day after week after month after year of not being able to get paid for doing anything that I love to do.

I’m quite familiar with these feelings. My first instinct is to get a beer and chill out in the quiet, peaceful comfort of my writing office in my basement. However, in light of my recent heart surgeries, this may not be the healthiest response to a bad situation. Pros and cons played endlessly in my mind on the ride home. It was a toss-up, but it came down to the fact that I had $51.00 in my wallet – a one and a fifty. Not enough and too much to buy a Fosters oil can. So, some other option was called for.

Got home, and fortunately my wife had salmon and brown rice just about on the table for dinner. I ate, digested, then went to the basement – but this time, I lifted some weights. I did my workouts, but I turned up the intensity a bit – three sets of each exercise, instead of two, and the whole workout done in the same amount of time. I popped on Zappa's Shut Up and Play Yer Guitar, stripped down to shorts, and blasted through the workout. And, by the way, totally reinvigorated my mindset.

This got me thinking. The physical affects the mental, and vice versa. I think most of us recognize that. I had a crappy mental attitude, and I wanted to drink, or eat junk. Anything to change my mental state through these (poor) physical actions. Instead, I was forced to do something positive physically, and as a result my mental state improved exponentially. I now wonder – is there something one can do mentally, some sort of interior mental exercise, a mental workout if you will, that can instantly change one’s state of mind?

I’m not sure. I’ve never read anything convincing to this effect. And what few mental tricks I have learned and read about – affirmations, visualizations, mirror pep talks – don’t seem to work for me. I’ve spent quite a good deal of time meditating in the Eastern tradition; again, true to my m.o., never consistent enough to see any real benefits. But when I do practice it with some regularity, I notice some pluses. I’m slightly more relaxed, physically as well as mentally, more energetic, and more upbeat.

Yet I’m not ready to give up the idea of this mental workout. Let’s say you’re having the mother of all bad days. You’re pissed, upset, ready to rip someone’s heart out. You’re ready to fake your own death and disappear, to resurface a few years later as a poet-boat operator in Algiers. Whatever. You’d agree that this very moment you’re not in the most productive of states. You may even realize you need to change your attitude but feel powerless to do so. Here’s where the exercises would be perfect.

First, I think, you’d need to immediately interrupt your negative mindset. This would have to be something physical. Get up, walk out of the room, escape your environment. Perhaps a large glass of ice cold water would startle you out of your negativity. Stretch or do push-ups if you’re able to (if you have the privacy). That’s kind of what I did yesterday.

Second, how to change your mindset? You need to take charge of your thoughts, the sooner the better. Hmmm. Here’s where I’m kind of winging it. Affirmations, visualizations, mirror pep talks – none of that worked for me. But how about if you did all three, and kept it short, simple, and energetic? Get thee to a bathroom mirror, and affirm! Visualize! Talk pep! I have no idea whether this’ll work or not, whether it has promise or is just plain silly, but it can’t be as bad as my black dog episode yesterday.

Another bit of wisdom to keep in mind is to “kill the monster while it’s little.” I forget whether this was first stated by St. Augustine or St. Francis de Sales or St. Alphonse Ligouri, but something tells me it was by some Catholic saint who coined the phrase in reference to combating habitual sin. Simply, as soon as you notice those little tiny negative thoughts creeping into your thinking, most likely in the form of that little tiny negative interior voice that constantly runs through everyone’s head, do the pattern interrupt and start those mental exercises!

So, to summarize:

Step 1 – Interrupt those negative thoughts AS SOON AS YOU DETECT THEM! Leave! Stretch! Do push-ups! Chug ice water!

Step 2 – Get in front of a mirror, affirm how great you are and how great a time you’re having, visualize what you really want, what you really are like, and convince yourself you’ll get it and you are that awe-inspiring person, all in five minutes or less.

I had such a bad day yesterday that I would gladly pay someone, say a hypnotist, a thousand dollars to never experience that again. Well, in lieu of this hypnotic messiah, and because I don’t have one thousand discretionary dollars, I’ll put these exercises into effect the next time the storm of negativity erupts. Which will probably be sometime later today (wink-wink). Evaluation to follow in a later post.