What to do when your head gets noisy
Worldly Worriers! Graham here.
I’ve been a little bit in my own head the last week or so.
I mean, I could write that sentence any week and it would almost certainly be true. But this week has been one of those weeks.
You know, those weeks where you wake up each day thinking, Oh. This again.
Weeks where you feel you should get some kind of award for dealing with your own brain 24/7. (Oh this is so unexpected! I’d like to thank the Academy, and my unrelenting inner critic, for never giving up on giving up on me.)
Weeks where it seems acutely unfair that life is this hard, and yet somehow you also suspect it would all be fine if you could just get over yourself for once.
(Mmm, tasty combo.)
A few thoughts on what to do in a week like this.
A Noisy Week
First, a week like this needs a name.
I’m going to call it a Noisy Week. Because everything just seems to have a little more echo to it. The events of the day linger just a little longer in my mind. The lines of my inner monologue repeat and overlap in a crescendo of noise, making it hard to think straight.
I even missed two separate trams on Saturday night, because I couldn’t decide whether I was tramming or driving. This little dance went on for about twenty minutes as I walked back and forth up my street, twice reaching the tram stop just in time to see the latest one sail indifferently past.
It’s not that Melbourne’s impeccable public transport network suddenly got harder to navigate. It’s that I’m finding it harder to navigate my own brain with all this noise in here.
The return of the pickle jar
In this particular Noisy Week, I can trace much of the noise back to a single source. I've been worried about one thing in particular - something I've spent considerable amounts of time worrying about over a number of years, in fact.
In other words, the source of this Noisy Week is one of my most tried and tested pickle jars.
Long-time Big Feels readers will remember pickle jars.
Pickle Jar. n.
1. Anything you worry about more than you think you should.
2. Recurring intrusive thoughts that leave you feeling like you are relating to the world through a thick glass jar. As in, “Sorry I wasn’t paying attention. I'm really stuck in my pickle jar today.”
A pickle jar is usually something you’ve been worrying about for a long time, and that you don’t tell many other people about - not just because it’s kind of embarrassing, but because you genuinely can’t explain why you’re still so worried about this particular thing. (Not even to yourself, let alone other people.)
The pickle jar I’ve been wrestling with this week never really goes away for me, but I'd had a good run of being at least a little obsessed by it lately.
I think this last few months (spent pushing myself harder than I've ever worked on anything) has left me open to a bit of a vulnerability rebound. So I’m not all that surprised this pickle jar has made such a noisy comeback.
“Something is wrong”
The particulars don’t matter here, but the overarching theme of my current pickle jar may be familiar to you:
Something is very wrong. And there’s nothing you can do about it.
All that noise in my head this week has really just been variations on that theme. My little noisy brain is like a master composer teasing out all the possible ways to state and restate the “something is wrong” motif, in three and four part harmony.
And god dammit if it isn’t a catchy tune.
Two things I’ve found useful, amidst the noise
A few nights ago, the noise of this Noisy Week had reached full voice. The “something is very wrong” song was starting to sound more like the dread-inducing strains of a horror film (in which I wasn’t even the plucky protagonist, but some doomed early-scene extra just awaiting their fate).
Every Noisy Week has this crescendo point. The bit where you have to stop pretending it’s just the usual worry, and try something a little different in response.
There were two things I found helpful, in order of magnitude.
1. I told my girlfriend what was happening. In hushed, tentative tones.
This was useful in that roundabout way that talking about these things often is. Which is to say, she didn’t really entirely get it (that’s kind of the whole point of pickle jars, they don’t really make sense to anyone else). But she listened.
And it was not a long conversation. There was no satisfying conclusion or ‘now what’ moment. She needed to go to sleep, I needed to find something else to do with all the ongoing noise in my head at that particular juncture.
But it was a helpful reminder that talking about it is an option, even if it’s an imperfect one.
When the noise in your head gets to a certain point, ‘reaching out’ can feel pointless, or even counterproductive, because the gap between what’s happening inside and the outside world seems so extreme.
This short conversation was a timely reminder that this isn’t true. That even if one short conversation about it won’t suddenly bust me out of my pickle jar, I can at least give someone else enough information to knock gently on the glass and say, hey! hello! I see you in there!
It helps, not because it solves the problem, but because it reminds you there’s still room for you in this world even while the problem persists.
2. Tara Brach. The feelings guide I needed.
Sometimes you just need to find something that speaks so spookily to your particular situation, you can’t help but feel more connected to something, even in the midst of whatever’s doing your head in so severely.
After I had the brief conversation with my girlfriend that night, I turned to Tara Brach (a psychologist and meditation teacher whose tender, been-through-this-shit-herself approach I find truly life affirming).
I absently put on her podcast to fall asleep to, and ended up re-listening again twice over the next couple days. It’s all about how sometimes, when you feel particularly trapped, the only path forward is surrender.
Here was the big idea that particularly jumped out.
Stuck in the small self
When you’re convinced there is something wrong (with you, with life) it is so often followed by the thought, I can’t do this. The strong fear that it’s all too much, whatever it may be.
Tara says, in a strange way, when you’re convinced you can’t deal with the “something wrong” right now, you may in fact be right. But not in the way you think.
It’s not that you’re a hopeless screw-up with no way out. It’s simply that right now, in the midst of all this worry and noisy inner monologue, you are stuck in one particular part of your mind: the problem-solving part. The part of you that is utterly focused on whatever issue it is you’re feeling overwhelmed by, to the exclusion of everything else.
Perhaps that’s what a pickle jar is. It’s that small sense of self we all have, the one that sweats the small stuff, the one that worries about every little detail and fears imminent irrevocable ruin at every turn.
Now, we need this small self. We need to get the details of life right sometimes. It’s just that, when we’re convinced that small, problem-solving self is all we are, it’s very hard to handle it when things don’t go as planned. It feels like the world is ending, because for the small self with its laser-like focus, whatever problem you’re dealing with is the whole world right now.
So when things aren’t working out how you'd hoped, you can feel trapped. Alone and afraid, convinced there is no way forward.
Surrendering to not having a solution
So if the small self can’t solve the problem, where does that leave you?
The small self needs some help people! The small self needs to call on something larger, not for some kind of magic fix or solution to the “something wrong”, but instead, for a reminder that the world (and you yourself) are bigger than this one problem.
In her talk, Tara steps through a three-part process for doing this. She shares one particular method for surrendering, for tapping into that larger sense of self we sometimes have such a hard time finding.
To check it out, you can listen on Apple Podcasts here. Or on her website (links to other podcast players there too).
I’ll give you one bit to finish with.
When all else fails...
She says when you’re really stuck, when you can’t solve the “something wrong” that feels (and may even be) so important, you can end up really doubling down on the small self’s problem-solving approach.
You can start to think, Well if I can’t solve the “something wrong”, maybe I’ll just become totally zen and enlightened and solve it *that* way! Maybe *that* will fix everything!
In other words, the small self still feels like it’s all on them to make things okay. Which doesn't help, because as we've established, the small self is stumped right now.
Tara offers something much simpler than spontaneously achieving enlightenment in a day. She says, when all else fails, when she’s feeling completely stuck, she tries a simple prayer. To the universe. To the larger self. To whoever’s listening.
Just three words.
“Please love me.”
With all the sincerity you can muster.
“Please love me.”
Even as my life falls apart. Even as this pickle jar threatens to drive me completely insane (for the hundredth time). Please, world, love me anyway.
It’s no problem-solving fix. It’s not ‘the answer’, but that’s kind of the point. It’s a sincere expression of hope, nothing more, nothing less.
So as I sit here still mostly in my pickle jar, I’m giving that a go. It doesn’t stop the noise of a Noisy Week, but weirdly? It helps.
