Today my therapist told me that I should try doing absolutely nothing for a day. Nothing at all. No work, no play, no chores, no activity other than just being where I am. She said I might need to do this for more than one day even, maybe three or more. I know most of you are thinking that this sounds pretty sweet. Alice’s mom said that she wanted to start seeing my therapist too. But me… I don’t think I have the capability to do this.
It seems one of the major concepts in the vocabulary of Generalized Anxiety Disorder is that of the “inner critic”. The inner critic is the voice inside your head that is constantly telling you that what you’re thinking or doing is wrong. A lot of different things can fuel this voice: fear of failure, fear of rejection, fear of abandonment, etc. Notice a theme there? Those various fears can, in turn, come from a variety of sources: parents who were too strict (or too lax), relationship trauma, your own unsubstantiated suppositions….
Speaking of which, let’s clear up the most common and most damaging misconception about mental disorders like GAD or Major Depressive Disorder or ADHD. YES: everyone is anxious or depressed sometimes, and everyone has to deal with distractions. NO: this does not mean that these disorders are just made-up excuses to avoid dealing with feelings that “everybody has sometimes”.
GAD and MDD and ADHD are caused by imbalances in brain chemistry caused by physiological issues, the same way that diabetes is caused by an imbalance in blood sugar caused by physiological issues. Someone with GAD/MDD/ADHD can’t just get over it through willpower (“calm down”/”buck up”/”concentrate”), just as someone with diabetes can’t just get over it. A diabetic needs insulin to manage the disease, and someone with GAD/MDD/ADHD needs medication to manage those diseases as well.
The takeaway from this is two-fold. First, telling someone with GAD/MDD/ADHD that “Oh, I feel that way too sometimes, you just need to get over it” is supremely unhelpful and callous. The fact of the matter is that YOUR feelings of anxiety/depression/distraction may be normal—or they may even mean that you actually also have a disorder and are just better able to deal with it—but it has NOTHING to do with a person who has a disorder and cannot deal with it without help. It’s like having a headache; people have different levels of head pain and pain tolerance, so one person has no basis or right to judge another person’s headache intensity and tell them to just deal with it.
Second: In the above comparison between mental disorders and diabetes, it’s true that it isn’t an exact comparison. It’s true that brain chemistry and thoughts/mood affect each other in both directions. Just as brain chemistry imbalances affect a person’s thoughts and mood, the person’s thoughts and mood do alter both their momentary brain chemistry and the way their brain adapts on a long-term basis. However, this doesn’t mean that these diseases are any less serious, and that all a person needs to do is “have a positive attitude”. Rather, it means we’re fortunate that these diseases can sometimes be treated by Cognitive Behavioral Therapy IN ADDITION TO medication.
(While we’re clearing up damaging misconceptions, my having “depression” doesn’t mean that I’m “sad” and need to “cheer up”. It isn’t the same as watching a sad movie or dealing with a breakup. From a psychiatric standpoint depression has more to do with energy and acute motivation than with happiness or sadness. Sadness is an indirect effect of having depression, not a symptom of it. But that’s a discussion for another post, since this one is about anxiety and not depression.)
ANYWAY, now that I’ve digressed enough, let’s get back to the inner critic.
In my months of therapy thus far, I’ve been able to identify a lot of the reasoning behind my “thought distortions”—the CBT term for the crap that your inner critic spouts to make you feel like an idiot or a failure—and see that that reasoning is generally quite faulty. For instance: I should NOT procrastinate on things I need to do, because having to spend that time/effort later instead of right now is NOT a net gain. Or more specifically, and as a better example of how convoluted Mr. Critic can get: I should NOT avoid doing my writing, because my work will NOT always turn out to be terrible, and thus I will NOT fail utterly as a writer, and even if in the worst case I do it does NOT mean that I’m a failure at life, and my friends will NOT all abandon me, Alice will NOT leave me, and my parents will NOT stop loving me.
Identifying the thought distortions, however, isn’t enough. Being able to recognize them, I can now sometimes talk myself off the ledge with logic and reason, but that kind of success is infrequent and unreliable. For whatever reason(s), I’m holding on to my inner critic and telling myself that his advice is actually still valid and useful to me when it really isn’t: trying to improve my work or do work as well as I can will result in a finished product that may or may not be great, while thus far trying to make my work PERFECT has resulted in no finished product whatsoever.
So my therapist told me that I should stop thinking of my inner critic as a part of me that may or may not be right, but rather as an invader, someone who—right or wrong—is trying to interfere with my life and should be ignored. I should give him a name and a face, recognize him for the enemy he is, and tell him to SHUT UP.
How does this relate to doing nothing for a day? Alice (jokingly, I hope) asked me how this would be different from what I really do. The key here is that I’m not “doing nothing” for a day as much as I’m aggressively “not doing anything”. My inner critic is so pervasive, so entrenched in my thought patterns that he’s constantly whispering in my ear no matter what I’m doing or not doing, telling me that whatever I’m doing or not doing is WRONG. It doesn’t matter if it’s working at a regular job, working independently, doing chores or running errands, playing video games, reading, watching a movie, or any other form of leisure/hobby activity, hanging out with friends, or hanging out with Alice; my inner critic is always telling me that whichever thing I happen to be doing is the wrong thing. Often he even chimes in on a smaller scale: instead of reading THIS book, I should be reading THAT one. The final blow is that once my inner critic has paralyzed me into doing nothing out of fear that whatever I do will be the wrong choice, he then proceeds to yell at me ABOUT doing nothing.
My inner critic is an asshole who makes me miserable. He’s my brain’s evil roommate who sabotages everything my brain does and doesn’t even pay rent in exchange. I have to make him move out, but he won’t go willingly. So what my therapist suggested as a nuclear option is for me to spend an entire day staring him in the face and telling him to SHUT THE HELL UP.
I don’t know if I’m going to go through with it. Like I said, even when I’m not doing anything that damned inner critic is screaming at me louder than ever. I don’t know if I’d be ABLE to go through an entire day doing absolutely nothing; I’d be going crazy to do something productive or even just go play video games (which, as we covered, is still “something” in this context). But then I think about it and realize that that’s actually HIM talking, trying to sabotage me again.
I don’t know, man.
Hey Eugene, I’m with you on all of this. I’ve had a lot of these types of conversations with people about SAD (social anxiety disorder) and it kind of goes the same way. “I get shy or anxious too. Everybody does. That’s not a disorder”. It’s hard to explain to people what you are suffering from really isn’t just regular stuff everyone goes through. And after a life time of anxiety or depression or ADHD or whatever, self-confidence isn’t high. We are usually trying to hide these conditions and appear as normal as possible. It certainly doesn’t help that when you do overcome your natural instinct to hide the problem people react inappropriately – either suggesting you don’t really have a problem, or suggesting a simplistic solution (like telling an alcoholic all they have to do is top drinking.)