Brainy

I’ve spent the last month or so reading books that friends have recommended to me. They range from hardcore Buddhism to pop psychology to “a weird self-help thing my super hippie friend gave me – it’s actually pretty good.” I’ve been surprised by just how uniform the message is across the board: Happiness comes from accepting what is. Let go of what you can’t control. Be present and focus on the now.

 Seems simple enough.

 But there’s another thing I’ve been reading about that makes it a little easier for me to understand why the simple direction above – advice so basic it’s kind of embarrassing that I bought five books about it – feels so effing impossible sometimes.

 I’ve learned that we’ve got two brains: an Observing Brain and a Thinking Brain. Our Observing Brain is our play-by-play. It watches and senses and experiences each moment as it happens to us (I smell coffee brewing upstairs, I hear cars in the distance on the freeway, I see that the sun just slipped behind a cloud). It is wholly unimaginative. It sticks to the facts.

 Our Thinking Brain is trickier. It thinks facts are boring. So instead it tells us stories about the moment that we’re in (those cars in the distance kind of sound like the ocean…last time I heard that sound we were in the Bahamas, on the boat together, making coffee just after we’d woken up…I’ll never be back there with him again…). These stories tend to be way more compelling than our factual observations. They absorb us almost immediately. They feel far more real.

 Not surprisingly, our Thinking Brain’s stories are at the root of two major mental health struggles: Anxiety (when we tell ourselves stories about how the future will go down) and Depression (when we tell ourselves stories about the past).

 And that’s because our Thinking Brain is awesome at weaving a particular kind of story: a really negative one. We’ve got our ancestors to thank for that. It used to do us humans a lot of good to imagine a full-blown, worst-case scenario story when we heard a noise in the darkness or a rustle in the bushes behind us. And the story-induced, fight-or-flight reactions that jacked our blood pressure and tensed our muscles were super useful – because that noise was usually a wild animal poised to attack and rip us apart. The Debbie Downer stories that our ancestors’ Thinking Brains projected onto their reality are the reason we’re alive.

 Today the stories we tell ourselves are smaller: “I don’t want to stand up and give this presentation, my voice is gonna shake.” “I texted him four hours ago and I know he’s back from his trip, he’s gonna ghost me.” But the big, physical ways our bodies react to them are the same. The stories feel real. And they feel huge.

 Something about this seems so sad to me. So evolutionarily unfair. Because we’re born storytellers. We figure out how to tell stories long before we figure out how to read. Stories are the fundamental way we learn about the world around us. They’re how we pass that understanding on to the next generation.

 Turns out stories can also be a fundamental way we hurt ourselves.

 Learning all of this has made me think about myself and my friends – the now 37- and 38-year-olds who were some of the very first Millennials. Before Gen Z came along and stole our headlines, we Millennials were famous for being the most stressed out, most anxious, most depressed, most medicated generation in American history. And now I can totally understand why. Everything we did, from the time we were little kids, was wrapped in a story.

 We were the first generation that was part of little kid travel teams. U-10 soccer. AAU basketball. Club swim. If you made it, you got a uniform and a cool bag and a printed schedule. You also got a story: you had real talent, you had more natural skill, you were on track to make varsity, eventually scouts would be watching, a college scholarship could be on the horizon. Same thing with honors classes starting in middle school. Districts selection for instrumentalists in seventh grade. The writing was on the wall early: you’d better start building your well-rounded success story, because everybody else is. And remember, the whole point of the thing you’re doing right now is the thing it will enable you to do next.

 Our Observing Brains must have seen us at 15, sitting in windowless rooms for hours, filling in multiple choice bubbles, and wanted to take a big nap. But our Thinking Brains knew that the difference between 1200 and 1400 on the SAT was getting into the college we wanted or not, which meant a great job when we graduated or not, which meant our future happening or not. A nap?! This was multiple choice Thunderdome!!!

 I got a text from my college buddy about a month ago. I saved it and I read it often:

 “I’ve thought a lot about the stories we tell ourselves. That totally kept me in a relationship longer than I probably should have been. How do you know the difference between the tough times that are the flames that the metal of your relationship is forged in, and the flames that are a huge red flag? My grandparents had one of those stories. He came back from the war with awful PTSD. He told her to leave him because he was a mess. She stayed anyway. And he called her his angel for the 60 years of marriage that followed. I came back to that story soooo many times in my marriage. How do you know when it’s that? How do you know when it’s a shit storm just rolling through? How do you know you’re trapped in a shit rainforest and need an airlift out?”

 When is pain actually purposeful – and when is that just the story we’re telling ourselves?

 I spent most of last year with my Thinking Brain in overdrive. My mind was constantly filled with stories about the relationship I was in and all the patterns I’d fallen into because of it. The constant pit in my stomach was a sign of just how invested I was in making this thing work. The hurt I was feeling was like a head race, or a marathon – as long as I could figure out where the finish line was, I could pace myself to withstand it. If I carved out just a little more of my time, gave just a little more of my energy and focus, I could figure out a way to fix the things that were so broken inside this person I loved. If I could be patient just a little longer, his actions would start to match his words. My friends wouldn’t notice I wasn’t around as much. My family would forgive me for being out of touch. Scram, Observing Brain, I don’t want to hear it.

 In some ways, I think Seattle was my airlift out. I needed a place where the streets and the waterways and the bars and the coffee shops and the desk that I work at and the room that I sleep in don’t have stories of someone who’s not there anymore. It doesn’t work all the time – my Thinking Brain hopped a plane west, too – but there’s a whole lot to just observe here, because it’s all new. It’s made it easier to work, and enjoy it again. It’s made it easier to row, and love it again. It’s been a little easier to hear and smell and see things for what they are when I walk out the door each morning. And if my Observing Brain can remember how to fire in the Pacific Northwest, it can remember how to fire when I go home. And moments spent with my family and friends and teammates, in a city I love, can feel exactly as they’re supposed to feel again – like pure happiness. What a story that would be.