How to Tame, Cage and Live with your Monkey Mind (Ep. 2.0)

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Hey folks, it's L J, your host for The Opine Motel podcast.

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Hope you're all doing well.

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Let's get into it.

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How to tame cage and live with your monkey mind, Episode 2.0 so welcome back, folks. Welcome back to the Corona-verse, Covid-land. This is Episode 2.02. Noting that follow up Opine pods on this

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episode

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will take the form of Episode 2.1, 2.2 which will help you source this back to this one on in your library. So the monkey, we will have one we will try to various degrees to manage a little monkey mind. Coming up I'm going to give you a brief outline on one why to care

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two what is it? Three,

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how it can affect your life four who can benefit and five tips and tricks to help you manage that cheeky and sometimes destructive monkey

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On a personal note, as someone who recently, like many of you has had to make radical changes to my living, working and familial environment due to the pandemic, and trying to navigate what next for each of these, you may imagine that I too have been coping with my own monkey mind, along with friends and family, and they've asked me for advice on how I cope and sort of tips and strategies to help them. So help them now who can help them over the next few months and also, how to kind of tame and cage that monkey over the long term. So given my background in psychology and helping some people with an overactive monkey mind in the past, I thought I'd share some ideas on how to tame and cage and live

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with your monkey mind.

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Number one, why care So consider that we have approximately 12,000 to 60,000 separate thoughts

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each day.

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That's right. You heard, right. We have a lot of stuff going through our head. And because it affects everyone, so whether you were Marcus Aurelius, a stoic Master, or an average general Joe just like me, the monkey is a known se in psychology. And dating back from the original term from Buddhism, put most poetically, this monkey is a monkey swinging through the trees grabbing one branch letting go early to seize another. , the one ports on this less poetic, we calling it the dmn default mode network, but more on that to be explained later. Therefore, I think we can all agree, we can all use a little help in dealing with this aspect of our thinking. What is it So it's the part of your mind that absolutely refuses to keep quiet,

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it just can't relax and let go.

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It's always foraging for problems, even when they're on them. It's the part of the brain most connected to the ego, which has the ability to create false thoughts. This being the chatter that we most often hear rattling around our minds, which sometimes turns the screeches during times of stress and crisis, and can affect you in a multitude of ways. So going through a few of them physically, we can have stress that can induce pains and aches. And then we've all seen it, the subsequent self soothing that we have, where we start rubbing on neck or clutching our forehead, trying to alleviate some of that in-built pressure that we felt feel within our body. We can have fatigue, and you know, it certainly can get wearing hearing that monkey constantly nattering about what we could have done better or right or what we did wrong.

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And then that can lead on to things like sleep. disturbances, so not being able to get to sleep, or even staying asleep once we've nodded off.

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And then the consequences of having not enough sleep, in which that can be a feedback loop back into a vicious cycle of fatigue and stress, and then the cycle continues.

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So, it can also affect us emotionally.

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So from mild feelings of unease through to anxiety, depression, self esteem issues, mood disorders, and then moving on to affecting us socially. So, that monkey mind can be very disruptive, in relationships between loved ones, family, friends and work colleagues in some of the actions and reactions that we have, because we constantly have a third voice in our head, telling us what we should or shouldn't say or putting a more negative spin on certain aspects of what's that colleague, friend or family member may Have Said, psychologists understand that there's a network in the brain known as the default mode network, the dmn.

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I sometimes like to know it as

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Damn, as in Damn, when you stop sometimes. This default mode network or just shortened to default mode operates when your brain is at wakeful rest, thinking about oneself, remembering the past, or future projections. It has recently been shown to also have activity when completing some active tasks to trying to exert control over that monkey mind usually emboldens it to run further awry. In fact, research on cognitive control finds that trying to suppress that monkey often triggers a rebound or ironic thought processes. As in when someone tells you not to think about something like a pink elephant.

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You may have heard of this phenomenon.

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It is where you find that you can't get the image of a pink elephant out of your mind once mentioned.

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Thinking about it now right?

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trying to suppress thoughts and images conjured up by the thought, emboldens the monkey mind and makes them pop back even stronger.

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How can it affect your life?

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So on the dark side, irrational fears, General fearfulness by their very nature, they are not vested with a lot of evidence on actual harm to oneself.

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However,

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they feel very real and your body reacts accordingly. So he lies the road to creating phobias and more generalised fears of starting something finishing something or even being frozen in place, immobilisation

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evidence free judgments are another one of oneself personally, of others of situations, events, moments and capsulated for the monkey mind to judge with unvarnished clarity. It's amazing how clearly he sees well in 2005, the National Science Foundation In the US published a paper showing negative thoughts can make up to 80% of our thinking. And 95 of those, percent of those, are exactly the same repetitive thoughts as the day before. Other studies have shown clearly that even when we think of the good ones, usually they're underrated, or easily forgotten, or brought to mind to counter the narrative. So here lies the road to negative changes in your self esteem. Another one is ruminating on past actions, thoughts and beliefs. We all know memory is fallible. Working memory only has a seven plus or minus two digit span, hence the length of most telephone numbers. And the complexity of laying down a memory is far more mysterious in its synesthetic recording using multiple senses, and the fallibility that comes with trying to recreate the rich tapestry of remembering. So why when the monkey mind is screeching away are we so certain that it is recorded the events with such true fidelity that we take it as read that it is correct and we should model future interactions on this true record. Here is the road to depression. The last one I want to talk about is this faux future forecasting.

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What I like to call mystic meg.

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So even when the monkey is wrong 99.9% of the time in how a situation is played out. Next time, it'll be right, right? The future is always uncertain, and none of us know really was actually coming tomorrow with such certainty. We all have plans, dreams and goals we're working towards. So ask yourself would you really take investment advice from someone that had such a negative probablistic ratio of success? Here lies the road to anxiety. All this has made real by constant attention. It can become exhausting,

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irritating all the way through to infuriating and all On the extreme end of the spectrum, when it becomes maladaptive, debilitating,So who can benefit? I think by now, you can see that essentially everyone can benefit from a little help. And what I'm going to do in the next section is essentially go through some tips and tricks on how we can start alleviating some of the worst excesses of the monkey mind. And yeah, let's tame it. Let's cages and let's learn to live with the little critter and maybe even learn to like a little

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five tips and tricks.

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So this is the time to arm ourselves with some tips, tricks and lifestyle choices that can help alleviate the excesses of that monkey mind

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and understand that it's a state of mind and the certainly one good thing about a mind it almost Certainly can be changed. So let's start off with some quick tricks. So the first one is called priming, or sometimes the literature focus attention. There are many, but each one has a key component in paying attention to a single entity. There are breathing exercises, this focuses on a single entity, which is your breath. And it's looks to manage to regulate your breathing. So what you can do is you can breathe in through your nose and out through your mouth. And you can use a simple sequence like breathing in for a beat of four holding it foreat of four, and then breathe out for a beat of four and then finally hold it for a beat of four and then repeat that same sequence. You can do it for a minute, or for as long as it takes to remove the attention from that overactive monkey and getting back to being presentin the present.

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So now you can start with two beats and work your way up to eight beats but kind of find what works for you You can also do the same focus attention on different objects and entities. So like a soft light, different objects around your house your reflection and you can quiet the mind by studying the details of this object and really looking at it through a granular lens. So, you can also combine this with the breathing technique above as you become more focused.

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selective attention in the mind can

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work to ensure your mind is focused on one task to the reduction or complete depletion of others. multitasking is a myth friends,

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so give this a try for short, sharp change of mind.

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mantra,

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okay, not Kali-ma, Kali-ma shankti de . An Indiana Jones reference from the temple doom or ohhms

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though Look,

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don't let anyone stop you if that's what you want to do.

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But you can just use a simple phrase like peace or I'm at peace. a superstar, or whatever flavour you like just repeated for a short span when you feel the screech overhead and want to quiet the monkey for a moment. Another technique is to engage your mind distraction. So look for an activity that engages you fully watching a good movie reading a good book, playing games, learning a new skill, musical instrument language, chatting with friends on on related topics to that push by the monkey mind. Though this can be also a double edged sword here, the monkey definitely likes to perform for an audience. The list is wide. Just have fun with it.

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A word of caution on this one.

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While during the active phase of engagement, you will be blissfully unaware of the monkey to a greater or lesser extent. However, in the act of rebounding revenge, it can cause your monkey to go from chattering to screeching once the activity is complete. All the while castigating shaming and judging you to a level of pays hell for having the temerity to silence exclude or put off whatever the monkey wants you to focus on. This technique is where the other techniques in conjunction with this one works better than just distraction alone.

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middling relief.

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So journaling is a good one. Write down your thoughts incorporate the corresponding emotions that you were feeling the questions and the thoughts that popped into your head. Now I know it's not always easy or even desirable to want to write everything down all the time or to

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keep a piece of paper with you. But look,

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once you get it down on paper, it tends to do several things rather than keeping it in your head. What it does, it helps relieve a little pressure from the mind. It allows you to visualise on the piece of paper or the device

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exactly what you're thinking.

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It allows it to be parked

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So once it's on the paper, or the device, you can look at at a later time. And thereby, this allows you to start making a plan. This technique gets you not only to see what's in your head, it allows your monkey to feel that they've been listened to, to giving your default mode network, time to cross it off its list for now, or will be satisfied that has been given some attention. And we've fed a little.

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This definitely helps to quiet the monkey mind.

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physical health, exercise,

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and its corresponding hormones. So that's endorphins adrenaline and cortisol. So by the way, have a brief background we have two major divisions in the peripheral nervous system the pain is the exact structure is not important for this session. And a little caveat here, that this is an extreme simplification. So we have the sympathetic nervous system, the fight or flight. We've all heard a little bit about this. This is very skittish, but very necessary. It certainly kept us alive through the ages. We're not having to think too hard about if there was a rustle in the grass. The body increases adrenaline to help you well to run.

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And those that thought too hard about what it was

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written by tigers, and removed from the gene pool.

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Afterwards, your body says thank you, to you, with endorphins to reward you for staying alive. Hence, you'll do it again. So you can imagine how this can be co opted by the monkey mind, a ripe playground for it to swing in. The parasympathetic system, otherwise known as the rest and digest system or the feed and breed system. This is a tree swinging paradise for a monkey think sleep disturbances and stress eating and how some of the worries of the day and the stress can trigger the body to be flooded

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with cortisol, the stress hormone

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And certainly when the monkey is constantly chattering and screeching at times, this can Co Op the system. And we know from many studies how physical exercise can reduce cortisol production and maintain these lower levels over a period of time. The default mode network mentioned previously, this is the automatic thinking group of brain structures, a base camp, if you will of the monkey, but this can be used against it, it may have some activity outside of the resting state.

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However,

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while performing physical activity, just the use and coordination required by the body to complete these tasks ensures that the monkey and its effect is vastly reducing its activity and effectiveness. You don't have much time sweating through a workout to waste breath on dealing with the monkeys needs.

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You need all the oxygen you can get.

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The thing about endorphins, adrenaline and cortisol, it's like all things in our body. It doesn't have a directional bias that to being good or bad, which is always wrongheaded, this black and white thinking

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the system is just the functional unit.

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And unless I'm monkey mind hijacks the system for its own fears, judgments and needs, don't let it and you can combat it, as you can see with some physical exercise.

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Therefore,

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arming yourself with this knowledge that if the monkey which is part of you can do it, then so can you. Therefore, the next time you go for a run, swim a lap walk a mile, know that this can quiet the monkey mind as your system is too busy running from a tiger to worry about or feed a cheeky monkey

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food.

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So we're talking about high sugar, empty calories and exercise.

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So our bodies need a plethora of good vitamins and minerals to keep it running at peak performance. Our cells are particularly susceptible to changes up and down due to the ion channels that are riddled throughout the cell membrane. And that goes to the mind as well. This is more of an ancillary bit of help and certainly not meant to tell you from any deliciousness. Just realise the next time that you reach for those goodies, you may be feeding an imbalance in your system, and then the monkey comes out to play.

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Sustained help.

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So the first technique is meditation,

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sometimes known as open monetary.

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So this is the single best way to come someone's mind. Pick your flavour and stick to it for at least 30 days around the time needed to form a new habit. So all have similar roots in Eastern philosophy. However, now we in the West have seen real changes to brain physiology via fMRI scans, where parts of the brains have been actually shown to increase in size. And there's real measurable and lasting cognitive changes in psychology. So it has now gone from Whoo, whoo, to the must do item for all of us

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and Bradley so.

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So in psychology, mindfulness based cognitive based therapy is used to help people with an overactive monkey mind, and has a vast amount of efficacy and body of work

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in peer reviewed journals, the scientific gold standard.

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The general mindfulness, which is the practice in which most of us hear about is very effective. And it just takes a moment to learn, but like everything a lifetime to master, surprisingly, though, most will start to see some results in as little as a couple of weeks. So mindfulness teaches you to keep yourself in the present. Remember, the monkey likes to shift you to either to the past where it can miss remember, or catastrophize or to the future where it can just make stuff up. So it uses a combination of breath focus, and focusing your attention on what's happening to you now. It gets you to keep your mind open and what they call noting. Just look at each Thought that enters your head without judgement or exploration. Sort of like clouds in the sky as it drifts away across your mind. Without giving it any attention. You can focus on your breath, body or visualisation that you can create. So it also teaches you about kindness to yourself. an underrated part of controlling the monkey mind,

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your own worst critic.

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So when your attention or focus drifts, just note it and return to focus the attention of the breath or whatever object you're looking at, without judgement or rebuke. This, as you can imagine, is training the mind to allow for mistakes, missteps, and human frailties without a catastrophic or toxic mindset that you did something wrong. You will be astounded and how much more focus and less distracted in most situations you become, the monkey is losing your attention. So whether it work with family or enjoying a favourite pastime, there is a reason that high level athletes, business leaders and health services are using this technique. So an elite tip, get your pens and papers out, folks. So as you gain more mastery in this practice, you will find the amount of distractions or thoughts flooding into your mind may not lessen substantially at first, just have a wonderfully active mind. However, you will realise you are beginning to take your first steps to better mastery in how quickly you can bring your mind back to that

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with which you are focusing on.

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So the point is to keep your attention focused in spite of distraction, and allows you to take it from your peaceful Zen Garden into your real world settings. So this advice I usually find is often missed and is the true hack to better mindfulness and acquired a monkey who cannot scream for attention anytime it wants. So a note of caution now, mindfulness practice is very useful. It's a very effective tool. in your arsenal to combat the monkey mind, however, the amount of nonsense about it being the panacea like cure or remedy for all the ages, reminds me of the claims that a number of those wonderful curing properties of filling your flavour of the month wonder drug thing to do now tonic, it is a powerful tool. Yes. Is it effective? Absolutely. It takes some work, but the monkey will not only be tamed, it can be useful in reminding you of legitimate concerns and actions that you need to take and act on them in a calm and peaceful way. It can be helpful as a best friend, or even an evolutionary guide not to get eaten, just with less screaming and mind shaming. So here's a little task. So after practising in quiet environments, honing your mindful technique. Let's take it into the real world. So try this when you're having your next couple. Pay attention to the feel of the cup. Its warmth next to your hand. It's texture, described these in your mind, the smell, identify the notes and the smell the taste the liquid, its consistency. The visual delight of the steam curling outwards the way the light glints off its surface. Mindfulness Meditation ensures that the mind is in the present, and with focus attention and kindness, which like the zoom function on a camera can pull back from bird's eye view, or focus down to a more granular level. All this leaving little room for the monkey. So another great tool is the ABC D model of CBT. It's a therapist tool known as Cognitive Behavioural Therapy. CBT is a very effective tool and can now sometimes be combined with mindfulness to create m CBT. That is an evidence rich methodology to cope with those automatic thoughts that monkey mind While most of you may not need formal therapy, we can all learn a little on how to help ourselves. When that cheeky monkey swings for the trees, it sets out a framework, which includes journaling, to catalogue your thinking and the corresponding emotions, thoughts on different subjects, along with some of these mind exercises I'm about to describe, like the ABC slash D technique.

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So imagine a piece of paper for columns

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with the headings and topping ABCD with a being on the far left,

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so a would equal the activating event.

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Next to that would be belief in thought on that event, and C would be the emotional and behavioural consequence that would come from that event and these thoughts. So I'll give you a real life example. I'll give you a few. So you can get a flavour of how it might relate to your life. So the activating event could be I have an important exam approaching. So you believe strongly That might go through your head on this would be, oh, I'm going to fail. I can't stand this. It's unbearable. I'm never going to be able to prepare for this not with my life in the way that it is. Now I'm useless. Why am I bothering? There is no point. So let's move over. What are the emotional behavioural consequences? Well, you can see, you're going to be very anxious, you won't be able to sleep, you can't focus, which means you may not prepare properly, which can then lead to a result of failing the exam, or not doing as well as you thought. So another example is my partner has ended the relationship that could be the activating event. The belief and thought

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that the monkey mind can come up with is

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I can't live without a

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undefined anybody like her again. Everybody always breaks up with me. I've never been a proper relationship. No one will ever love me. I can't cope with being alone. It's awful. So we move over we can see the emotional and behavioural consequences of these kind of thoughts with that. event is we become depress, may avoid people and events we shouldn't neglect our personal hygiene, which again exacerbates the fact that we may not meet anyone else. And then we exacerbate the loneliness. Another example that I'll give is work related one, which is my friend got a job we went for not me. So that's the activating event. So the belief and thought is well, that's unbelievable. He's thick.

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He's not even that good

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or funny or anything on our must be even worse than him then all the interviews a total idiots. Yes, they are. I hate him. It's not fair. So as you can see the emotional behavioural consequences that could come from that is being angry, aggressive, irritable, and flying off the handle. Can't these are things that your future employers would not be looking for, and can then stunt you getting a new job.

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So as you can see,

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it's a simple text But it gets you to really, if you write it down, see exactly what your thoughts processes on each of these different areas are like, and what certain consequences can come from such beliefs after an activating event. Now what we want to add is column D. So this is the Empire fighting back. This is what's known as the dispute. This is where you create a different framework. Let me give you one last example. One of the one of the things that most people hate is his public speaking, if I could have an activating event in which that I have to give a presentation. So what are your beliefs and thoughts? I'm gonna make sure myself It's gonna be so awful. I'll be shaking, my mouth will be dry. I can't do it. People will laugh at me it's going to be crap. If we move on to the consequences of those feelings and behaviours, what will happen?

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What are they going to be? What we're going to be anxious and afraid we

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can't concentrate on putting together the content, we're gonna start to feel ill and can't stop thinking about it. So we're losing sleep.

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And ultimately, that may lead to

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us actually not doing so well on the presentation. Not because we weren't prepared to do a good presentation, but because we took those beliefs and thoughts at face value. Let's dispute them.

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That's that fortune telling part

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of monkey mind

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that future. That Mystic Meg,

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telling us that it's an absolute fact that I am

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going to make sure of myself.

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And that's not rational.

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That's guessing at a future that you have no clue about.

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It'll be more correct to say, Well, look, I'm afraid I may make a show of myself but I don't know how will pan out. And that same thing would go for things like I will be shaking. I can't do it. People will laugh at me. All of it. fortune teller. I simply feel these imaginings, I have no actual evidence of these things. And these thoughts are going to be rational, correct. So what I want to do is I want to do what's known as a thought stop. I want to disagree with these things. I want to derail these thoughts as soon as they occur. We're all over the running them over and over and over in our head and feeding that little monkey.

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So CBT and this ABCD technique,

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which everyone can use, just get out a piece of paper and

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try for yourself

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can get the monkey mind to question

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its thoughts and judgments and reframe and ultimately not allowing unknown unknowns to become self limiting beliefs. That's the the rational thoughts to become a reality.

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So change your mind.

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Change your reality.

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Finally, the takeaway

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As tempting as it is to rely on changing circumstances to find fulfilment in your life, the truth is your outlook determines your happiness, not your circumstances. And it's never more so true during Corona-verse. So learning how to control your mind is crucial for building a sense of serenity within yourself, your life and helping you to achieve greater

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heights in whatever motivates you.

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Learn to love the journey that you are undertaking to achieve that which you want. Rather than having the monkey mind co OPT and inhibit the enjoyment we might take away from each and every moment. We know that not every path life is always positive in the moment, and happy happy Joy Joy. However, the negative moments which we will all experience work as

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a good contrast to that of the positive ones.

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We will appreciate them more, though certainly it won't feel like it at the time. However, it also gives us a chance to grow, to learn to change anything we don't much like about our story. Let's learn to be the creator of our journey, not just the passenger. Thanks for listening to me opine on taming caging and living with your monkey mind and giving my thoughts on helping you achieve your best life and dealing with that furry lovable and sometimes infuriating little critter. Give me your feedback on Twitter and find the email links in the show notes below. I'm L J, your host. This has been my opinion. So here's mine. What's yours?

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Coming up on the next episode, a loveable look at activities to make you smile, games, movies, and all manner of eclectic activities to get us through the Corona-verse. So after a heavy and densely packed show today, I wanted to reach out to you for your opinions, suggestions and activities. Ping my twitter @OpineMotelPod or an email to opinemotel@gmail.com with your name, a brief account on the activity, and why should we all be doing it

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right now?

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I will also follow up soon with Episode 2.1 in response to any questions, thoughts, corrections, and anything you'd like to opine on, concerning this episode. If anything is affected you more serious way I highly recommend my psychological professionals in your area to explore and delve into making you live your best life be well see you next time. I look forward to your company then. Thank you very much for listening. I'm L J. Your host this has been the Opine motel podcast, music credits. Go out to the intro Fluffy by Smith the Mr. interlude sounds by Sappheiros and to see out out Happy Life by Fredji. Be well everyone. See you soon.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai