50 Percent

As an estimate, I would say about 25% of my thoughts and emotions in a day are productive and useful. Another 25% are not useful but also not a hinderance to my well being. And 50% are positively unproductive and not useful. Most of these 50% are repetitive and obsessive – they are thoughts and emotions which I feel I can’t help but have and attend to, like baggage I have to carry around even though I don’t need them and no one is telling me to carry them.

That’s an amazing number: 50%. And I am being perhaps generous, or maybe making myself look better than is the case. Maybe the number of unhelpful thoughts and emotions is 60% or 70% or higher.

But even sticking with 50%, that is incredible. It means that I would have a better life just in virtue of turning my mind off for 50% of the day more than I do now.

I try to be cautious about not wasting resources. Turn off lights and water when not needed. But I am wasting 50% of the resources of my mind everyday without even caring about it. I try to turn off the lights when I don’t need them, but I leave my mind on even when I don’t need to.

An even clearer analogy might be with leaving the heat on. It’s like I leave the heat on 90 degrees even when I leave the house for most of the day. And when I come home and though it’s hot outside, I turn it up to 100 degrees inside the house, and then worry about why it’s so hot and when the weather will get cooler again.

It’s hard to accept that if my mind was blank for 50% of the day, that would be better than now. How can that be? Who would “drive” my life for that 50% of the time? Isn’t this like saying I would drive better if I took my hands off the wheel half the time?

That’s pretty much what living with anxiety is like: feeling as if one is driving all the time. That one has to be vigilant and not relax too much because without one’s continual attention, an accident might happen, hurting oneself and others.

The thought of quieting the mind feels like accepting being comatose. As if to not have something to think or worry about, or to analyze or to anticipate, or to remember or mull over, is to inflict harm on oneself, like severing a part of the brain. Surely it is mere self protection and a healthy attitude, even just due diligence and being responsible, to not hurt oneself. Thoughts and emotions are as much a part of us as hands and legs. Who would be better off giving those up? And besides, how can one “turn off” thoughts and emotions anyway, that too for 50% of the time? It can seem as impossible as it does irresponsible.

But the point isn’t to turn off thoughts and emotions. It is simply to recognize that 50% of the thoughts and emotions are repetitive and don’t come from a space of creativity or spontaneity. In anxiety the distinction between creative thoughts and worn out thoughts becomes hard to hold onto. Every thought and emotion feels new, as if it has to be responded to with the energy of a new idea – even as it is obvious that the thought is as familiar and as old as stale bread which is inedible.

Thoughts and emotions come unbidden, constantly. About 25% of the time when they come unbidden they are linked to the context in which they arise and where they offer new, fresh perspectives. But 50% of the time they come unbidden without being linked to a relevant context. They come purely out of habit, not because an interaction with the world requires it. In anxiety this distinction between habit and the world requiring it gets blurred, so that keeping up with habit itself comes to seem like what the world requires. So thoughts which come 50% of the time just from habit appear as if they are coming from the world, and so as requiring the due urgency that any first time, spur of the moment interaction might require.

What feels like hurting oneself by letting go of the identification with 50% of thoughts and emotions is actually relaxation. Real relaxation. Not the type of relaxation which the thoughts I can’t stop tell me I need – where I can relax because I have fully protected myself from all imaginable threats. But the type of relaxation which doesn’t buy into the call to “fully protect” myself. The type of relaxation in which one can open into how one might be if one doesn’t have to worry about protecting oneself.

Most of what is ordinarily called “personality” is the unique combination of 25% helpful thoughts, 25% neutral thoughts and 50% unhelpful thoughts which a person has. The compulsion to hold on to even the 50% unhelpful thoughts comes from identifying with one’s personality. To see how 50% of the thoughts are unhelpful is, by it’s very essence, to mark a shift in one’s personality.

It is to be open to new mental habits and patterns, new ways of focusing the mind and relaxing. It is to be open to changing, to growing, to challenging oneself and tapping into deeper recesses of one’s creativity and imagination. Against this, the 50% unhelpful thoughts call out for identifying with them so as to resist change and so that an imagined stability can be held to which seems preferable to the openness of growth.