When we are young, we often think that we are our thoughts. It’s a simple assumption for our minds to make. For many of us, our thoughts run through our mind constantly, making it hard to separate our thoughts from ourselves.  It took me a long time to grasp this; what am I without the endless stream of thoughts that are running through my mind 24/7? When our thoughts are helpful and uplifting, this might not seem like such a problem. However, in the case of mental health, when thoughts can often be dark, insidious, scary, and disorienting, it’s extremely helpful to get some separation from thoughts to see the clear sky which is resting underneath.

In our beginner’s blog post and podcast, we discussed the roots of our mental illness beginning in high school. Andrew and I touched on a lot of the self destructive and self-hating thoughts that we had back then: feeling like there was something wrong with us, feeling like we were not good enough at anything, and self hatred for who we are. In the moment, we took all those thoughts as a fact. The most central tenant in treating depression and anxiety was for me, learning to create distance between these negative thoughts and who I was underneath.

It was not school, or college, or a relationship or a friendship which made me finally seek out distance between my thoughts and my sense of self. It was something more primal and basic than all of that: sleep. During my junior year of college, I experienced the worst insomnia of my life. Before this experience, I assumed that insomnia just meant a few sleepless nights. It can sound pretty trivial to struggle with sleeplessness, and even when I confided to my friends about it, they rarely understood the magnitude of grief and struggling that it caused me.

Sleep is central to being human, yet it can also be elusive. It’s another thing in life that we cannot control, despite the fact that we want to desperately. My struggles with sleep started early junior year. I remember clearly one day I was studying for an exam and I felt completely unproductive; I felt that I was unable to retain or to understand any of the material. I decided that I would aim to go to bed early that day. I tried to force myself to sleep at 9pm, but I was unable to fall asleep. I tossed and turned in bed for hours, feeling progressively more and more anxious as I was unable to fall asleep. I kept thinking about how tired I would be the next day due to my sleepless night and how I would fail my exam and be an even greater failure.

Well, as many sufferers of insomnia will know, the anxiety snowballed. The next day, when I went to bed, the anxiety returned. I would feel my heart pumping loudly and my hands shaking and feel completely riled up as I was about to go to bed, as if my body had entered into fight or flight mode. I would be unable to sleep, while getting progressively more anxious that I was unable to do so. After tossing and turning the entire night, I’d wake up utterly exhausted. This went on for over two full months: I’d get maybe three hours of sleep total each night.

It’s hard to underestimate the impact of chronic insomnia. Each day I felt as if I had a splitting headache, was unable to focus on basic tasks, and lived in a constant state of arousal. For someone who was already in the depths of depression, chronic insomnia and anxiety on top of it made the semester unbearable. When I went to the doctor in the hopes of treatment, they prescribed me a very strong tranquilizer often used on heart patients. I decided to not take the medicine. I tried everything else: benadryl, routines, melatonin, dim lighting, wind down rituals. Nothing was able to stem the constant flood of anxiety that I felt after sunset each day. It was as if when the sun goes down, my body felt as if it was about to be hunted by a tiger.  In retrospect, it’s no surprise that I felt unable to fall asleep given my level of anxiety.

It was then that I read about CBT: Cognitive Behavioral Therapy and ACT: Acceptance Commitment Therapy. Each warrants its own blog post, but the key takeaway was to be able to create separation between your mind and your automatic thoughts, to realize that you are not my thoughts. In the night, when my mind would go down an anxious spiral, instead of believing in my automatic thoughts (such as “I wouldn’t be able to function the next day,” “I need to get to sleep tomorrow,” “I’ll fail the test if I won’t be able to sleep”) I simply noticed the thoughts, letting them drift away like clouds in the sky. I realized that underneath the anxious thoughts, there was another mind present: a quiet, calm, and receptive mind free of anxiety. 

The idea that you are not your thoughts is at the core of treatment for mental illness, since mental illness usually does stem from cognitive distortions. (basically, bad thoughts). Gaining separation from your thoughts and realizing that your thoughts do not define you was a pivotal way of shifting my thinking and allowing myself to get better. So remember, thoughts are clouds: sometimes they are big and fluffy and beautiful and can make the sky a more interesting place. Other times, they can be large, dark, and disorienting. Either way, they aren’t you: you’re the clear sky underneath it all. Whenever the clouds get so much, just let them drift on away from you to enjoy the sky behind it.