At 3 AM, I was tossing and turning.
I tried to push A.’s hurtful message out of my mind, so I could fall asleep again.
But it wouldn’t work. My body tensed up, and I was getting fed up.
Why couldn’t I let go?
Stop thinking about this!
Why did the message hurt me so much?
This way I’ll never fall back asleep again!
As I felt the frustration racing through my veins, my mindfulness training kicked in. I realized that pushing my thoughts away only made the message bounce around more aggressively in my head.
Sound familiar?
A Quick Experiment
In his excellent book The Antidote: Happiness for People Who Can’t Stand Positive Thinking, Oliver Burkeman describes the White Bear Challenge. Are you up for it?
It’s simple: try not to think of a white bear for a whole minute. Go ahead, set a stopwatch and see how long you can go without thinking of a white bear. I’ll wait here for you.
And?
Don’t despair. No one can do this. As Burkeman suggests:
"The white bear challenge, after all, seems like a metaphor for much of what goes wrong in life: all too often, the outcome we’re seeking to avoid is exactly the one to which we seem magnetically lured." READ MORE
