Seeing your mental patterns clearly is one of the biggest benefits of a mindfulness practice. I experienced this recently and the results of a few minutes of meditation were so pronounced that I had to write about it. I had a big attack of anxiety about a party with my law firm. Despite this beginning, the night was actually really fun. I had an amazing time and ended up singing “Pink Pony Club” in front of my colleagues without the slightest feeling of fear.
So what changed? How did I go from social anxiety to social butterfly in the course of a night? The long story is that I have practiced mindfulness for more than a decade. The short answer relevant to this particular situation is that I spotted my mental pattern.
This post will share some steps for recognizing and navigating challenging mental patterns with mindfulness and self-compassion.
What Are Mental Patterns?
People new to meditation are likely to notice that the mind generates a lot of thoughts. If you keep meditating long enough, you eventually will see that thoughts are often not original. Many of the same thoughts repeat themselves or fall into categories.
These can fall into a wide array of categories, but many people have a select few that dominate their minds. Some examples include obsession with planning, a recurrent theme of self-doubt, or even a preoccupation with past harms or slights.
One of my most obnoxious mental patterns is the anxiety that arises around social settings. No matter what I do, I can’t seem to shake the fear of being rejected in a social situations. This can make it hard to enjoy myself during the networking events and parties that lawyers often have to attend.
Clearly, taken to the extreme or left unchecked, patterns like this can cause us to feel shame, and miss out on connection, opportunities, and fun. This is why learning to recognize and navigate mental patterns is one of the most important power moves that mindfulness practice can offer.
The Problem: Mental Patterns Can Be Tricky
Here’s the problem with well-worn mental patterns: we often don’t recognize them for what they are. Many lawyers are too busy to pay close attention to our thoughts and feelings. We also are often intent on projecting an image of strong self-assuredness.
So, when nasty mental patterns arise, they can be hard to spot. These patterns don’t announce themselves. Instead, they slink in through the back door of your mind and whisper awful things about you and your life. They have the bleakest and most savage view of every situation.
In my case, the pattern revealed itself by creating little worries about nearly everything associated with the event. My mind criticized the outfit I had selected. It worried about whether my shoes would be too uncomfortable. It offered concerns about whether I would be too tired to have fun. It presented me with mental imagery of me standing alone in a crowded room with nobody to talk to.
Does any of this sound familiar?
Mindfulness Can Help You Recognize Mental Patterns
After a while of these nagging thoughts, I started to zoom out and get some perspective. Instead of seeing the thoughts as individual rational reflections, I saw them for what they were. These thoughts were the manifestation of my social anxiety.
This hardly sounds like good news, right? I know it is counterintuitive to feel relief that a litany of negative self-talk is *just* one’s anxiety. Even so, there is a very practical benefit to be had from recognizing that the worrisome thoughts are part of a pattern.
An implicit idea underlying all of my nasty thoughts was the idea that I was not good enough and would never be good enough. This is a constant lie that anxiety tells me. But when I saw the mental pattern as just my social anxiety talking, I realized that it was not the voice of reason. I stopped believing it for a moment and that gave me enough space to break free.
The Practice: Holding the Toxic Mental Pattern in Mindful Awareness
When I created enough space, I saw that I was struggling. So I did the thing that I have trained myself over years to do: I took a pause.
It is not a fun to sit and let nasty thoughts just bounce around in your mind. I am sure that this is why so many people say that they can’t meditate. Trust me, I get it. It truly sucks.
Over the years, however, I have learned something cool. If you can sit and let the thoughts bounce around in your mind, they don’t hurt so much. Sometimes the thoughts change. Sometimes other insights arise to counter them. Or sometimes the thoughts just bounce around until they lose energy and they just stop or disappear.
With this experience, I knew that I should just meditate for a few minutes and let the thoughts do whatever they wanted. I let them wash over me and thrash around. All the while I kept returning my focus to my breath or softening and relaxing my body.
Finally, the big insight came that I was nervous about the party. My thoughts weren’t truths. They were signs of my fear. They were signals that I wanted to connect with people, but was afraid I wouldn’t be able to do so.
The Red Flag: Don’t Judge Yourself
In years past, noticing a childlike vulnerability like this in myself might have made me feel worse. But in my case, this was actually the path forward. Years of mindfulness practice, has taught me a lot about self-compassion. That has helped me cultivate a healthy dose of caution when it comes to self-judgment.
Instead of feeling like a loser about my anxiety, I recognized that I just needed some self-assurances. I needed to take care of my fear. First, I offered myself some perspective by reminding myself that this was supposed to be fun instead of a test. Then I remembered that I did not have to stay at the party for any specific period and could leave if it wasn’t fun.
Finally, I drew on common humanity to remember that I was probably not the only person who had these fears. I recalled that social situations are hard for a lot of people and that we had several other new people in the firm. In reality, most of us were too busy, but we made the effort to attend the party because connection matters.
The Result: Being Brave Enough to Break the Pattern
The final step of the process is to break the pattern. Once you see the pattern, investigate it, and take care of yourself, the only way to get out of a pattern is to disobey it.
I won’t lie. This is really hard. If you are new to mindfulness practice, it may not always be possible to get out of mental patterns so easily or you may have to take baby steps. As someone who has practiced mindfulness for more than a decade, I have learned that part of changing my patterns is acceptance.
Life experience helps me run a quick cost benefit analysis whenever my anxiety flares up. I know that fear, worry, and nerves are often going to be part of many social activities I undertake. So I sit with them, take care of my fear, and then make the brave choice to proceed anyway.
Before the party, all my anxious thoughts were attempted roadblocks. They were concocted objections and warnings trying to convince me to skip the party. Life experience has taught me that the best way to silence those thoughts was to take their power. I did that by ignoring them. I just decided to go to the party and be afraid. A few minutes in at the party, I wasn’t afraid anymore.
Conclusion: Mindfulness Practice Is One Way to Check Mental Patterns
Don’t get me wrong here. There are a lot different types of mental patterns. All of us cannot necessarily expect to face those mental patterns on our own. We all deserve the support of trusted friends, medication, and other mental health treatment to face down our most challenging mental patterns, including those relating to anxiety. Even so, one of the great blessings of mindfulness practice is that it can help you support yourself and build the skills to check, disrupt, and break free from some of the mental patterns that hold you back.
This post is just one example of how this can be done, but once you learn a process that works for you it can help you many times over the course of your life. I hope that, like I was able to do in the example shared here, you can recognize difficult mental patterns before they keep you from doing the things you want to do in life.
Want to learn more about mindfulness and compassion? Check out my new book, How to Be a Badass Lawyer, for a simple guide to creating a meditation practice of your own in 30 days. And to share mindfulness with your little one, check out my new children’s book, Mommy Needs a Minute.
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