Boggarts, 100 days of meditation and 5 minutes of gratuity a day— How I changed my pattern of negative thinking

“Oh, I see. Like Boggarts!”

“Like what, sorry?”

“Boggarts. You know, shapeshifters… From Harry Potter.”

And just like, once I’d got over the idea that someone could be living amongst us without a full and comprehensive knowledge of Harry Potter (riddikulus!), I conducted my first ever Defence Against the Dark Arts lesson. Teaching my counsellor all about what a Boggart is, how to defeat one and the spell required to do so.

But how did we get here?

Admittedly it doesn’t take much to entice me onto the topic of Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, but this time it was actually fairly poignant.

The conversation centred around negative thinking and in particular how we pick up mental scars through life that shape our beliefs, our thoughts, our actions and, possibly most importantly, how we view ourselves.

My counsellor was explaining how the experiences we go through in life create “tags” in our minds that influence how we feel and react to experiences and emotions both at the time and in future circumstances that are similar. These tags will then continue to guide our thoughts, feelings and emotions in the same way until they are challenged and we shine a light on them to reduce the power they exert over us.

Much like a Boggart, these tags like to dwell in dark places of the mind, waiting to spring into action whenever called upon. When activated they take the form of our insecurities, worries and fears and it’s not until we combat them with humour, light, compassion and love can we change their appearance and reduce the impact they hold over us, or even better, vanquish them for good. These tags are often developed in our young and formative days and they hang around, convincing us they form part of the structural integrity of our minds, when actually they are more like a worn out quilt that we are holding on to for sentimentality’s sake.

Using the Boggart analogy helped me better understand this process. And understanding a problem is the first step to knowing how to overcome it.

Humans are creatures of habit. We like routine and we like story telling. For whatever reason, we are also wired to seek negative story telling over positive story telling. Its much easier to think how much better we could have done something than it is to tell ourselves the story of a triumph.

As a physiotherapist I often need to remind people that to get stronger you need to commit to an exercise programme for 6 to 12 weeks. Just knowing what you should do or doing it a few times is likely to be fruitless in its efforts. This was my own experience and reminder that the same applies to changing the mind.

100 days of meditation

I have advocated meditation for some time now, but even so, I have been less consistent than I should be. Until this year. So far. I have meditated for between 3 and 15 minutes every day of 2021, and it really wasn’t until I got past the 100 day mark that I realised how it had steadily changed my mindset. Just a little.

Anyone who has experienced depression and anxiety will know the feeling of drowning in your own head. Barely staying afloat and treading water on a good day and being completely submerged on a bad day. Being completely suffocated by fear and worry about what might be; uncertainty over what was.

But here’s where getting to 100 days of meditation started to help. Whether its because my meditation “technique” improved, or whether it was frequency of which I had heard the repeated message about feelings and thoughts being separate from reality, I began to be able to distance myself from anxiety. Just a little bit, but it was significant.

I was more comfortable sitting and being with the stormy emotions and thoughts swirling around my head. It was as if I was watching them rather than being them. I was in the house looking out at the storm overhead rather than being out in it being battered from pillar to post, falling into the trap that anxiety and depression lays for you; that thoughts and feelings are reality. They are not. They are thoughts and they are feelings. They are real in the sense that they are happening, you are thinking them and you are feeling them, but they are not more than that. And these storms will end. They will pass. Sometimes they may change and come back, and that’s when the distance is important. After a gradual and then rapid decline down the mountain, I landed on a ledge, rested and started to climb back up again. I have subsequently had to shelter on ledges until a new storm has passed and sometimes I’ve tumbled back down the mountain again. But with new tools, the injuries aren’t as bad and the ascent is a little easier to begin again when I’m rested.

Today I am grateful for:

Along with meditating daily I have also been taking 5 minutes before bed to write down three things for which I am grateful that day.

Don’t get me wrong, there have been some days where I have very much felt as if there is nothing to be grateful for. But despite pain, suffering, sadness, worry and whatever else has plagued my mind that day I have found three things everyday to write down and reflect on.

In fact on the really bad days I force myself to find a fourth too. Over time I also noticed that this was having a profound effect. It forced me to notice the good in amongst bad. The specs of light in the blanket of darkness. It brought perspective to the day. And, ultimately, its another tool that helped put distance between myself and my thoughts and feelings.

Here are some things I have been grateful for this year:

• 2020 finishing and still being here
• A warm comfortable bed to sleep in
• A phone call with my parents
• A feeling of hope
• A new opportunity
• A pleasant conversation with a patient
• Having enough space to create a home office
• The health of my family
• A hot shower
• A lie in
• To have received three meals today
• Clean water
• To have been able to help someone
• My family
• My new umbrella
• Another week’s worth of food in the cupboard
• The sound of Woodwick candles
• Laughing
• Kindness of my friends
• YouTube tutorials
• Spending the day with my partner (Sheredan)

I also ventured a step further, beyond gratuity, in my attempt to start acknowledging my own positive attributes. After the gratuity list I write down one thing I like about myself. I find this exceptionally challenging, even perhaps, awkward. In fact just writing this here brings on a sense of queasiness.

Depression and anxiety are deeply entrenched in things such as low confidence, low self-esteem and a feeling of unworthiness. So to acknowledge the good bits about yourself challenges these beliefs. It hasn’t magically eradicated them for me, but I can see how it’s changing the internal monologue. It affects the flow of negative thinking. Or, at least, the flow of cold negative thinking now contains some warmth to it. So even if the direction of flow hasn’t changed yet, the temperature is beginning to change and the speed of the flow is, perhaps, slowing.

Negative thinking is natural. For most of us it is probably a daily record going on the background. It often convinces us that the lyrics of this record are the truth, but the real truth is that we can change the record, turn the volume down or even turn the bloody stereo off completely. But it takes time and it takes consistency.