DTD 169
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This is the Drive Time Debrief, episode 169.
Hey guys, welcome back to the podcast. I'm Amanda. I'm Laura. And I'm Kendra. And today we are going to talk about the second principle from Byron Katie's book Loving What Is. The first principle that we discussed from her book was Minding Your Business, which is very important.
But [00:01:00] today we're gonna talk about meeting the mind with understanding. So imagine you're driving home from a long shift and the thought hits you like a punch. I didn't do enough for that patient. Your stomach drops, you start replaying everything, you're ruminating. Hopefully I'm not the only person on the planet out there that does this.
So today we're gonna talk about the mind's tendency to tell painful stories and what happens when we stop believing everything that it tells you. So, Byron Katie calls this meeting your thoughts with understanding and it's a game changer. And I'm just gonna read you a couple paragraphs because it's really kind of a big concept.
And it's gonna be hard to explain it better than she does, but here's what she says. A thought is harmless until we believe it. It's not our thoughts, but the attachment to our thoughts that causes suffering. Attaching to a thought means believing it's true without inquiring. A belief is a thought that we've been attaching to, often for years.
Most people think they are what their thoughts tell them they are. One day I [00:02:00] noticed that I wasn't breathing, I was being breathed. Then I also noticed to my amazement that I wasn't thinking that I was actually being thought, and that thinking isn't personal. Do you wake up in the morning and say to yourself, I think I won't think today?
It's too late. You're already thinking. Thoughts just appear. They come out of nothing and go back to nothing. Like clouds moving across an empty sky. They come to pass, not to stay. There's no harm in them until we attach to them as if they were true. No one has been able to control his or her thinking.
Although people may tell the story of how they have, I don't let go of my thoughts. I meet them with understanding. Then they let go of me. Thoughts are like the breeze or the leaves on the trees or the raindrops falling.
They appear like that. And through inquiry, we can make friends with them. Would you argue with a raindrop? Raindrops aren't personal and neither are thoughts. Once a painful concept is met with understanding, the next time it appears, you may find it interesting. What used to be a nightmare is now just interesting.
The next time it [00:03:00] appears, you may even find it funny. The time after that you may not notice it at all. This is the power of loving what is. Okay, what does that mean? Let's talk about it. I love that. You know, I'm not sure, have we talked about who Byron Katie is? I know we've referenced some of her ideas.
Maybe on minding my business one. I don't know, maybe. Okay. Well, I like to think of her as a modern philosopher and she went through some tough midlife stuff and had what she called an epiphany where she realized all these things about thoughts and about, you know, our lack of
actual control and what creates suffering for us. So she's a very cool person and we find her ideas super, super helpful. So one of the things that she says is, a thought is harmless unless we believe it. This is really interesting. Psychologists talk about boundaries in [00:04:00] terms of internal boundaries, containment boundaries and protective boundaries.
And the protective boundary is kind of outside of us and helps us filter information coming in and decide whether it's true or not true, and whether we want to believe it. When we have no boundaries, as many of us who come into medicine come in with zero boundaries. That's why we accept what we accept during our medical training and careers, because we don't know how to have boundaries.
And so what happens is, anything that someone says to us that is negative or may or may not be true, we allow it to affect us, and we don't have to do that. And same with our thoughts. Oh man. We beat ourselves up with our thoughts all the time. Worse than any patient, for sure. Worse, oh, so bad.
And that only hurts us if [00:05:00] we believe it. It's so interesting because our lower brain will always be offering up thoughts that may have been helpful to keep us alive, but are not helpful to us to be happy and healthy. Things like, oh, you know, you're just not good enough. You should not try to do that hard thing.
You should stay home and sit on the couch and eat some Cheetos. You definitely should not try to ask for a raise or try to get a new job or do anything that involves risk. And if we can recognize with our higher brain, with our prefrontal cortex that we could say, oh, that's just my limbic system trying to keep me safe,
and not believe it, it doesn't cause harm. But when we believe it and we're like, oh yeah, I shouldn't ask for that raise 'cause they might think that I'm greedy. Well, is that helping us? No, it's harming us. So when we believe thoughts that are not helpful and we think thoughts [00:06:00] are facts when they are not facts, that's gonna harm us.
So she's not telling us to stop thinking. She's saying you can question the thoughts that are harming you, and we would invite, that's a good thing to do. We'd say that's a good thing to do is to look at our thoughts and decide if we really want to believe them or not. We can notice thoughts and we can meet them with understanding.
It makes sense that my lower brain wants me to stay at home and not have any risk. It makes sense that part of my brain kept me alive, kept our species alive for millennia. That's what it does, and its job is to do that as the threat detection system. So I can understand why it's acting like that. I can understand why it wants to critique the things that I'm choosing to do, and I can have compassion for it, and I don't have to believe it.
She says, I don't let go of my thoughts. I meet them with [00:07:00] understanding and then they let go of me. So here's an example. Take the thought, I should have done more. That's not just a passing comment. It creates guilt, stress, and shame (reference back to our podcast on Should). But what if instead of believing it, you paused and got curious?
What if it's just a mental reflex, which it is, and it's not the truth? And we're good at it. We're so good at it that part of our brain is so good. It kept us so alive until now, and it can be so destructive if we believe everything it says. So here's some examples. So as doctors, as physicians, we're especially vulnerable.
We embrace perfectionism like it is the most virtuous characteristic we could have. Because of that perfectionism we all have imposter syndrome, chronic self-criticism. While [00:08:00] it has a role in motivating us, maybe not for the right reasons. We're like, well, I got to where I am because I'm so demanding of myself.
But really all of that being baked in our systems is a recipe for burnout and sadness and dissatisfaction with life. Those patterns start with unexamined thoughts, and it makes complete sense that we don't examine them. A lot of times it's what we grew up with. And this is the water that we swim in, especially during training.
Everyone talks like this out loud, not just in their brains. And so how could you even think any differently? And when we have an awareness that, yeah, in fact our thoughts are not facts, our thoughts are not 100% true. And also sometimes they're harming us. Then we get the opportunity to look at them and be like, Hmm, I'm not so sure about that brain.
So the next part about this is talking about [00:09:00] metacognition, and if this is a new concept to you, metacognition is really about noticing your own thoughts, and sometimes this has to happen with you getting a pen and paper and just starting to just write it all down. Everything that's coming up in that brain of yours, getting it down on paper.
Sometimes that's easier to just barf it up on the paper, then like, sit with your brain and be able to kind of compartmentalize and be an observer. Sometimes you have to get it down. Then when you practice for a little bit, then you can start basically observing what is going through that brain.
What are the thoughts that are coming in. Which are true, which are not true. Basically it's just observing each one or what's happening. Eckhart Tolle says it this way. You are not the voice in your head. You are the one who is aware of it, and that awareness is where your freedom lives. So [00:10:00] for example, the thought could come up once or twice, and maybe it has in my career.
I'm not a good enough doctor. That can actually appear like it's a flashing sign with bright lights and multiple arrows pointing to it with loud music, drawing all the attention. But if you step back and think about it, it's real easy to get curious. I'm wondering why I am questioning whether I'm a good enough doctor.
Once you do that, you actually take the power out of that thought. So I was talking about this last night actually to my husband. We were talking about the amazing amount of variability in practice. Like specialties, for example. I mean, there is a lot in EM, but depending on where you trained and what you saw and how much you got to do.
But we were talking about that and like, one of the things he mentioned was sometimes in training, especially [00:11:00] (he's a surgical specialist) the thought is like I'm so academically smart, but I don't have the hands, or I can't tell my hands what to do. I can't guide them in the surgery, so the thought might be like, I'm terrible at surgery, but I'm super book smart.
Or I read all the literature, or I'll be good for academia, or I can just teach. I can't do, I don't know, like, and just finding all of the evidence to support these like random thoughts that clearly aren't true. If you got to med school, made it through med school or in a residency, you have all the potential in the world.
But anyways, it's just a thought, like why is that, that you're even questioning if you have what it takes or if you're good enough. Just interesting to think, hmm, what's going on right now? So really making that transition to a more empowered thought. So the shift is from identification with the thought
to observation of the thought, and [00:12:00] that's where real change can happen because like we talk about, we really challenge those thoughts. You start to ask, is that really true? Is it really true that I'm not a good enough doctor? Or could I find evidence in my life or facts? Like certificates, like if you have to stare at the certificates on your wall that are hanging framed all nice that says, you know, you have earned the degree Doctor (for me, Doctor of Osteopathy), and you graduated and I have my EM board certified certificate.
I could stare at that. So if you just need something in your face, it's giving you evidence, I don't know, I would invite you to remind yourself, but that's one of the parts about being an observer. You know, most of the time you can find what you're looking for if you truly wanna prove to yourself that you're not a good enough doctor.
Trust me, there's plenty of evidence and I would challenge that and I would say there's probably some facts of your life that actually point to the other. Yeah, so kind of the motivation behind this episode. Well, one is just because Byron Katie's [00:13:00] principles are fascinating to at least discuss, and consider.
But the other one is we had a client who's having a really hard time separating from her inner critic and not believing everything that her inner critic says. And she's kind of like, I know. I know objectively that it's not true, but I can't, I can't distance myself from it, and that really is a practice to start.
Most people have never even gotten this far where they've realized where they've observed their thoughts. So please don't judge yourself negatively if this is a new practice for you. It is a practice though. Probably at one time was right brained. I've had that beat out. I mean, mostly left brain now, but I like to think of it like with metaphors or like an image.
And one client said it beautifully, like it's as if you stop, pause the movie and then you are the narrator of like, what's going on. That helps me visualize what we're trying to explain. That's metacognition, observing what's happening [00:14:00] to all the characters. Your body happens to be one of the characters.
Another way I like to imagine it is (I mean, we'll find out in the afterlife if this is true or not, but I like to think) your soul, your soul enters a body. Well, the body comes with a brain also, and so it's gonna offer up all kinds of crazy stuff because you have a human brain, but you are the driver of that.
Once you realize that you're in an avatar almost, then you can start using what's serving you in a much better way than attaching to every single crazy thing that your brain offers up. Your brain's a sack of like fat and electricity and neuron connections, right. But that helps me visualize like, oh, I'm the driver of this.
Yeah. Or I had a thought come that it's like you think you're on a rollercoaster, like you think you don't have any control over what your brain is doing, but then you wake up and realize you can [00:15:00] drive it. You can drive it just like you would drive a car. Yeah. And that's what she says.
One day she woke up and she was being breathed like she was in this body that was functioning without any thought, whatsoever, without her like having any input on it. And the same thing with her thoughts. She wasn't choosing these thoughts, they were just being offered up. But then once she became aware of it, she can start to like, fine tune that and start to drive the machine.
So, I like both of those. Think of it however you want to, but this is a big concept to start to grapple with. So I need illustrations. My brain can understand it better with illustrations. But let's start to apply this. So like a real world application would be, say you had a complication with a procedure or surgery, and your mind is automatically (because it's very well trained to do this)
That was your fault. You shouldn't have missed that. You shouldn't have done it that way, you know? And then you spiral into the death spiral [00:16:00] of shame and everything else. But now you can pause and ask, is that true? And if your brain says, well, yes, then you say, are you a hundred percent sure about that?
And then you're like, well, you know, all of a sudden you start getting the other side of the equation also. And you might be able to meet that thought with understanding when you realize that it's a neural loop that, hey, whenever we mess up, these are the thoughts that we flood our system with.
And that's just how we do it in this machine. Okay. Until now though. Now I'm gonna be like, okay, I get you. I know that served us in the past. It seems really useful, but I'm gonna start driving this machine and what I know is that this is keeping me down. This is not making me a better doctor.
This isn't even helping my patients for me to be talking this way. And so on purpose, I'm gonna choose another path. So, maybe when your mind is offering this up, you can say, I did the best I could with the knowledge I had, or [00:17:00] this experience will make me more attentive going forward. That is a much more useful assessment of whatever it was that just happened.
And to clarify, this is not toxic positivity that is lying to yourself. This is radical honesty. The thought really is just a thought. Your mind is chatty and can sometimes be incredibly dramatic, and that doesn't mean that it's right.
So to recap, your thoughts are not the boss of you. They're just suggestions. What Byron Katie teaches and what neuroscience confirms is that awareness creates space, and in that space you get to choose, and we talk about this a lot, this is that choosing to question the automatic negative thoughts and
start to rebuild, starting with maybe a little dirt road and that new five lane superhighway that becomes your default. So on your next drive home, if your mind throws a dagger, pause, notice it, name it. Don't wrestle with it. Just watch. You might find, [00:18:00] as Katie says, it lets go of you. So if any of this has helped you, if you have identified with any of these daggers on the way home, know that.
Like we said before, awareness is key. Can I add one more thing before we close? You may even decide that the thought is true, but then you go one step further and is this helping or serving any purpose in my life?
And who would I be if I couldn't think this thought again? Mm-hmm. That's ultimately, if you're driving the machine, it's like, sure it's true, and it gets me nowhere. That's like the next step after that boom. That's like the $10,000 level. If you have any experiences about what we talked about or you just wanna chitchat with us, obviously we always invite you to scroll down, click the link, meet with one of us, or send us an email [email protected].
We'd love to hear from you. And we'd also love for you to check out our new free video, How to Crush Physician Burnout for Good without Cutting Back Hours, Quitting Medicine, or Sucking It Up in [00:19:00] Silence. So scroll down in the show notes, click those links, and check us out today. Until next time, you are whole. You are a gift to medicine and the work you do matters.
