BOREDOM
What better time and place for a mindfuck than an asylum camp.
A refugee
Default mode network
You are in an asylum camp after a long and risky journey, for many of you a very dangerous journey. You have arrived. Finally! You might feel happy, relieved. Finally there is safety and you might feel that you have achieved your goal and that from now on things will only get better. But this feeling won’t last long because after a while it starts: the bureaucratic system, the waiting, and the rules. From now on that’s what it will be like. You have to wait. And you wait and wait. You wait maybe while staying in a small room with five other refugees. Sometimes you wait even for two years until you get the second IND appointment.
Waiting and doing nothing is terrible! Tell any average Dutch guy to wait, do nothing for six months, and you bring him to a madhouse. Why? Because he starts telling stories over and over again in his mind. His demons will merge and he will make himself crazy. And this is a “sane” mind. A mind without war, violence, rape, murder or extreme poverty. Imagine the mind of a refugee. Fortunately there is hope, that’s what keeps the refugee from becoming completely crazy.
This waiting, this repetition of days without doing anything but eat, sleep and repeat is killing! In fact in too many cases it turns out to be a silent murderer if you consider the number of refugee suicides. The human mind just snaps at some point. It cannot cope for too long, but too long it is in a dysfunctional system.
In this waiting, in this repetition, your mind will put most, if not all its energy, on the past and possible future outcomes. It ruminates. It will wander away and project all kinds of scenarios and possible outcomes that create strong stories and patterns of belief. Many of these stories trigger the trauma response, trigger fear, stress and tension in your biology. They move you away from your deeper being, away from seeing clearly. It’s that monkey shouting in your head on full speed, it’s the daily chatter, that voice in our mind from which we believe it is who we are. It’s the chatter that is always dissatisfied and preoccupied with the past or future. It grabs an old event, it grabs a desired future or idea, and then it start feeding it with energy, with all sorts of story lines.
You also hear updates from other people from the camp, and you compare because they did have an IND appointment and you didn’t. Now that’s a good reason to start making up all kinds of possible outcomes. It provides you with an extra dosis of insecurity just like when nobody of the camp management tells you where you will go when a camp moves to another place. There are many cases in which (the lack of) information creates insecurity. You think, maybe you get seperated again from the friends you have made in the camp. Or maybe you think about what happened to you and how little you can do for your family who are still at your home country. You might think you messed up, you might think this or that. Countless thoughts, countless stories. You feel powerless! You feel helpless, inadequate. Five thousand miles away a few insane people in power screwed you over, made you leave your home, and here you are lying on a bed doing nothing but thinking about a million scenarios. There is no escaping the mind.
Eat sleep repeat
All this negative energy is building up. You wait, sit, lay down, sleep a bit, hang around, play table tennis, talk to your friend, stare outside, stare at the phone for the 3rd time this minute, watch a movie, check TikTok, grab another coffee, grab another cigarette, lay down again. But the energy that has been built up hasn’t gone anywhere. What you need is to release that energy. If you don’t there is more energy for your ruminations and it will strengthen the vicious circle, strengthen the beliefs and labels you have given yourself.
This rumination, this compulsory thinking, the monkey chatter, what all people suffer from is located in a brain region called the default mode network (DMN). This network of neurons gets highly activated while you think away with countless scenarios of the future and memories from the past. This DMN is very concerned about the what if’s. It’s very concerned about your identity, it’s very reflective on what is going on with you and your story in relation to other people (where shame finds its source).
To maintain a kind of "control", you start thinking and visualising about the future. In that anger and in that fantasy, you are engaged in resolving all kinds of fighting, dealing with, or avoiding insecurity, anger, fear, and shame.
Paul Conti
M.D.
The DMN likes to do one thing and one thing only: chattering, gossiping and inventing stories in the mind that directly or indirectly revolve around you. In your mind, you might heroically solve your problems. You ruminate that you fix all problems in the future to make yourself feel better in the present, but it doesn’t solve anything. In fact, you repeat the story, you repeat the subject, and the wiring in your head will grow. Physically! It’s not some vague idea of thoughts floating in the air. These thoughts become neural connections in your brain. The more you think about something, the better the brain gets in building neuronal connections and associations surrounding that subject. Hence your ruminations and belief become stronger. Fantasy thinking might provide momentary relief, but it comes from the back door with a vengeance. This momentary relief comes at the expense of long-term improvement. It has the strong tendency to strengthen your negative stories. Stories that keep you away from present awareness. Stories that can give you anxiety and tension. Stories that can make you sick. Rumination creates the negative. Negative mood, negative memories, and engaging with the negative.
“Not for a moment do we believe that the healing power resides in all of us. Not for a moment do we have any idea how to encourage, invigorate, or empower that healing power that we all have. What we do instead is replace one pharmaceutical with another.”
Now these are the words of Gabor Maté who is an authority on the subject of trauma and addiction. The relevance here is that rumination can bring about the same effect as pharmaceuticals. It’s like an outside source that soothes but doesn’t solve. Rumination, your inner chatter, provides a shot of addictive neurochemistry that makes you feel uplifted, it takes you away from that which you want to forget, it makes you feel “better”. Just for a while.
Breaking the pattern of clinging to your stories, to your labels, you shame, guilt or anger will help you. Breaking the pattern comes naturally after you first become conscious of it. You cut it by becoming aware of it. Rumination is as addictive as heroin! Your brain and your biology will only say: ‘I want more!” To witnesses your inner chatter means to create distance. If there is a witness how can the chatter be you?
Important
Remember that this is not about NOT THINKING or CONTROLLING the mind. If you try that, it will come back at you twice as hard. And don’t ever judge yourself when you ruminate. Everybody ruminates so don’t start thinking that it’s bad for you and that you have to get rid of it. Then it becomes just another mind game. Don’t ever get disappointed that you are creating all kinds of stories in your head, that you are building up stress and negativity. Just become conscious of it. Gradually. That’s all. That’s what we are doing here and that’s why we go slow. On and on you will fall back in the old habit of thinking all kinds of (crazy) stories but that’s okay, just don’t give up and keep doing the exercises. It requires your patience and your dilligence but if anyone can it is you.