A man who spent months in residential treatment for alcohol addiction learned a mindfulness technique that helps him manage anger fueled by doomscrolling. The skill: step back mentally and observe the feeling with curiosity, then interrogate the fear underneath. This creates space in your nervous system and lets you think clearly instead of reacting.
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Almost 20 years ago now, I spent months in residential treatment for a life-threatening addiction to alcohol. And every morning at this particular rehab facility, we had group. It was a counselor, 5 or 6 patients or so, and for 2 hours we would just sit there and talk, sometimes about situations or past events, but more often about how those events made us feel. You know, by the time you get to rehab, you're pretty sick and everything feels angry, like your nerve endings are just sitting at the edge of the skin. Everything hurts. But I learned a skill there that has helped me manage a lot of the doom that at least I feel these days. Because the news feels heavy. You can feel it in your chest before you even finish the headline. If you're like me the last couple of weeks, especially, you have felt a low buzzing anger that just sits there all day. I'm not a counselor or a therapist. I've never even been a sponsor. But here's what I learned in rehab to keep at least part of that fear and anger from drilling a hole into your soul. When that feeling hits you, tightening of your chest or the, or the feeling of a dark cloud around you, try to picture yourself outside of yourself, like a foot away, observing yourself in that moment, not judging, just observing. You see yourself gripping your phone, your shoulders up around your ears, your breath shallow, And here's the way I was taught it in treatment. Think to yourself, isn't that interesting? I wonder what made me feel this way. You interrogate your response to the stimuli, not— you don't soak in the stimuli itself. And that tiny shift does something. You stop being the anger and you start noticing it. You turn it into data instead of fuel. You create a sliver of space between the feeling and the reaction. People get mad at their kids not because they didn't go to school, but because they fear their kids will drop out and then not have as many opportunities. You yell at the cashier not because she can't refund the shirt you bought, but because you're afraid that without that money you won't have enough for rent. Anger is our reaction to fear, and the social media algorithms— God, especially Facebook's— know precisely how to trigger that response in you because it keeps you engaged and enraged. Rage is profitable. But curiosity is different. It slows things down. Curiosity gives you options. When you look at your own reaction with interest instead of immersion, your nervous system gets a signal that you are not under attack. Your body starts to settle, your thinking comes back online. I don't know if that'll help you, but it helps me. I think these days we all deserve a mind that works for us, not against us, even in dark times. Especially in dark times.
