summary:: Some thoughts on parasitic processing, anxiety, and how mindfulness "works" in addressing a common form of mental distress.

Parasitic Processing and Mindfulness

Argument:

• Thinking yourself out of anxiety (e.g., with thought replacements or thought stopping) is often limited in its utility in the moment of anxious rumination.
• Anxious thoughts themselves can be seen as the result of many processes, baked in with many assumptions about the world.
• Changing thoughts simply attempts to replace the outcome without addressing the roots (i.e., the perceptions and assumptions themselves).
• Mindfulness offers a powerful, potent way to become aware of and decenter from those very perceptions and assumptions, giving us a new platform from which to view and disengage from the process of anxious perception.

Parasitic Processing is a term I learned from John Vervaeke, creator of a popular YouTube lecture series entitled Awakening from the Meaning Crisis. The term itself attempts to specify all the various components which constitute the (much more common) term of "overthinking." For a detailed overview, this post captures the biases and heuristics that comprise parasitic processing. In essence, this process creates a negative feedback loop, where the results of anxiety (e.g., physiological, mental) then become the fuel for further anxiety, and so on.

Buddhist psychological explications of cognition and perception have quite a bit to say about how we experience the world, moment by moment. This analysis is covered in depth in The Embodied Mind, which argues that (Abhidharma) Buddhist mindfulness is a tool of directly engaging and intervening with the various processes of our experience―toward the ultimate (soteriological) goal of ending our suffering.

In other words, mindfulness provides a strategy of understanding our experiences, and directing our experience toward certain goals that reduce our suffering.

As many meditators will attest, modern mindfulness practices often lead us to direct confrontations with our fundamental assumptions about our selves and the world. Often, old narratives and stories we tell ourselves―that we "aren't good enough," or that we "always need to be productive"―become starkly apparent when you (are trying to) sit and observe the breath.

When it comes to our most common, bedrock assumptions of the world, one of the most well-known in Buddhist philosophy is the following: Objects in the world have an independent, inherent existence. Highlighting this point in his (wonderful) book "Seeing That Frees," Rob Burbea argues the following about how this assumption plays out in our moment-to-moment experience of the world:

"On a[n] intuitive level...our belief in the inherent existence of dualistic concepts forms a support for dukkha more basic even than clinging. For this belief radically shapes not just our thinking, but our very perception. We do not only conceive dualities on an intellectual level; through conceiving them intuitively, we perceive them. And this is so even when we perceive without verbally labelling the percept in our mind. The conception of duality between pain and non-pain, for example, is actually wrapped up in our very perception of pain" (244)

Diving into "inherent existence" and the philosophy of interdependence is not the purpose of this post. Rather, Burbea's point powerfully demonstrates a simpler fact: that our beliefs about the world shape our very experience of it, on a perceptual moment-by-moment basis. So, our very perception is formed by deeply ingrained habits of pattern recognition and implicit, unquestioned assumptions about the objects in our phenomenological field.

While this provides a useful framework for navigating the world, this ability to intellectually grasp, manipulate, and re-form the world mentally (toward prediction) becomes the enemy when dealing with anxiety and depression. Toward prediction is important, because the cognitive load of approaching each situation as "brand new" would be incredibly demanding for our minds. However, anxiety and depression morph and shape our experience toward selecting certain interpretations and perceptions of the world which lock us in negative, spiraling patters (i.e., parasitic processing).

In anxiety, for instance, the mind becomes a simulator of negative outcomes, justified through our current perceptions of the world that are slanted and tilted by spectacles of emotion and unconscious bias. Trapped in a vague, future-oriented worry that can never seem to be disproven, situations tend to "feel" like they are headed in the wrong direction. Ruminating thoughts spin off body feelings (stomach aches, head aches, racing heart rate), which then spin off more thoughts, etc. ad nauseam. And while you can try to address the thought with a rational challenge, or to use techniques of thought stopping, you usually feel like shit before remembering to attempt them. And with an aching stomach at 3am, stopping the torrent that has been brewing for the past few hours feels impossible. The rational challenges cannot keep up with the volume of "what ifs" and "how abouts," and stopping the thoughts feels childishly silly.

The way out of this trap is not through changing the outward, or most apparent, manifestation of the process of torrential thinking and shitty body feelings. In other words, the way out of the trap of anxiety is not by addressing thoughts. At least, not in the moment of anxious rumination. A snaking machinery of processes lead to anxious thinking; changing the thought itself, replacing it with something else, is not addressing the root. To address the machinery is to get at the perceptions and sensations themselves, to become aware of how we are processing the world moment by moment. And in this case, "processing the world moment by moment" means creating a mental distance through nonjugmental observation of the body feelings, of the thoughts-as-thoughts.

This is the premise and promise of therapeutic mindfulness, of "paying attention in a particular way: on purpose, in the present moment, and non-judgmentally" (Jon Kabat-Zinn)

Referenced In: