When You Change How You Think, You Change Your Life

A lot of people attempt to die by suicide — too many of us. In fact, someone ends their life every eleven minutes in the US.

Many people swallow toxic substances. In lifesaving efforts, doctors pump their stomachs, and the people recover physically and go on to put their lives back together with little lasting evidence. When I tried to end my life, too much time passed after I took the pills before I reached the hospital, so the doctors didn’t pump my stomach. Over 90 pills, mostly brain drugs: sleeping pills, tranquilizers, antidepressants, went all of the way through my system wreaking destruction.

I Almost Succeeded

When the paramedics busted through the ER doors with me on the stretcher, I was coded a triage acuity level one, the worst rating a person can receive and still be alive. I was in acute respiratory failure with a breathing tube down my windpipe, had an abnormal heartbeat, and wasn’t even responding to pain.

After the initial crisis passed and I’d stabilized later that night, the hospital staff quit monitoring me for hours, I was told by family. My fever climbed to over 107 degrees, and I started having prolonged myclonic seizures, which are shock-like jerks of a muscle or group of muscles. At that point, my mother, literally, pitched a fit to get me a cooling blanket and a doctor’s care. (Eternally grateful, Mom!) She witnessed a nurse stomp into my hospital room, slam down my charts, and frantically scribble notes for the time period none had been checking on me.

For a long time after I attempted to end my life, I was seething mad about this lapse in medical care. Yes, I had tried to end my life, and I was mentally unhealthy. You’ll get no argument from me about that. However,  once I arrived at the hospital, the medical personnel had a responsibility to do everything in their power to help me live, at best and, at the very least, to do their jobs.

There was a time when I wanted to sue the hospital for negligence.

A New Perspective Allows Healing Thoughts

In the years that followed, instead of pursuing a lawsuit, I invested my energy into healing physically and emotionally. Even if I had brought and won a lawsuit, would the victory have really changed anything? I’d have more money, sure.  However, I’d still talk funny and my other deficits from the brain injury would have persisted while I exhausted my limited resources, physical, mental, and financial, on the lawsuit instead of applying them towards bettering myself and my situation.

In time, I came to have compassion for the nurses and doctors on duty in the busy ER that night. Because I don’t know the reasons behind their negligent behavior, it’s up to me to fill in the blanks. I can pick a perspective that causes me pain or one that brings me peace.  I choose to think that the hospital personnel had finite resources and, believing I was going to die, allocated their attention to other people who had more favorable odds.  If this was true, I can only imagine the surprised look on their faces when they realized that I was going to pull through.

Change Any Situation By Changing the Way You Think About It

As this situation exemplifies, I’ve found that with conscious effort and practice, I can take any situation, put some distance between myself and it emotionally, and try to look at it objectively — from a different perspective — a view without fault or blame and that doesn’t cause me unnecessary pain.

I didn’t say it was easy, but it can be done. And by doing this simple reframe, the hurt dissipates and healing can follow.

With time and repetition, because of neuroplasticity, the ability of the brain to change form and function based on behavior, experiences, and thoughts, your brain will rewire itself and reinforce pathways so that this new pattern of thinking becomes the default.  To harness and guide neuroplasticity this way requires that a person consciously make a consistent, repeated effort to alter their habits and brain circuitry. It takes some effort, but it can work.

How To Change Your Thoughts

In her book, Loving What Is: Four Questions That Can Change Your Life, Byron Katie explains how to do analyze your thoughts to alleviate struggling and anguish in any situation. According to Katie and many philosophies, all suffering is caused by our thoughts and judgments about what happens, not by what actually happens. The challenge is to change your thoughts patterns which, in turn, changes your brain. The Work consists of four questions about your thinking and a turn around:

• Is it true?
• Can you absolutely know that it’s true?
• How do you react, what happens, when you believe that thought?
• Who would you be without the thought?

After you’ve analyzed the situation with the four questions, you turn it around. Each turn around is an opportunity to experience the opposite of your original statement and see what you and the person you’ve judged have in common. Katie says the turnarounds are the prescriptions for happiness. I would agree!  For example:

Thought causing pain: “The hospital workers should have done more to help me” turns around to:

• The hospital workers should not have done more to help me. They had to make a judgment call as to the best use of their time.
• I should have done more to help myself before ever getting to the hospital.

Applying the four questions can help to ease anger and suffering about any situation and allow a new perspective. It did me, and it can work for you too. You can find a full explanation of The Work and worksheets on Katie’s website. Try doing The Work with some troubling situation in your life and you may find that you can find a little peace merely by changing the way you think about it.

image source: https://www.flickr.com/photos/princess_devils/