Sticky-Note Method
Jeffrey Schwartz’s Four-Step Method, very basically, involves four sticky notes for mindful awareness of the Narrator’s incessant voice in our head. We can’t easily shut this voice out since it is a basic function of the left hemisphere of our brain. The Four-Step Method is a mental string around your finger reminding you not to buy into the Narrator’s specious pitch.
Make up a pitch of your own to counteract the Narrator’s pitch. Schwartz likes “It is not me, it’s my brain.” This key phrase is easy to focus on when things get a bit shaky. I sometimes say to myself, “It’s not resolvable.”It is unproductive to go over and over irresolvable problems. Instead, you focus on processes that aid in healing like Ki Breathing Meditation and Open Focus.
Acknowledge the Narrator as a nonstop story-spouting machine, an illusion dispenser, not defining who you are. Awareness is the key to freeing yourself from the binding, restricting, limiting, illusion of self.
The Four-Step Method with its roots in Buddhist Mindfulness alters consciousness, not by denying the voice of the Narrator, but by separating who we are from the Narrator’s convincing account of who we are. We are not this storyline spun so intricately into our consciousness.
Buddhist meditators realized thousands of years ago the reality of a non-cohesive self. Neuroscientists conceive of the brain as a collection of neural pathways and circuits, modules interacting with trillions of modules. No central cohesive self, no command central, no thoughts found among the billions of neurons. Our brain is a galaxy of neurons functioning in huge clusters to get different jobs done. Our conscious self is a 50-bit story spun to hold us together. The brain does not consider whether this story is true and whether it helps or hinders.
Feeding the Monster
Jeffrey Schwartz, psychiatrist, researcher, author of “You Are Not Your Brain,” refers to the process of doing almost anything to get rid of uncomfortable thoughts and sensations by automatically responding with detrimental behaviors as “feeding the monster.” The monster is the part of the brain – the Narrator – that generates deceptive brain messages that cause bodily and emotional reactions so uncomfortable you will do anything to make them go away, even things harmful to your mind and body.
These behaviors may be psychologically and physically, as well as legally harmful, yet you respond again and again in a semi-automatic way. You feed the message-making monster, making it stronger, rewarding it with drugs, alcohol, food, obsession, compulsions, rage, and sex. The monster becomes an overlay of your sense of self. You see no way out and resign yourself to believing this is who you are and this is how it must be.
The Four-Step Method is a cognitive, mindful strategy for dealing with brain messages invading our psyche. These repetitive thoughts and feelings make us angry and uncomfortable, causing us to behave in ways unhelpful to setting and reaching goals. If someone were to bring up these thoughts and feelings each time we meet, our meetings might likely be few and far between. Yet they enter uninvited into our private sanctuary, ad nauseam.
Sticky Note 1
Separate yourself from automatic maladaptive uncomfortable thoughts, feelings, and emotions. You are not the monster. You are experiencing unhealthy patterns of automatic, destructive, brain messages. Separating your identity, from these messages is what step one is about.
In place of “I’ve got to go back to see if I’ve locked the door,” you might say “I am having an obsessive thought that I must go back and check the door,” or a compulsive urge to wash. You recognize the thoughts and compulsive urges as symptoms of your OCD. You cannot make the thoughts and urges immediately go away, but you can immediately understand the thoughts are false messages from neural pathways firing in the brain. Schwartz quotes one of his patients who coined a phrase, “Don’t be polemical, it’s just chemical.”
It is not enough to create a clever phrase. Schwartz points out that the possible sticking point of his Four Step Method is when the brain starts sending false messages that you cannot readily recognize as false. It is important to observe and be aware of these messages. These are the shoulds, musts, damning and condemning of REBT, the must-do well or perform well to accept myself.
Sticky Note 2: Reframe
Take the POV of the impartial observer who sees the whole person, not defaults. You are not a nose, mouth, eye, or leg. You are not a physical deformity or mental disease. This applies to all irrational patterns of thinking, not just OCD. Practice stepping back from thoughts, feelings, moods, and urges, and viewing the gestalt.
The static image in a photo is not the you others see. They don’t see eyes, nose, stomach, neck, hips, legs. They see an animated, moving you. They see a living, breathing embodied soul that not even a holograph can capture.
Shining a light on deceptive messages, feelings, and urges reinforces the neural networks and makes them return stronger. Shining a light on them leads to overanalyzing and moving deeper and deeper into mazes that are impossible to find your way out of. Be aware, without shining a light.
Psychodynamic therapy can shine a light. Self-immersion while re-experiencing negative thoughts, feelings, and physiological sensations that accompanied the initial event, entangles the mind in ruminations and obsessions that can spiral out of hand. That is what happened when I went through psychoanalysis. I came close to taking my life. The therapist resorted to a series of electroconvulsive (ECT) treatments, like kicking the TV to get it to work properly, he confessed.
Some people are helped with a simple script or catchphrase for easy recall: “It is a bad brain day.” “I’m having a brainstorm.” “This feels like such a part of me, but I know it is synapses and networks firing away.” “I do not have to act on these thoughts, feelings, and urges.” “I do not have to act in an unhealthy, destructive way.” “I do not have to follow deceptive thoughts and feelings with endless loops of analysis.”
I find the most effective way of reframing is to change your point of view. Reading novels helps me to get into the heads of other people and reframe the way I am seeing things. It is not that there is a wrong versus right way of framing, it is that there are so many options.
Sticky Note 3: Refocus
Refocusing involves redirecting focus to an activity of your choosing. Acknowledge and accept that messages and sensations will arise, but that you do not have to act on them. They do not define you. You do not have to get caught up in them other than to recognize them for what they are. Then refocus by shifting behavior.
It might be ideal if you were able to shift focus to an activity immersing you in a state of flow where you are energized and focused. Runners, writers, and artists report experiencing flow. You can experience flow in books, movies, and video games. But almost any activity that you can immerse yourself in will work. Don’t get caught up in brain messages other than to recognize them for what they are and shift focus. It does not change anything. The problems are still there. The challenge is to shift focus and live within this paradox. The methods are diverse.
Refocusing does not mean thoughts, impulses, urges, and other unpleasant brain messages will be gone. You refocus even though they are screaming for attention. By refocusing and changing behavior, you shape new habit pathways in the brain. First, become aware the message is calling out from well established, worn, and tortuous paths in the brain. Rather than allowing yourself to indulge and reinforce unhealthy obsessive thoughts, feelings, and urges, make the effort to refocus your attention. Refocus on Ki Breathing Meditation, Open Focus, and Attention Training Therapy (ATT).
Refocusing is not a way of ridding unwanted thoughts and feelings. Allow sensations, thoughts, and impulses to be as you engage attention and refocus. Your brain will take you down the same uncomfortable neural pathways until they weaken. That takes refocusing each time you are distracted.
Sticky Note 4: Revalue
Revaluing and aligning with deeper values of self gives meaning to life beyond worn repeated brain messages and behaviors. Revaluing and finding a personal way is the fourth step, the long-term part of the Four-Step Method. Schwartz counsels that especially for revaluing, to call upon the Wise Advocate. It is the wise inner Self, an intelligent, loving guide.
The Wise Advocate helps relabel, reframe, refocus, and revalue to make healthier choices in line with goals. The Wise Advocate does not automatically respond to deceptive brain messages in an unhealthy manner. It is mindfully aware of deceptive messages but shies away from automatically responding to them. The Wise Advocate can help you to refocus and revalue with an activity that can offer a sense of flow.
The Wise Advocate is Self as compared with small self. Small self is the self that is the storied creation of the Narrator, the self you have come to believe defines limits and confines you. Self with a capital “S” is the true present Self. It is the Self that has been buried and takes work to bring to the surface. It is who you are in this moment sans stories and deceptions. It is truth deep within you now.
The goal of the Four-Step Method is to live according to your true Self. This means to discover and caringly and lovingly attend to your true emotions and needs. As your mind becomes aware of the destructive, unhealthy, habitual, automatic messages of the Narrator, you can call on the Wise Advocate, your inner true Self, to encourage you to plan and make decisions in a more helpful way based on your best interests, now and in the long run. You call on your inner Self to view the healthy, life-giving forest instead of romping through sweetly pungent, rotting trees. To begin to see Self, you must begin to ignore self. As the balance shifts to Self, your life will become more at peace. Schwartz’s book is titled, “You Are Not Your Brain,” and he is saying you are not your small self.
As you begin to call upon and become the Wise Advocate, it gets stronger. Without a strong inner Self, you are at the mercy of a brain that runs the show uncaringly with unending loops of troubling thoughts, feelings, and urges. As the Wise Advocate strengthens, you are more able to become an observer of, rather than overpowered by distressing neural loops, and to work on living life now. Each time uncomfortable messages and feelings disturb you, rather than attempt to push them away, Relabel, Reframe, Refocus, and work on Revaluing your life.
Live With Paradox
Overthinking and overanalyzing strengthen maladaptive brain circuits and their associated habitual responses. You live with paradoxes, unresolvable riddles. It is counterproductive to attempt to solve them. When you focus on paradox and attempt to solve it, it blows up to monstrous proportions.
Instead of ruminating on irresolvable problems, living with paradox is key to Meta Cognitive Therapy (MCT). Instead of ruminating on irresolvable problems, step back and look at harmful problem-solving methods, like ruminating. Replace narrow perseverative patterns of thinking with flexible patterns of attention. Move from focusing on irresolvable problems. Stop shining the light. Don’t feed the monster. Accept paradox.
We don’t have to react or respond to uncomfortable thoughts, habits, sensations, and urges. We do not have to focus on thoughts, feelings, urges, and desires that sabotage our best interests. We can step back, observe, and move on.
In the words of Jon Kabat-Zin, MD, a pioneer in applying mindfulness to the treatment of chronic medical conditions:
Every time we are able to know a desire as desire, anger as anger, a habit as habit, an opinion as an opinion, a thought as a thought, a mind spasm as a mind spasm, or an intense sensation in the body as an intense sensation, we are correspondingly liberated. Nothing else has to happen. We don’t even have to give up the desire or whatever else it is. To see it and know it as desire, as whatever it is, is enough.
“Coming to Our Senses” Audio Disk)
Self-help books that help:
Brain Lock: Free Yourself from Obsessive-Compulsive Behavior
Total Self-Renewal through Attention Therapies and Open Focus
The Open-Focus Brain: Harnessing the Power of Attention to Heal Mind and Body
