How To "Get Out of Your Head"? Touch Grass
How activity in a natural space can help ground neurdivergent brains.
An article that I like to reference in ADDittude Magazine is about 9 strategies for quieting the brain. It has a lot of information in it that I have personally referenced too many times to name this year. Neurodivergents often get stuck in their heads, meaning that we get so caught up with our own thoughts that we can sabotage our own relationships and/or projects. This is done by overthinking and over-analyzing situations until there is nothing more to reason, so the imagination steps in. That’s when we leap to the wrong conclusions or make the most fearful assumptions. The result is a body that is stuck in one place, too afraid to move. Or, a moving body that is reacting to information that may not even be true.
Getting stuck in your own head is never fun. It’s also hard to spot. I know that it’s only recently that I have been able to identify when I am doing this. And most of the time, the damage is already done and my work becomes surviving the moment and damage control.
How we get into our heads is another topic for another post. Today, I am going to discuss how to get out of it. And this is something I do on the regular. In fact, I wrote this post immediately after coming off the trails.
Touch Grass and Get Out of Your Head
One of the solutions that the ADDitude article (linked above) gives is to MOVE. Action can sometimes be enough to shift your thoughts. For me, it takes more than one motion. I have to get up and get out. Because getting out of your head is best done when you have a reason to think of the present or what’s right in front of you. I work better when I have to be alert of a car coming down the road or wildlife on the trail. When a breathtaking view is right around the corner and you may catch a crane in flight if you are diligent.
The point is to do something that forces you to think of the here an now. In some way. This is what people mean when they say “be in the present.” We will not discuss how many years of therapy it took before I figured this out. Do things that make it nearly impossible to stay in your head. A lot of our people do garden. It’s true they do. I know them in real life. The act of gardening requires attention to procedure, counting, paying attention to patterns, sticking to routines. All of these things require the parts of your brain that cannot operate if you are stuck in melancholy.
Storytime: My Touch Grass (Sand) Moment
My therapist, who I met for regular weekly sessions, sometimes more, to treat post-pardum depression. Childbearing people on the spectrum, who are neurodivergent, you need to talk to your mental health and OBGYN team about PPD. We are prone to it for a number of reasons. I’ll save that topic for a future post. For this story, it was my third time being diagnosed with PPD, my 5th pregnancy. So my mental health and OBGYN team had a plan in place to help me get through the last weeks of my pregnancy (when PPD actually starts) and through the next year after the birth.
We figured out that I needed to do something to get me out of my head around dusk every day. That time seemed to trigger the worst of my symptoms, and made my nights even worse than the usual insomnia and depression/anxiety. It was like sundowning in people with dementia.
I describe it as a feeling of impending doom, of reality spiraling down into a dark place. Of clocks winding backwards. Of walking a razor’s edge line between sanity and some form of crazy that I never wanted to peek into. Like some bad sh*t is about to go down and there is no way to avoid it. Like I was on the plane in the Stephen King story and movie The Tommy Knockers. The world is wrong and in the distant something horrible is coming and I didnt want to stick around to see what it was.
My psychologist had the idea to do something to get out of my head. We figured out that my brain can pull out of an emotional state if I have to work a problem that’s logical, analytical, and qualitative. Math problems, logic puzzles, crosswords, anything that requires a calcultation, strategizing, etc. I still do mental math when I feel a panic attack coming on or if I get emotional. We also found that a change of environment also works to get me out of my head as well.
I knew that the beach at Lake Michigan, yes, one of the Great Lakes, was my happy place. So I decided to go there at dusk every day. It was June, summer in northern Indiana. The lake water was still freezing cold, so I would sit on the beach with the newborn baby while my older kids played volleyball in the sand. The summer volleyball tournaments were later in the month, so they had nets up. We brought a ball. This ritual lasted through the fall. My kids called it Midnight Volleyball, even though we usually left the beach around 9PM. They remember this time as a fun one. It wasn’t until my oldest had kids that I started talking about what this time was like for me.
I would sit in the sand while the kids played volleyball, and look out at the water. Slowly, I would unfold out of my brain. Now that I look back, it was like a meditation. Going through the senses. First, touch, feeling the cool breeze on my skin. Then smell, the muddy, fishy, earthy tones hit my nose. Trying to figure out all those notes pulled me even furthet out of my dark space. The sound of the kids playing and giggling, under the roar of the waves against the sand. Cars in the parking lot nearby. A dog panting as he ran by, pulling an owner saying, “f*ck slow down!”
In rolling through this sense information and processing it, I was able to connect with the present. In the moment, it felt like I had been released from the cell in my brain and I could roam outside. Like being released from a prison cell long enough to walk the yard. I knew that I had to go back in at some point, but in the moment, I was enjoying the limited freedom.
I did this until it got too cold for us to be close to the lake. By that time, my medication and therapy was helping and the sundown mental nightmares were not happening every day.
Taking to the Trails
These days, I go out onto the trails near my new home. Walking a trail deep in the woods, looking out for snakes, critters, spiders, and other wildlife requires attention to the here and now. Pushing aside tree limbs reaching down into my path and avoiding tree roots breaking through the ground do the same work. Some times there’s tons of mud. At other times the insects are overwhelming. An hour out there always pulls me out of whatever funk I was in.
So the next time you find yourself obsessing about something, brooding, moody, or even that panicky “crawling out of your skin” feeling, go touch grass. Get outside and move. Do something that will force your brain and body to pay attention to something other than the thing causing you stress. Doing so is not only good for your mental health, its going to help your physical health as well.
Now, go forth and conquer the world.