This is an excerpt from my upcoming book Dear Charlotte, which tells the winding story of the triumph and folly of forever trying to better yourself. This letter is from the chapter on "The Pursuit of Happiness."
Hi Charlotte,
I've been developing a new tradition on my trips to Southern California. I like to take these two-hour drives to visit my uncle and cousins out in Palm Springs. I borrow my parents SUV, crank up the Sirius XM, and let the music and my mind mix and project onto the rocky desert mountains that line the route to the desert. I think I'm a hundred times better than I was before I got back into cognitive therapy, and I probably wouldn't have been able to enjoy with these drives without my newfound calm, but I still have a nagging problem. I'm still an over-thinker.
Do you think there are limits to cognitive therapy? I don't really have the same epiphanies I had a year-a-half ago, mainly because all the baggage that it was supposed to destroy has been destroyed! But what if its possible to use cognitive therapy against the raw, mechanical process of thinking too much?
So, I opened my cognitive therapy journals, and went through the step-by-step of cognitive therapy. I started by attacking my inner-academic. When you think of the faults of academics that are commonly bandied about, one is that they can be arrogant know-it-alls. So I told myself, "Look Phil, a theoretical understanding of things is so easily abused, that your inner-academic misleads you to over-estimate how much you actually know." I then attacked my inner armchair philosopher. "Look Phil, 90% of true learning is in the application of knowledge, not in the theoretical circumscribing of it. All your thinking is preventing you from acquiring actual/meaningful experience."
The epiphany I had from this was very calming. Normally, after my Palm Springs road trips, I need another one-to-two hours to unravel all the thinking and meta-thinking that had occurred during the drive. But this time, when I closed the door to my parent's SUV and greeted my cousin, I smiled a full smile, one unencumbered by the burden of neurotic bruises. Instead of my internal mental chatter bleeding out and turning me into a semi-obnoxious chatterbox, my cousin and I just got up and drove to the hills to do sandboarding (snowboarding on sand dunes). There were no breaks, no need for pause, just activity.
Maybe I've finally destroyed over-thinking, just like I've destroyed every other internal barrier through the use of cognitive therapy.
Or maybe it's just a placebo effect.1
1 It was.
