When I was battling depression years ago, I made a realization: The most dangerous place in the world for me was lying alone in bed — not sleeping, not reading, but THINKING. And the most dangerous part of my day was that time period between when I woke up and when I stood up. And the longer I extended that time period — the longer I stayed in bed, captivated by what I came to call “horizontal thinking” — the worse off I would be.
~ Elizabeth Gilbert, Instagram post Nov 11 2020
Sometimes it’s about the world. I see trees falling and people falling. I see boots falling. Democracy falling. I see the unspeakable cruelty we unleash on each other.
Sometimes it’s about me. The stupid, hurtful things I’ve done. Countless bad decisions that have caused suffering. The morning I carelessly pulled into the high school parking lot and scratched Liz’s new car. Most of my first marriage. The stupid, terrible thing I said to Travis that time. The godawful situation with Jodi. My step parenting in general.
Horizontal thinking, as Liz Gilbert calls it, offers me an endless, painful parade of bad behavior, unwise words, and selfish choices.
Unlike Gilbert, my horizontal thinking happens not only in the liminal space between sleep and getting up. For me, it can happen if I’m not quiiiite sleepy enough when I first get into bed. It can happen at 2am when I get up for water and a pee. It can happen pre-dawn before even the birds are up.
It doesn’t take much to get the painful thought parade rolling when I’m horizontal.
And even though this scourge of horizontal thinking has been with me most of my adult life, I forget that getting vertical changes everything. I forget that once I’m up and moving and living, the pain parade falls into context and perspective. When I’m horizontal, I believe each and every thought in the train of terrible as truth. Every fear as forgone conclusion.
Once I’m up, I can see it all as part of a much larger whole. But God help me when the train of terror rolls through my horizonal brain, I have zero perspective.
Liz Gilbert advises to just get up. She writes,
Don’t let your mind win its most brutal game. You deserve better. Get vertical. Move your mind to a higher altitude, where the view is better.
And yes, that works. It feels like my brain is the top of an hour glass full of gritty, sandy, poisonous thinking that settles down and out when I get upright. So yes, get up. In the morning, get up.
But sometimes, this poisonous train pulls through when I need – and I mean, badly need – to sleep.
When it’s not yet time to get up, I give my mind something else to land on. Sometimes, I stretch out on the living room couch and read. No or very low light (an e-reader without connection to the Internet is ideal for this). Nothing too stimulating. Most certainly not email or social media or the news. I read for about 30 minutes then get in bed again and hope that the terrible train has pulled out of the station.
Other times, I slide on my headset and listen to Kathryn Nicolai’s podcast Nothing Much Happens podcast.* In her incredibly soothing voice, she reads stories in which, you guessed it, nothing much happens. My husband calls it my “boring stories.” But as Nicolai sometimes describes it, the story is less boring and more like a river on which my mind can gently rest like an upturned leaf.
I rarely hear a story to the end.
I know folks who listen to other things when they can’t sleep and horizontal thinking tumbles in. Some read boring things like appliance manuals. Whatever it takes to put the brakes on the terrible train of painful thinking, do it.**
At the very least, when horizontal thinking rolls in, I remind myself that those thoughts are distorted, one-sided, all out of proportion. Like Silly Putty left in a hot car, they are a mushy, melted mess. Whenever they march into your head as you lie in bed, see if you can gently say to yourself, “This is horizontal thinking, honey. You can let it go.”
Trust that no matter how bad things look when you’re horizontal, it really will look better when you’re up. Even the exploding sh*t show of the world right now looks better when you’re vertical.
*A thousand thanks to my friend, Zakira for suggesting this podcast when I was in the thick of a bout of insomnia. I’m just paying forward her generous gift.
**I’m not a fan of sleep medication, melatonin, or alcohol for sleep. And not only am I not a doctor, I’m most certainly not your doctor. I’d say, research it well (here’s a conversation with Dr. Jen Gunter and a sleep specialist that focuses on menopause & sleep but it’s appropriate, really, for everyone) and ask your health care provider before trying anything like that.