How to improve your mental state by embracing neutral thinking
The biggest mental shift I've ever made is understanding that things don't have to be great or terrible. They can just be.
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TRIGGER WARNING: This article deals with suicidal ideation, anxiety, and depression. I am adding five spaces before it starts so that you can stop now if that is an uncomfortable topic for you.
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Ever since I was a child, I’ve wanted to kill myself.
Tried a couple of times, too (and failed, in case you were wondering if I was a zombie or vampire).
Mostly, it was just a lot of ideation.
Constant, insufferable ideation.
The kind of ideation that grows boring in time. Like, I get it, you want to die, but I have to pick my wife up from the airport, so can you cool it for five minutes, kind of banality reserved usually for a droning teacher from a bad 80s movie.
These pleas for death were not even from my conscious mind, either.
That’s the biggest mindscrew of it all. It didn’t matter if I was happy, sad, angry, or hungry. If there was a silence of any type or any duration, a little voice would pop up from the depths of oblivion and say “maybe you should kill yourself”.
I listen to a lot of music and podcasts to drown out the silence. I even wrote The Void Calls Us Home based on experiences with my own inner voice.
It was the dull hum of my life until I reached my late thirties and went to a psychiatrist who told me “no, that was not normal”.
Did you know that normal people don’t hear a voice in their heads telling them to kill themselves at all hours of the day and night? I learned this truth several years ago now but it’s still bonkers to me.
They also told me that I was one of the most anxious humans they have ever met. So, in total, they told me one thing I already knew and one that blew my frigging mind.
(NOTE: If you hear a voice in your own head telling you to kill yourself, that is NOT NORMAL. Seek help. Meds changed my whole existence.)
I went on medication during the pandemic, and guess what? That voice…it vanished.
Well, that’s not completely true. It’s still there, but it got lazy. I still hear it saying “maybe you should…” before trailing off like a drunken aunt at a cocktail party that’s blacked out and about to pass out.
As somebody who has had suicidal ideation, severe depression, and anxiety for decades, I have a lot of feelings about positivity.
Mainly, I really, really despise positivity culture. I love optimistic people, especially when they show me tangible opportunities that still exist in the throes of failure, but I do not like positive platitudes or affirmations.
Every time somebody tells me “things will get better”, or “to keep a gratitude journal”, or some such nonsense, I visualize smashing them across the face with a brick.
It’s not very nice of me, and I know that they are just trying to help, but positivity positively grinds my gears.
This is nothing against people for whom it works, but I am not a positive person…at all. None of that stuff works for me.
Depending on when you started to follow me, the fact that I’m not a positive person might come as a shock. Lots of people who came into my orbit in the last couple of years have told me I am relentlessly positive.
I don’t think that’s true. I’m pragmatic, and my pragmatism leads to a generally optimistic outlook for authors in the next five years.
Pragmatically, every author should be able to find 100-1000 true fans that will support their work out of a world population of 8 billion people. Mathematically, it’s a near certainty that you can find 1.428571428571429e-5% of the whole world to resonate with your work.
That’s just data, and data is amazing not because it is positive but because it is objective.
Conversely, if you came into my orbit several years ago, you would know me as a relentlessly negative person.
I’m not really negative, either, though.
I was put in many situations that warped my perception of truth and weighed negatively on my conscience, but when I extricated myself from those situations (and got on meds) my mood drastically improved.
There is a grain of truth to both of them, but on any given day, my goal is to be completely neutral. I’m trying to be very beige these days.
I have tried every single happiness trick and hack in the universe, and while I’m obsessed with happiness to the point of fanatical devotion, I am not happy. I have moments of joy, but I am not, as a rule, jolly.
I could cite studies about happiness until I’m blue in the face, but I don’t even want to be happy anymore. Happiness is a whole lot of baggage and I don’t need it in my life.
I just wanna be beige. In fact, I actively try to avoid happiness.
I have, from a very young age, equated happiness with “bad stuff is about to happen”. If good things happen, and bad things happen, then it’s nothing but a vicious cycle.
I’m not a monster, though. Well, I’m not a monster for that reason.
Things can make me momentarily joyous and I feel a lot of love for a wide spectrum of nouns (your general people, places, things, and ideas) and a smattering of verbs, too.
I don’t run away from my wife, my dogs, my family, or my friends, but I focus on finding moments of joy and love, and avoid things that will make me “happy”.
I do actively run away from positivity culture, though, because I find what they are peddling is toxic. They are coming from a place of love, and I don’t want to ruin their whole vibe, but that ish is not for me.
Things don’t, in my experience, get better.
They just get bad in different ways.
Even if 90% of my life is going well, there’s at least 10% that is an absolute dumpster fire at any time.
If I’m constantly chasing happiness, and happiness is equated to positive things happening, then I will literally never be happy because bad things will always happen.
It is an unsolvable equation. Even if 99% of things are all good, something will go wrong and ruin everything.
Yes, specific bad events can turn around, but life is like a seesaw. If it gets out of balance with too much positivity, then a big, fat blob of yuck slams down and catapults whoever’s on the other side high into the air of negativity.
Not to mention that if I plan for things to “eventually” turn around, and then they don’t, it makes me spiral into a deep dark place.
More than anything in the whole world, my goal is to stop myself from spiraling into negativity. I will gladly give up ever feeling pure happiness again if I can avoid spiraling, too.
I spend the whole of my life trying to prevent bad thoughts before they ruin my mood, and pulling myself out of a tailspin before I crash into a fiery wreck when they do.
I’m pretty good at it, by and large, and positivity has zero to do with it. Instead, my whole focus has been curtailing extreme emotions on either end of the spectrum.
By curtailing my happiness just a bit, I’ve also been able to clip my anger issues (which is a story for a whole different day), my sad thoughts, and my big, bad thoughts.
These days, I try to keep myself as close to the middle of the seesaw as possible.
I thought I was just a weirdo who didn’t know how to be happy, but then at Wondercon this year author Jonathan Yanez told me about neutral thinking, and it changed my whole life.
Neutral thinking means accepting that when something good or bad happens, it happens. Instead of getting caught up in the negativity, you accept it for what it is and move on. - Lindsey Marlowe
He used this analogy:
A farmer wins a new horse. His neighbor comes over and asked “Don’t you think this is so great?” The farmer replies “maybe”.
A farmer’s son breaks his leg on the horse. His neighbor comes over and asks “Don’t you think this is terrible?” The farmer replies “maybe”.
The farmer’s country declares war, but his son avoids the draft because of his broken leg. His neighbor comes over and asks “Don’t you think this is so great?” The farmer replied “maybe”.
I have been living this philosophy for years but didn’t have a name for it…and it perfectly sums up why I hate positive thinking as much as I hate negative thinking.
I have been to therapy, taken meds, and followed just about every guru under the sun and this, along with copious medications, is the only thing that has truly helped me.
It seems simple in retrospect, but assigning good or bad to every action is onerous. Most things are not good or bad. They simply are, and coding them on either side of the divide was messing me up.
When I started to reframe stuff simply as existing, I realized that not only were things not intrinsically good, but they also weren’t intrinsically bad, either.
I already talked about my dogged determination to prevent spiraling, and the biggest reason for my spiraling has always been thinking bad things were happening and wouldn’t stop happening. Even “being positive” made me see negative things everywhere.
At my suicidal worst, the voice in my head would pile on as well, and it would feel like I’m drowning. Getting on meds helped, but it wasn’t enough by itself.
Neutral thinking was the key that unlocked the final door and allowed me to live a semi-normal life.
Now, when something happens, it has no intrinsic value. It doesn’t make me spiral because it is not good or bad. It simply happened.
It turns out that if nothing is good or bad, it’s really hard to see the bad in every decision.
What helped the most was nearly dying last year. After I got out of the hospital, people sent me well wishes, which was great, but it left some questions I wrestled with for a long time. Was it good that I wasn’t dead? Is it better to be sickly than dead? Would I really accept existence if I was given the choice?
I eventually realized none of those questions mattered because I did not die, and I was not given the choice to not exist. Since I wasn’t going to kill myself, only one truth remained; that I was alive.
It didn’t matter whether my death would be positive or negative because either way, I would still be dead, and that would cause a cascade of decisions that people I love would have to make in my absence.
Some decisions would be good and others would be bad, but it didn’t matter because one truth trumped everything else - I wasn’t dead. I was alive.
Embracing that simple fact allowed me to frame my life in a new way, and inch myself away from the darkest ends of the mental health seesaw, which goes from toxic positivity to toxic negativity at either end.
People have told me my whole life that only a positive attitude could combat a negative attitude, but that is bull plop.
When I was on one end of the seesaw, all positivity did was throw me hard in the other direction toward negativity, which led dramatically into spiraling.
Instead, neutral thinking allowed me to clip off the positive and the negative, until I was mostly in the middle of the seesaw, balanced.
It allows me to cut off negative thoughts.
Yes, it also clips the positive thoughts, but they never made me happy in the first place. As I already mentioned, picturing something positive simply made me think of all the horrible things that would happen if anything good happened.
That is a losing game.
Besides, it’s not so bad being beige. I still experience love and joy, which are the best things anyway, and while I try to surround myself with goodness, positive thinking can go screw.
Last year, I came to Austin on a trip that included seeing a couple of my good friends who moved here. I was lucky enough to come again this year, around the same time…
…and quickly realized things were much different this time.
Previously when I stayed with my friends, we were able to enjoy staying up later than usual and chatting. I was fully available to do things, go places, and engage in these conversations.
This year, I was in a bad way.
My migraines were so terrible that could barely string two sentences together for most of the time I was with them. After contracting COVID last year, which led to long COVID, I have been slowly degrading into a shell of my former self.
It is…suboptimal.
It’s often hard to think straight due to the migraines that have been beating against the inside of my brain in a near-constant state since late last year.
It interferes with every part of my life.
For instance, I always work out when I’m away, clocking in an hour or more at the gym, or walking 10,000+ steps, or both, when I travel. It’s annoying how consistent I’ve been about it in the past years, even spending time at the gym when I went to Vegas for 20books last year.
However, after a couple of days at the gym down in Austin this year, I was wiped to the point of exhaustion, unable to even keep my head up for the whole day.
This is not uncommon in the long years of my life. I’ve been chronically ill for 20+ years. Not recently, though. In recent years, I’ve been better-ish.
I spent years in my 20s and early 30s basically confined to the couch, unable to do more than a few hours of work every day. I would have from about 10am-2pm to work in the years before and immediately after my Graves disease diagnosis.
After that, I had to sleep for hours, only to get up before my wife came home, and then go immediately to bed soon after dinner.
It wasn’t much of a life, and I worked very, very, very hard to get healthy. I’ve never been more proud than when I stopped needing a nap every day of my life.
For years, I felt like a prisoner of my body, but recently, I have felt like my body was a vessel for me to live a real life, instead of the other way around.
COVID took that from me…
…and I am weirdly at peace with it. It’s not good or bad, necessarily, but it definitely exists.
It is suboptimal for sure, but whether it is good or bad…I don’t know.
In my younger years, I would have railed against my body, cried about my lot in life, and withdrawn from the world to become a bitter husk of a person.
Now, though, when I have every reason to curse the universe for leaving me stuck in bed while my friends were hanging out at a tiki bar with my wife, all I felt was an inner stillness telling me to withhold judgment until the end.
The end of what?
Unclear, but it’s helping me to avoid spiraling into the pits of depression as I have so many times before, and that is my optimal state.
People always tell me that I have myself together, and that’s true to an extend, but there’s a really good reason behind why that is true, and why I don’t ever recommend it to other people.
I have myself together b/c if I don’t have myself together I lash out at everything all the time.
It’s one of the lovely blessings of being an Enneagram 8w7. You get a bottomless spring of charisma and a hair trigger in stress.
The final product of this mix is a subtype that is very pragmatic and that will do whatever it takes to accomplish their goals. They are very self-confident and ambitious. 8w7 don’t settle for anything, they always seek more. They are also strategic and tough if needed.
Considering these two Enneagram types are not part of the same triad, this crossing point between the Head Triad (7) and Gut Triad (8) creates a new type that combines overthinking with instinct when it comes to making decisions. To feel safe, they become very self-protective and eventually get intensively aggressive too. Setting clear boundaries and showing their authority gives them assurance and advantage to get prepared for different situations. However, they also struggle for love and support. They need a safe space they can trust and gives them care and assurance.
Enneagram 8w7s are idealistic and imaginative people, they are highly creative and perfectionists when they feel comfortable. They master their field and consider themselves the best when they hold specific positions that allows them to make important decisions. -Enneagram Universe
I have to avoid stress at all costs if I want to be even mildly tolerable.
I get things done the minute they come in because I can’t not and like the person that comes out.
Earlier this month, I was running late and I literally turned into a monster. Luckily, I was alone. Still, I felt guilty about it for two weeks.
It’s not a choice. I don’t really think most of the way we go through the world is a choice. The choice is how we want to be seen and how we want to see ourselves.
The rest of it is constructing the universe around us to allow that best self to exist. We can control how our emotions present, but we can’t control having them.
I prefer to avoid the conditions where my worst self has a chance to take over.
For me, that means rigidity and predictability with way more time than is reasonable to finish things or get places before it becomes a problem.
In that world, my best self can exist. The question of good and bad habits is kind of a misnomer, anyway.
Some habits that allow my best self to exist would bring out somebody else’s worst self.
I’ve gotten very good at setting the right conditions for my best self to flourish, but I doubt it would work for anyone else on the planet like it does for me.
We all have to set our own conditions for success, and that’s incredibly personable to each of us.
I know the conditions I have to maintain to stay here, and that I absolutely hate the person that comes out when those conditions aren’t met.
That looks like having myself together because the opposite is untenable to me.
The Author Stack sits at the intersection of craft and commerce, helping writers build more sustainable businesses that allow them to thrive while creating work that lights them up inside. We strive to give authors agency in a world that too often seems intent on stripping it away from them.
We have hundreds of articles in our archive, along with fiction and non-fiction books for paid members.
If you are not a paid member, you can read everything with a 7-day free trial, or give us a one-time tip.
This was really brilliant. I upgraded because of it. Have you read Zadie Smith's essay, On Joy? I think you might like it.