what to do with a busy brain

Raise your hand if you have a brain that is busier than your body. Hello, friend!

I recently had a psychiatrist appointment during which I expressed distress over my level of anxiety. I know I am anxious when I stop sleeping at night—a frustrating no-win situation where I don’t want to go to bed because I know sleep won’t come. However, I’m also nearly paralyzed by the idea that I won’t sleep and will be too tired in the morning.

Cue the tiny violins, but honestly, when you work with four and five-year-olds all day, you need to be awake. They know when you are bluffing. Plus, you are used as a human tissue for eight hours a day, five days a week, and if that immune system is depressed, well, you wind up with RSV like an adult four-year-old. Hello. That’s been me for the last three weeks.

And then there is the brain bouncing. The ideas! So many of them! Constant. All directions. It’s like dropping 4,000 water beads on a linoleum floor and then trying to catch them. Yes, I’ve experienced this. My school’s maintenance staff was not happy with me. Not one bit. The fact that this happened almost ten years ago, and I am still thinking about it, gives you an idea of how unhappy of a moment it was.

Back to the psychiatrist. “I can’t sleep,” I said, “and I can’t stop thinking, and the thoughts are everywhere and about everything.” She smiled at me and said, “You are used to your mind being in demand for twelve to sixteen hours a day, split between two jobs. Now you are completely focused on one, and you are allowed to log off from work life at 6 pm. In short, your brain is on hyperdrive, and it makes you anxious when you aren’t busy.”

This is completely on point. I closed out a contract at the end of 2023, and now I am free to focus on teaching, which is one of the greatest gifts I’ve ever given to myself. This isn’t to say that teaching isn’t rocket science because, believe me, I have spent many a night trying to piece together puzzles that are children and their unspoken or undiagnosed needs. When I’m not doing that as a form of counting sheep, I’m planning the next four years of lesson plans. You never completely log off from teaching. At least I don’t.

The idea that the brain gets used to being stretched to the point of tears and then has trouble regaining its elasticity resonates. Add a mind that is predisposed to never shutting off, and you get me—someone who revels in the number of ideas and plans and excitement that her brain seems to generate all at once at any given second but is also a bit terrified of all of that action, like millions of molecules dancing and colliding, and what it might mean to just stop and take a breath.

A case in point was a recent meditation that I did with my shrink. I’m a fan of inner resources, and she guided me through the identification of three. I realized on my way home that all of the ones I chose involved movement: running, moving through and experiencing a city that never sleeps, and stepping backward off a very high diving board. But the yin to those yangs are that in each, there is a slowness that one can feel buried within the high velocity, like when you establish the perfect cadence, or you give in to the drop of a dive, or stand still while the city moves around you. You feel like you’re flying.

So here I am, and my brain is flying. It’s kind of magical, I guess, to have so many ideas and thoughts and goals, even if they all feel like constant movement. There’s a flow zone, and it’s beautiful. Now I just need to stop biting my nails.