Calming the Mind: Meeting Overwhelming Thoughts with Compassion

I have always had a complicated relationship with “mindfulness”.  Many people have framed mindfulness in a variety of ways.  Some described it as an inner calm characterized by a lack of thought.  As a designated ovoverthinkerI am skeptical at best.  Others describe a state of being in the moment fully and without distraction.  I live to multi-task.  My rabbi framed it as an appreciation of the small, quotidian joys in life.  I have had a gratitude practice for years, so?

“Mindfulness” has alluded me for half a century, largely because I never found a way to define it for myself that felt real, authentic, and personal, until I listened to a podcast on dopamine and mental clutter that aired in 2025.  The guest was a clinical psychologist who developed overwhelming post-partum anxiety after the birth of her first child, and she used mindfulness to counter the intrusive, unpleasant, and very intense thoughts.  The psychologist described a particularly disturbing and overwhelming series of ideas that intruded during a quiet morning atfor herwhen her husband was out with bathe by, she had slept for seven hours consistently, and she was trying to enjoy the breakfast that had just been delivered to her door.  She started having images of hurting her daughter.  The moment was terrifying, and she immediately called a colleague, who reminded her to simply breathe, observe the thought without judgment, and then let it go by challenging it with an emotional “gut check”.  It was as simple as that.

Through that woman’s story of new motherhood, I found a definition of mindfulness that finally resonates with me.  Mindfulness is just observing our thoughts without judging them, acknowledging they are there, and then emotionally accepting that they appeared for a reason.  Thoughts are not future predictions, they are not logical judgments reached after deliberate discernment, and they are not always something we control.  They are flashes of our inner life.   They are barometers of our emotional and psychological distress, making themselves known so we will do something about that distress.   

The psychologist went on to explain that those images of harming her daughter were the canary in the coal mine of her mental health.   When she was aroused, exhausted, and dysregulated, her intrusive thoughts had felt like an inconvenience, but she could mostly power through or ignore them, attributing them to the stress of a crying baby and too little sleep.  A fleeting idea of harming her child felt reactive but understandable at those moments.  When she was relatively rested, calmer, and free of the burden of direct childcare, those same ideas were alarming.

She started working with a therapist who specializes in post-partum depression and anxiety, who helped her to understand that those images of hurting her child were just a subconscious fear about not being a “perfect parent” coming to the surface.  Her insecurities of inadvertently causing her child irreparable harm were manifesting in overwhelming thoughts of actively abusing her baby.   These thoughts happened again, even after starting therapy.  When they occurred, she was able to simply acknowledge them without judging them, recognize that they appeared for a reason, and accept that they were just part of her parenting journey.  Mindfulness allowed her to have them without the experience derailing her day or harming her mental state. 

Like many people in the world today, I have had an abundance of thoughts racing through my head in the past six years.  We live in tough times with a constant barrage of trauma and uncertainty, and my brain has been trying to process that.  Some of these thoughts are difficult to tolerate, and they seem foreign to who I am as a person, inconsistent with what I value and how I want to live my life.  That used to alarm me, but now I simply acknowledge that these thoughts are there for a reason, and I don’t treat them as intentions or goals, or even real reflections of who I am as a person. I just greet them and do the work to understand why they showed up when they did. 

Written by: Deanna Diamond, LPC