The Secret to Mental Clarity

Yes, it is totally a clickbait-y title, but by George I think I actually figured something out while hiking in Wyoming.

This summer has been incredibly busy, not just because our family is gone every weekend enjoying time at the lake, but also because we had an impromptu trip to Oklahoma to buy a new-to-us boat and a week long trip to Wyoming to go backpacking. On top of trying to keep the house halfway clean and prep our oldest for first grade (which starts tomorrow 😭).

This means that every day, every week, every month, my mind is racing. As a planner and typical overthinker, I feel more secure in this busy schedule by creating mental lists, talking through many scenarios to make sure I am prepared, and repeating things to myself making sure I don’t forget them. Summer is fun, but my brain is on overload until I can sit my butt in my boat with some music and lake scenery. Then it quiets to only one or two racing thoughts, a reprieve from the 27 that are normally fighting for dominance.

I have also had quite a bit of personal hurdles with some family this summer (and if you have been regularly reading, you probably figured that out based on my last cathartic vent post). Luckily, these hurdles occurred the same year I started therapy. This has been incredibly helpful to have a professional sounding board with various tactics and coping mechanisms to work through.

Even with the help of therapy, these hurdles have been consuming quite a bit of my brain space this summer. Right before our trip to Wyoming, I had a therapy session where my counselor advised me to turn it all off. To use the complete remoteness of Wyoming to reset my mentality and rest my nervous system. While I feel pressure to find a solution to my familial issues and come up with go-forward relationship management, I took my counselor’s advice to use this trip as a reset button.

After spending a couple of early hours chatting about it with my husband on the 15 hour drive to Wyoming, I used the hours of flat Nebraska landscape to slowly close mental doors. I found safe places to rest my anger, my confusion, my guilt. I tucked them all into blankets and locked them in chests, a la Doctor Sleep by Stephen King. My subconscious gave me one last nightmare before we began our 12 mile hike to Squaretop Mountain on Sunday morning. I reluctantly strapped my pack on, then I shut the final mental door.

This was our second backpacking trip to Wyoming. Last year, I was woefully unprepared physically and mentally as we embarked on a five day hike to Titcomb Basin. I spent the last year doing rucks wearing a 20 pound weight vest up and down huge hills (even though our packs are 40-50 pounds). I practiced mental control with my breathing, working on compartmentalizing pain and discomfort. I did so many weighted variations of step-ups to strengthen my legs, although they did surprisingly well last time.

This year, I spent the first couple of miles feeling spectacular. The trail at the beginning was all downhill (which 4-days-later-Heather did not appreciate as we had to climb uphill to get to the parking lot) and it was almost magical. The floor of the trail was soft, almost bouncy, carrying a rich reddish brown hue littered with pine needles. The path circled a serene mountain lake and was narrow, surrounded by dark green forests and large stones. It felt like you might see a hobbit enjoying potatoes on a boulder, a fairy flitting between sunbeams, or a unicorn in the distance munching on some leaves.

My mind in those early miles was racing between different thoughts, but the beauty of the trail allowed my imagination to take hold, slowly slipping into creativity. Soon song lyrics were dancing around my head and I would grab onto them, dissect them, try to find where my subconscious was trying to take them.

Then the trail became really difficult. And what is funny is none of us could pinpoint exactly why. It could be because the trail was narrow, trying to take small steps with a huge pack swinging around our backs. It could be because the scenery was so stunning and we were trying to walk while looking and not trip over the rocks that dotted the path. But everyone retreated into whatever mental space they occupied to get down the trail towards our destination.

My mental space had no room for logical thought. No room to dissect my family issues or think about how much I missed my kids. Part of that was my endeavor to train my mind this past year. The last trip I allowed every intrusive thought to enter and derail me:

I miss my kids, I can’t take a deep breath with the pack weighing me down, my body is burning from lack of oxygen, oh my gosh another switchback I can’t see how far it goes, how much longer before we take a break, but I don’t want to take this pack off and put it back on, I can feel each blister forming on my toes -

This year, I quieted my mind and only grabbed onto the things that wouldn’t derail me. Like I mentioned in the early miles, it was song lyrics. As the trail got harder, it became cadences that would pull me through. I would stab my hiking poles down and count, “One, two, three, four…” before stabbing them again. I would see an approaching uphill and begin deep breathing exercises to conserve oxygen.

The closer we got to our destination, a new part of my body would start to burn up. My right shoulder with historic issues. Then both shoulders. Then my neck. Then my mid-back. Then my collarbones. Then my hips. As each body part started to yell in protest to please, please stop, I would begin my counting again:

STAB

One, two, three, four…

STAB

One, two, three, four…

When we got to our destination and made camp, my body may have been tired, but my mind was calm. The normal buzzing of my thoughts was quiet. I could focus on one thought at a time with clarity. Distractions went out the door once my phone lost signal in the car halfway to the trailhead.

The next day made my mental game even stronger because it almost failed.

Part of the challenge of me going to Wyoming is my extreme fear of heights. I get vertigo going past the third step on a ladder, which is why my ugly house is still not painted six years after moving in. Hiking the mountains means I encounter heights at some point. Last year, I had a complete mental breakdown that separated us from the group we were with. This year, I had no intention of doing that.

This is the mountain I was allegedly supposed to summit. No thanks.

The group wanted to summit Squaretop Mountain. There is no “real” trail and you have to bushwhack your way to the top, straight up. Nearly rock climbing. Once I saw how tall the mountain was at the trailhead, I declared I would not be attempting to summit. I knew having a mental break near the top was not good for anyone. Others also dropped out once we got to camp, either from being uncomfortable with the steep grade or because they needed to recover a body part or two. The part of the group that dropped decided we would hike to a lake that was “on the way” to the summit and hang out there for the day while the psychopaths others went for the summit.

This picture does not do the very steep grade justice

What our stay-at-the-lake-group didn’t realize was the hike to the lake was as straight up as you can get for two miles. We climbed over logs, crawled up the side of the steep mountain, and latched onto trees to pull ourselves up. We gained 1500 feet of elevation in a mile. Everyone was relieved when there was a kinda-trail along the side of the mountain for maybe a half mile, but that is where I started to break. This “trail” was extremely narrow, with the mountain on one side and a drop off on the other. Even typing about it now, I am sweating and my heart is racing.

Not only was I started to get altitude sickness at the rapid elevation and the cardio-heavy nature of the climb, but I was also panicking at the height. I started to lose control of my breathing. I had to bear crawl that distance to “feel safer”. My husband reported my lips were turning white and was urging me to turn around. We lost sight of the group as they worked ahead while I was trying to not have a panic attack at altitude.

My very funny friend snapped a picture of me bear crawling over my fear. Again, picture does not do justice to the drop off on the other side. Emoji face used to hide my other friend.

I gathered myself, worked slowly up with my husband behind me thinking I was going to pass out any minute. It started to rain once we got to the lake and met up with everyone. Sitting in the rain, the trip to the summit was cancelled due to everyone’s reflections about the two hours it took just to get to the lake which was a quarter of the way up. The rain gave me time to sit and re-collect myself. To center my racing thoughts, realize my mistakes, and make a plan for getting back down. It was a challenge and I practically failed, but I learned what to do to get control of my thoughts and fear.

My husband tried to capture a panoramic of the steepness of the hike to the lake. This is the closest we could get to capturing how insane it was.

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This clarity and focus carried me back down that mountain. It helped fight boredom as we were stuck in our tents for hours during a rainstorm the next day. It propelled me to speed walk back to the trailhead the fourth and final day, carrying a 50 pound pack 12 miles in six hours up way more hills than we came in on. (Okay, yes I was making all kinds of guttural noises and slightly cursing on the way out, but I didn’t stop moving or have a breakdown like last year. #progress).

The mental preparation I practiced for this year’s trip is something I did not use in my everyday life. Yet as I sat in a tent, rain tapping and trickling down the canvas, I realized the control over my racing thoughts could be replicated at home. There were of course more distractions. Kids running around with their little lives that I have a responsibility in shaping and managing. Work duties and financial obligations. My recent extended family challenges. Technology dependency with that need to doom scroll through various social media channels (a habit I re-found too quickly once I had signal again). The difference is now I believe I located my reset button. The master switch that can shut down the racing and flitting thoughts and help center myself, compartmentalizing the pain and discomfort of everyday life.

This secret path to mental control was something I thought I would get out of meditation when I tried it in the thick of post-partum depression (PPD). Instead, I had an existential crisis. The blankness of my mind let too many other things in that I couldn’t control, that threatened to drag me under dark waves. But being able to hyper focus on a mindless cadence, motivated by the scenery around me and the raw promise of food and shelter, gave me a mental path that matched the difficulty of the physical one I was walking for miles. And if I could get through that physical path to my destination, there was no reason I couldn’t make it through the mental one.

We will see how long this Buddha-esque clarity will last. So far it has held up decently well to the antics of children and the nightmares that returned immediately upon reaching civilization. I think recentering myself in nature and focusing on a menial, cadenced task will be my GPS coordinates back to that mental path to the reset button.

I would love to hear what tactics you use to gain mental clarity when things seem overwhelming or stressful. Or if you learned something from my revelations, please share!