I spend a lot of time in my head. Technically, all of us do. Everything we sense is interpreted and packaged for us by that big, ridged, pinkish-gray organ behind our eyes. There really isn’t anything other than spending time in your head if you think of it in a certain way. In terms of the self you take to be real. In terms of the processing that governs your behavior. In terms of thinking thoughts at all.
All that said, it seems to be the case that there’s a wide spectrum of experience related to spending time in there. There are actually so many frameworks for understanding the harmony (or lack thereof) between “internal” and “external” life that it’s maybe less of a two-dimensional spectrum and more of a three-dimensional space. Or four-dimensional. Or five. Or 8 billion, I guess. There are introverts and extroverts. Impulsive types and agonizers. People who think in words and people who think in images. That’s right. There are people who think a stream of language and people who think visually. As someone who exists primarily as the former, I find the idea of the latter crazy. You’re telling me you see a shrimp frying rice when you read the phrase “shrimp fried rice” and not those literal words?
As an adult, I’ve played around with a bunch of different techniques for “getting out of my head”—not necessarily because I think being in there is always bad, but rather as a way to bring greater perspective to my life. To grow, as it were. Even coming into an awareness that the idea of being in my head is just that—an idea, not an explicit reality—has been an interesting expansion of my lived experience. Turns out that committing to a meditation practice, even if it’s just 10 minutes per day, can do that for you. Turns out there’s an alternative to constantly identifying with your thoughts. Presence, baby!
This is a mini-revelation that’s been pretty useful for me, because while I definitely don’t think being in one’s head is always bad, I do think always being in one’s head might be. There’s nothing wrong with having a rich interior life, but no matter how vibrant and expansive it gets, it exists as an extremely contained and ephemeral point in a natural world full of open ideas and energy. A compressed point that can get muddled and start to feel like it’s collapsing in on itself the less it passes into the external through interaction, through conversation, through connection. I say this as a fundamentally anxious person whose default is to overthink—when I stay inside my head for too long, my world gets smaller. When I dare to venture out, more often than not it gets bigger. Oversimplification? Probably. True regardless? Yep.
How did I get to be like this? Who knows, man. Some combo of nature, nurture, and environment, probably. My maternal grandfather, from whom I also picked up a love of cooking, happened to be an exceptionally quiet man. So much so that, to be honest, I can’t say I had much of a relationship with him. He expressed love and care for his family in many ways, but spoken word was much lower on the list than a delicious savory pastry or silent walk, side-by-side. It’s funny to think of him this way, but I wondered sometimes what his internal monologue was like while conversation bounced around the room without his participation. He may have been silent externally, but I doubt he was internally. For all I know it could have been as animated as J.D. from Scrubs. In Russian.
As I get older, I hope to continue checking in on my TSIH (Time Spent in Head — feel free to use that metric) levels and adjusting when necessary. Already I find that I zone out quite a bit in social settings with even just one other person without really realizing it. I get told I’m quiet, or even mysterious. Which feels absurd because I find it so loud in my little world, a place with no willfully hidden secrets. But I get it—to me it’s loud, but to others it’s J.D.’s monologue scenes without the voiceover. And turning the volume down inside by filtering the content outward is doubly beneficial. Lowered anxiety and a more open world. Win-win.
Imagine that.