Stressed out, worn out, burned out, overwhelmed…these seem to be the words on everyone’s lips today. And everyone is searching for the secret cure to make these feelings go away, to bring more joy and peace into their lives. The funny thing is I believe you already intuitively know one of the key factors contributing to your disquiet - but the problem is that you don’t know that you know. Let me be explicit about what it is and then let you be the judge. You decide if it makes sense to you based on your personal experience. I call this key factor the “Language Trap.”

What is the Language Trap?

We humans developed language to be able to communicate with others – to be able to share our experiences, our hard-won wisdom, and our ideas with them. Since we cannot directly share our internal experience with others we resort to words to convey in a short-hand manner our interpretation of our experience. The problem is that language has become an over-used habit. We no longer use it only to communicate with others – we use it to speak to ourselves. We insert our own personal “translator” (the voice in our head) between the sensations we experience and our thoughts and feelings about them. To a great extent we don’t really “know” about something until we put it into words in our heads and talk to ourselves about it. And often we find ourselves unable to turn off the narrator in our head.

Unfortunately, although the voice in your head is a valuable mechanism by which you can formulate and plan your future or ruminate on and dissect your past it is not the voice of the present. You cannot be present while “the voice” is running because it is always leading or lagging your actual experience. Therefore language is necessarily an abstraction, a dissection, an analysis of your experience. When you are talking to yourself you are essentially cut off from the flow of existence – and may experience a sense of isolation, frustration, of “not really living” or of “life passing you by” - especially if you find that the majority of your time is consumed by internal dialogue.

True experience is what occurs in the present and it is not to be found in the words you generate in your head. It is absorbed through the senses – e.g., sight, smell, taste, touch, hearing, and kinesthesia (i.e., body sense). When you look at something, hear something, touch something and then you “name it” (i.e., attach words to it) you are no longer experiencing it – you are dealing with an abstraction of it and you fall into the Language Trap.

How does the Language Trap contribute to stress and overwhelm?

There is a mental “overhead” attached to the translation process you engage in when you convert experience into words and it can be very exhausting. Have you ever watched someone trying to speak your language whose native tongue was not the same as yours? Did you notice how it required effort on their part to translate from one representational form to another? That is what you are doing when you put words to your experience. Because language is such an over-learned skill you may no longer be aware of the effort it requires to extract and synthesize aspects of your experience and convert them to symbols (words) but it exists nonetheless.

Another reason language can be exhausting is that it lends itself to constant “replay.” While your actual experience happens in an instant your internal dialogue about the experience can go on and on for minutes, days, weeks, months, or even years as you incessantly rehash the past, overanalyze an imminent decision, or rehearse an imagined future.

How can I overcome the stress and overwhelm caused by the Language Trap?

The antidote to the Language Trap is to learn to reconnect directly with your sensations thereby quieting your internal voice. Most of us intuitively seek sensation as a refuge from stress – for example as we turn to music, walks in the woods, massage, sports or other physical activity. Each of these is highly evocative in that it engages the senses directly without need for interpretation.

Meditation can also work when it serves to focus the attention on the physical sensations of breathing. Another technique is to find some physical object that you enjoy – for example flowers, crystals, or birds - and allow yourself to simply gaze at and experience them without naming them. Open yourself to the sensations and “feel” them as they communicate with you. Even the simplest acts of redirecting your attention to really notice a color or a smell or other physical sensation can provide you a form of mini-relief from stress and overwhelm and re-center you.

The Bottom Line:

The real experience of the joy and peace of life comes through sensation not through words. Sensation evokes emotion directly without the need for intervening “interpretation.” It is important to remember that words are just a type of short-hand that cannot hope to embody the depth and complexity of the objects or experiences they are intended to represent. When you spend the majority of your time in mentally manipulating words – abstractions of reality – this can prove a tiresome, stressful pursuit that leads to feelings of disconnectness and overwhelm. Now isn’t that something that you intuitively already knew at some level?

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