You Can’t Fix What’s Broken with Something Broken

We’re talking days going by with zero hours of sleep, crushing my mental and physical health. My sister said, “you are depressed and you need to start dealing with it. You won’t take medication (it hadn’t gone well for me in the past) so you need to find another way to manage it.”

I don’t know why, but that hit me, hard. It certainly wasn’t my first experience acknowledging my depression, my parents and I attempted a slew of treatments for me in high school, but those caused more harm than good and we eventually just kind of gave up. I must’ve needed to hear it a different way, because this one stuck.

One to always try to solve my own issues, I hopped on Amazon (a fairly new website still at the time) and bought a workbook called something like Dealing With Depression Without Medication. It was pretty elementary, very straightforward, and exactly what I needed at the time. It was my first real understanding that these broken thoughts I was having day in and day out, robbing me of sleep and of health, were NOT NORMAL and not real. I can’t tell you how many times that book floored me with typical depressive thoughts and I would react, “what, not everyone thinks that way??”

That was the start of the game changer – recognizing my thoughts were not normal, not healthy and could be healed.

Fast forward to my introduction to mindfulness meditation (more on that in a future blog or this one will become a novel) where it was further engrained in me that thoughts are just that, thoughts. Some are helpful, some are highly detrimental and NONE of them are something that you have to react to or feel bad about.

But here’s the tricky thing about thoughts, you can’t fix what’s broken with something that’s broken.

Those broken, harmful thoughts can not be fixed by something that is also experiencing a brake when you are depressed – your brain. It’s like trying to fix a broken leg using a broken arm. When your brain is sick, you simply can’t logic yourself out of those thoughts. You can’t recognize them as harmful. It’s a loosing battle that is far more likely to cause you to spiral further into illness than accomplish anything else.

THAT’s when, for me (I am no doctor or therapist), the breath became the key to help heal.

Focusing on my breath through mindfulness meditation allowed me to slow down those harmful thoughts, recognize them as “just thinking,” and try my damndest to move on. Did it always work? No. Do I still have to fight like hell somedays? Yes. Did it work enough to get me on this path to balance and wellness? Absolutely.

A healthier brain (healed through something that was not my brain) helped me sleep a little better; which in turn gave me energy to exercise a little more; which made me want to eat a little better; do a little more good for myself and my community; build better, healthier relationships; and on, and on, and on…

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Balancing a Brain that’s Fighting Back

By Katherine Warren • April 6, 2025

Your brain will straight up lie to you. There’s no way to sugar coat that, friends, there just isn’t. But your brain also creates beautiful ideas and inventions, and well, everything you see that surrounds us. It’s the power of the AND. Your brain is the king of the “and.” The first step in finding balance is recognizing this. The second step is discerning the beautiful part of your brain from the beast. The third is not reacting to, judging or negotiating with the beastly part. It’s tough, tough work. It’s lifelong work. And even if your friends start calling you things like the “definition of balance” (a term so kindly bestowed on me by some friends recently). You’re still gonna have to work your a** off on this part for the rest of your life as you sway back and forth, in and out of balance. Does it get easier? Yes and no. The beauty of understanding the feeling of balance is that you don’t have to rely on your brain so much. You know how it feels to be in a place of solid, grounded peace, no matter what your brain is shouting you “should” or “could” be doing. The harder part is that the more you find balance, the more likely it is that you are upleveling your life. Your focus and pure presence have likely brought about more of whatever you define as a successful life--mentally, physically, or materially. That uplevel can mean those brain lies cut a little deeper, make you question every decision you make to protect your peace. If you’ve learned to sit with that pain in your belly, it might fight a little harder to make you pay attention to it. It might put up a bigger fight to try to force you to listen to those untruths. This is when you have to remind yourself, your brain will straight up lie to you. Under no circumstances should you negotiate with these thoughts. That’s where spiraling lives, that’s where lack of balance lies. Sometimes holding hard to your balanced routines will do the trick.