The Easiest Buddhist Practice To Hammer Down Stress and Anxiety

Buddhism offers a toolbox of practices for living well. You have probably heard about breath meditation (ānāpānasmṛti), for example. But have you heard of “changing the peg?”

While breath meditation is focused on uniting your conscious mind with an awareness of your own body, changing the peg is focused on altering the process of your thoughts themselves.

My practical purpose in this essay is to explain what this practice is and how to use it.

My philosophical purpose is to show that the Buddhist practice complements the approach to directing your thoughts that Stoic philosophy recommends. Specifically, it draws on the same moral psychology but treats a different concern.

I am going to follow Thich Nhat Hanh’s articulation of the “changing the peg” in his The Heart of the Buddha’s Teaching. Martin Luther King Jr. once nominated him for the Nobel Peace Prize, and now, at 94 years of age, Nhat Hanh is quite ill and preparing to pass on. I think it’s worth pausing to reflect on his teachings as a way of expressing thanks.

What Is Changing the Peg?

Nhat Hanh explains how the practice fosters Right Thinking (samyak samkalpa), writing:

The Buddha offered many ways to help us to transform troublesome thoughts. One way, he said, is to replace an unwholesome thought with a wholesome one by “changing the peg,” just as a carpenter replaces a rotten peg by hammering in a new one (62).

To illustrate the point, let me give you a story.

Not long after I first became a university professor, I was nominated to coordinate the Latine and Latin American Studies program. Since it was my first time in the “driver’s seat,” I was overwhelmed.

Though I could fall asleep, I would awake with anxiety about trivial affairs. I worried about sending an email, or filing a reimbursement report, or following up on an agenda item. I wrote everything down, but my thoughts still cycled back onto the same topics.

After several mostly sleepless nights, I was ready to take drugs. What was I supposed to do, after all, send emails at 3 am? That would just make me look crazy and no one would read them before 8 am anyway. My anxieties were pointless.

Eventually, I tried changing the peg. Specifically, I thought of happy surprises. For example, I thought of the time that I flew across the country for my mother’s 60th birthday. My father had convinced her that they were headed to the airport to pick up someone else. When I showed up instead she was so flustered all she could say was: “But what are you doing here?!” Then she hugged me.

I used thoughts like these to push the other ones out of my mind, just like a new peg pushes out a rotten one. And I know it worked because I eventually fell asleep.

How to Apply This

There are actually two tricks that Nhat Hanh explains for successfully changing the peg.

The first trick is that you need to replace unwholesome content with wholesome content. My anxious thoughts were pointless, making them unwholesome. But it wouldn’t help my cause to replace them with different anxiety-inducing thoughts.

Instead, Buddhists hold that you need to pick a thought that is supported by Right Views. That means you need to think of something good, like a happy surprise, to alleviate your anxiety.

The second trick is that your new thought, the one you are going to use as a “replacement peg,” needs to have a high emotional valence. You can’t crowd out an anxiety-producing thought with a boring thought. You need something with at least an equally strong emotional charge.

It’s the emotional charge of the new thought, not its content, that will change your mind. Keep going until you find something that works for you.

But even if you use these tricks, you might find that your best efforts aren’t working. In that case, you may be facing a different sort of problem.

When Does It Work Best?

In a line, this is a practice for when you are having a rumination problem. Here’s Nhat Hanh on the point.

Thinking has two parts — initial thought (vitarka) and developing thought (vichara). An initial thought is something like, “This afternoon I have to turn in an essay for literature class.” The development of this thought might be to wonder whether we are doing the assignment correctly, whether we should read it one more time …. whether … and so on (60).

You can see that he’s describing the sort of problem I had. The initial thought (vitarka) is a true proposition and there is nothing wrong with it. It is the developing thought (vichara) that proves problematic because it keeps cycling back to a point that doesn’t have anything to resolve.

Ruminating thoughts and the anxiety they produce are cyclical in character. Changing the peg works on them, then, because you are knocking out the center of the circle.

Stoic philosophy also distinguishes between first impressions and follow up thoughts. In a piece I wrote on how Stoics address shame and vulnerability, I showed how this “Western” tradition uses that division to stop thought cascades.

Rather than go in circles, thought cascades go something like this.

I’m supposed to be an x.

Xs are people who do y.

But I’m failing at y.

So I must be a failure as an X.

And because of that, I am a failure.

This is the sort of spiral you might fall into if you’ve failed at something repeatedly. Maybe you’re an athlete who has had a string of losses. Or you’re a writer who has hit a whole patch of unsuccessful blog posts. Zeno, the founder of Stoicism, seems to have come on this pattern when he decided that he needed to learn more about the principles of logic. I had my own stretch in facing publication problems as a young researcher.

In fact, if you ever want to succeed at anything, you will fail repeatedly at some point, and your thoughts are very likely to cascade.

The point is that you can’t treat thought cascades by “changing the peg,” because they don’t circle around a central peg. Instead, you stop a thought cascade through an insight. You need to recognize that you’ve illicitly transferred a property of an outcome, something you are failing at, to a property of who you are as a human being.

But you can be a good human being whether you are rich or poor, a top athlete or an onlooker, famous or unknown, and so on. It’s a mistake to identify who you are with outcomes you cannot control. That’s the insight that breaks the chain of thought in a cascade.

Living Well By Ancient Wisdom

Buddhist and Stoic philosophy share the view that tranquility can be had if we choose it. They also hold that this choice involves practice. The “West” has called these Buddhist practices “mindfulness” and the Stoic practices “spiritual exercises,” but the intention is close in both cases.

Life is an art, and like learning to paint, you must train to do it well.

Both traditions similarly begin from the insight that thoughts have an initial starting point and a later development. Since human thinking is staged, it is possible to intervene to stop unhelpful thoughts. The Stoic focus, however, centers on thought cascades. The Buddhist practice of “changing the peg” centers instead on thought circles — on rumination.

These are complementary practices, then, born from the same basic insights into human moral psychology. That’s been my philosophical thesis and I hope it’s clear now.

The practical purpose of this essay has been to explain how to use (1) the emotional valence of (2) a new wholesome thought to (3) “push out” an unhelpful rumination. Along the way, I hope you’ve learned how to stop thought cascades too.

I’ll leave you with one of Thich Nhat Hanh’s concluding remarks, which typify his “engaged Buddhism,” the form he developed and Martin Luther King Jr. so admired.

Please practice as an individual, a family, a city, a nation, and a worldwide community. Please take good care of the happiness of everyone around you. …

The teachings of the Buddha on transformation and healing are … not theoretical. They can be practiced every day. Please practice them and realize them. I am confident that you can do it (253).

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Sebastian Purcell’s research specializes in world comparative philosophy, especially as these ancient traditions teach us how to lead happier, richer lives. He lives with his wife, a fellow philosopher, and their three cats in upstate New York.

Disclaimer: The original version of this essay was published on another platform at https://medium.com/illumination-curated/the-easiest-buddhist-practice-to-hammer-down-stress-and-anxiety-13cde6268ed