The Test You've Already Been Taking (You Just Didn't Know It)

You know the night. Plans fell through, or you're homesick, or you're just lying in bed at 1 am with nowhere to be. Your body's still, but your mind isn't. It starts wandering, maybe toward a fight you're replaying, a version of your life you wish you had, a scroll through everyone else's highlight reel, a daydream about the promotion, the person, the applause.

And for a few minutes, it feels good, almost like relief.

Then it's over, and something in you feels worse than before you started. Hollower. More restless. A little more alone than you were an hour ago.

Some nights, though, the wandering goes somewhere else. You think about a person you love. You remember a conversation that actually mattered. You picture the kind of life you actually want to build, not the one you want other people to see. And when that thought ends, you feel different. Steadier. More like yourself.

Quieter in a good way.

Same bed. Same stillness. Same you. Two completely different afterward-feelings.

Most of us have noticed this pattern at some point and shrugged it off as mood, or tiredness, or just how thoughts work. Here's the part I find remarkable: this exact pattern is the foundation of a spiritual practice that's five hundred years old, and it started with a man who had nothing to do but notice his own thoughts for months on end.

He was a soldier before he was anything else.  Ambitious, vain, chasing glory the way a lot of us chase a title or a follower count. Then a cannonball shattered his leg in battle and ended all of that in a single moment. He didn't have physical therapy or scrolling to fill the recovery. He had a bed, a shattered leg that would never let him walk the same again, and months of nothing but his own mind.

So he did what any of us would do. He daydreamed. Long, elaborate fantasies of returning to war a hero, of winning the love of a noblewoman above his station. And it felt good, while it lasted.

But there was almost nothing else to read in that house except a life of Christ and a book of saints' stories. So when the war fantasies ran out, he read those instead. And he noticed something he hadn't expected: after the glory daydreams, he was left restless, edgy, subtly worse off. After reading about the saints, something in him settled. Stayed settled, even after he closed the book.

He started paying attention on purpose. Not to what the thoughts were about, but to what they left behind.

That soldier was Ignatius of Loyola, and what he'd stumbled onto in that sickbed became one of the more sophisticated psychological frameworks in Christian history, centuries before "psychological framework" was a phrase anyone used. He called the two afterward-feelings consolation and desolation. Consolation being the movement toward peace, connection, and life; desolation being the pull toward agitation, isolation, and a kind of interior static. He didn't ask people to judge a thought by how exciting it felt in the moment. He asked them to judge it by what it left behind. Discernment, not willpower.

That framework eventually became the Spiritual Exercises, still used today, and it's the reason a recent book caught my attention: The Soul Also Keeps the Score, which draws directly on Ignatius's convalescence to argue something I said in this week's newsletter: that trauma and healing were never only a body problem or only a mind problem. They're a soul problem too, and the treatment has to go where the wound actually is.

What strikes me most is how little has changed. You don't need a cannonball or a monastery to run this same test. You're already running it, every time you close an app, end a conversation, or finish a daydream, and notice, even faintly, whether you feel more like yourself or less like yourself afterward.

Try it this week. After anything: a scroll, a show, a conversation, a thought spiral- pause for one breath and ask: did that leave me steadier, or more scattered? More connected, or more alone? That's it. That's the whole practice a wounded soldier handed us five hundred years ago, and it still works, because the thing it's measuring, the soul, never stopped being real just because we got better at measuring the brain.

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This post pairs with this week's newsletter, "Be Brave, My Heart," and the final episode in the Holding Hope Trauma series on the Triphasic Model: Reconnection.