Mental health, every day

Thinking about my own situation, it made me realise how lucky I am never to have had a huge episode where it has affected my life.

That’s not to say there aren’t experiences that have shaped who I am – after my Dad died on the first day of my GCSEs, I’ve got a big target on my back that any therapist can riff on.

However, as someone who has been relatively fortunate day-to-day, I couldn’t help but think about how and why I feel I’ve got there (aside from things like friends + family.)

The comparison that crystallised for me today was allergies. It feels like a good way to put mental health on a spectrum, from the extreme to the everyday.

Some people sniff a peanut and it’s game over. Some people may have a vulnerability to or, at the very mild end, an intolerance.

I think the same may be true with mental health.

For anyone like me who hasn’t encountered the big bad yet, this might be a useful framework for shaping your life in ways that helps.

After all, prevention always beats cure.

Here’s examples of slight mental health allergies I believe I have, and what I do to try and treat them:

#content will never make me happy

So I try to buy magazines or newspapers more.

I’ve blocked Facebook and Reddit on my phone and iPad (1Blocker is great for this), because even after removing the apps, I was still loading the browser.

What I’m searching for in practice is some kind of real satisfaction, and buzzfeed or updates from a school friend who moved to America in year 10 will never deliver that.

It’s often actually chores or work that deliver there. I started making a list in my reminders app of things I can do any time, that may help scratch this itch. Play my guitar, go look for something to tidy to make my wife happy, send a note to my mother.

When my Apple Watch reminds me to stand every hour, I’ll take that opp to get up from my desk and go do one of these too, until it tells me it’s happy.

Phone time is numbing

I use my iPad a lot for work, or for reading through Instapaper, checking in on Feedly, Guardian, NYT and others.

However, my phone is a little iPhone SE, chosen purposefully because it’s a horrible way to consume content. If I ever find anything interesting, Instapaper lets me save it to consume properly on the big beautiful 120hz iPad Pro.

I never come off my phone feeling satisfied.

Moment has been another effective app for helping me be aware of time passing. It tracks how many times I pick the device up each day, how many minutes I’ve used it, which apps I’m spending most time in.

It also flicks up a little reminder/ notification every 15 minutes so you become aware of time passing.

The body is a game

As I get older, I realise more and more that my body is a machine I have to live in.

But also that it’s a kind of incredible morphing animal, that will get better at anything you make it do regularly, and will literally fire heroin into your brain if you treat it right.

However, if you let it drift, it doesn’t take much to screw up the balance. Too little water, too little food (#hangry), not enough salt, not enough movement – any of these can be disruptive.

Ultimately, on some level we are all still just a helpless baby. And so, similarly, you have to troubleshoot your body as if you were one.

Go through the list, and apply each of the necessary inputs to see if that’s what’s screwing with you.

Water.

Food.

Sugar.

Salt.

Exercise.

Naturally, I have lazily left the hardest one until the end. But that’s also because the others will help it.

Interestingly, I’ve found the answer is never caffeine. Caffeine is a (lovely, delicious) excuse you make for not actually solving the problem.

Being tired is good if it’s for the right reason. Even if you can squeeze a little exercise in, it can help feel like the listless tired apathy is because you’ve JUST RUN A GODDAMN MARATHON MAN, DID YOU SEE THAT?

(Author’s note: Your mileage may vary and in fact, I haven’t run for over a year after back surgery, so instead you will see me doing physio and/or gliding serenely* through backstroke at the local pool)

Maybe you have your own? Maybe you think this is nonsense? Maybe it’s a useful framework to join the dots from the extreme down to the more mundane. Maybe that will help a few people.

Love to hear from anyone else on this way of looking at it.