Looking at the different hobbies everyone has picked up during quarantine has been really fascinating to see. I appreciate that in a school that constantly emphasizes science and engineering, the community around me isn’t afraid to explore the more artistic, athletic, and even just the pure fun parts of life. I’d like to now share something I’ve been doing these past few months: The Brain Scale.
Until I became a senior, I used to consider myself “the master of disaster,” managing to find ways to catastrophize every single aspect of my life. My commitment to perfection and high achievement from my earlier teenage years served to be nothing but toxic in these past four years of college. I equated success and happiness to having my life put together all the time, giving my 100% to everything, and doing all of my tasks perfectly. As a result, I would execute my routine as such. I would plan days and deliverables by the minute and never stopped to reflect on how much this perceived structure was actually hurting me. Eventually, a day would come after 3 weeks of this nonstop routine where I felt tired and unhappy. The minute this feeling came, a sense of inexorable dread also accompanied it. What now? Why do I feel this way? Am I going to be okay? Am I destined to constantly fail because of my anxiety? I’ve been doing everything right, so why do I feel so damn bad? The questions would turn into affirmations of my failure and the affirmations would then lead to a complete destruction of my routine. Here I was in this unknown place again, angry at the world, angry at my friends and family, and unhappy with myself. I really thought that maybe there was just something wrong with me and I would never be able to grasp onto mental stability for longer than a month.
That last statement wasn’t completely wrong. There really was something wrong with me: my continuous catastrophizing. Of course, if you know me, you know that I am an introspective person. I recognized that I was setting myself up for failure every time, but I couldn’t make the mental connection as to why I went from 0 to 100 so quickly. To get to the bottom of this, I finally decided three months ago to journal every day. I was hoping I could pick up on some of my mental patterns and…well, I wasn’t sure at the time what I wanted to do because I wasn’t even aware of the issue. I just knew that something had to change.
My journal entries were dense with words. I have too many thoughts in a day, so I quickly realized that I needed to find a simpler way to summarize where I was mentally. That’s when The Brain Scale came into existence. It was really simple. I would draw an axis of rotation that the visual representation of my brain would lie on. If my brain was drawn tilting to the left of the axis, then I wasn’t doing too well. If it stayed still, then I felt content. If it leaned to the right, then I was feeling good.
There’s nothing revolutionary about what I did. I’m also 99% sure I didn’t even invent this kind of scale and it exists somewhere in research literature. Yet, something as simple as seeing what my brain “looked like” every day did wonders for my mental health. I never understood why I always felt so bad. It turns out, though, that my brain cycles through “good,” “neutral,” and “bad” throughout the day quite often; I was never just one or the other. As a result, my brain usually stays in the “neutral” territory overall.
However, my problem was that I would hold onto the emotion in a panic when my brain entered “bad” territory, completely forgetting the fact that the rest of the day might have been good or even okay. This makes sense because, like everything in life, emotions come and go; that’s their function. I wasn’t letting go and in my tenacious efforts to figure out what was wrong, I became my own problem. Anxiously clasping onto and waving around these feelings ballooned into worries about the rest of my life, throwing things way out of proportion. What started off as something so basic became so much more complicated than it ever needed to be.
We go around and take these personality tests, sometimes by ourselves or sometimes for classes, to describe us. Other times, we look to the people we trust to tell us our identity. What we fail to recognize is that those things are extremely static. It is so much more important to recognize who you are during times of change and uncertainty and whether those habits are conducive to a healthy lifestyle. And that’s something only you have the answer to by chronically reflecting and observing.
The action of catastrophizing was my toxic trait; it served to undermine my self-esteem and impact how I treated those around me. And it’s not always easy to face the brutal fact that you have toxic parts of your personality, working as automatically as your blinking eyes and as insidiously as a spreading tumor. But if you accept it nonjudgmentally, remain kind to yourself, and take baby steps towards improving it, I promise that you will have clarity and be a better version of you.
Next, I’d like to nominate Vivek Pai to share his quarantine story!
