Mental health practices that help me maintain sanity in the grownup world
Disclaimer: This article is a summary of my personal experiences. I’m NOT a qualified psychotherapist and I’m just sharing my thoughts on the things that work for me and it doesn’t mean that they will necessarily work for you. Please consult with your therapist before you try anything at home.
This is a very long read. TLDR; I will speak about my personal experience with postmortems, journaling, meditation, cognitive biases, psychotherapist and the effect they have had on me so far. Keep reading for more and I will appreciate it if you share your thoughts with me.
How often do you take a shower? Have you ever thought about cleaning up inside your head? We get obsessed with how we look, with the things we wear, our accessories and gadgets but we tend to neglect the importance of mental hygiene. We’re rarely taught to maintain it. On the contrary, I was taught to brush my teeth at an early age. If my breath stinks, somebody will for sure try to tell me about it but I’m less likely to get told that something is wrong with the way I think or behave. In fact, very few people can identify mistakes in the thinking process. And I’m not talking about mental disorders or disabilities but about more general practices that I wish I had learned instead of learning to brush my teeth.
Postmortems
I learned this technique while working with software development teams. What they do is — every time the team makes a mistake, finds a problem, they sit down together to discuss 3 questions in regards to this mistake.
- What didn’t go well? i.e. what went wrong?
- What is the root cause? i.e. what lead to the mistake
- What should have happened instead? i.e. ways to avoid it in the future
I thought I’d give it a try in my life outside my work and it has proven to be an effective way for personal growth, relationships, family. Reflecting on my past actions and results of these actions helps me understand patterns in my behavior and decisions as well as it helps me track the overall dynamics. I’m convinced it has added mindfulness to my daily life.
I keep a journal of all my postmortems but I modified the technique to make it a bit more positive experience. Along with analyzing my mistakes, I add entries for things that went well too, I run them by the same 3 questions to understand what steps and decisions lead me to success so I could extrapolate them to other things I do.
- What went well?
- What contributed to the success?
- Is there room for further improvement? How this can be used in the future? Can it be scaled up in some way?
Another positive effect of postmortems is that with time I started spotting my mistakes while making them and I was able to course correct my actions to minimize the negative results of my actions. This does prove that doing postmortems actually pays off if I do them regularly.
I like this simple technique because I can do it anywhere, on my phone, while commuting, I don’t need a therapist to help me analyze those things since they are usually basic and very subjective. If I’m struggling with identifying the root cause, I reach out to the people around me to get input from them. Usually, other people see situations differently and it helps me reconstruct a full picture of the situation and get to the underlying cause.
Physical body awareness
By this I mean maintaining awareness of my body, senses, and mood. It helps me restore my physical and mental energy and avoid losing my temper. A couple of months ago I noticed that if I work abnormally long hours at the end of the day I feel so tired that any tiny little thing can make me go off at family members for no reason, I also noticed that spotting it in time and taking a shower refreshes me and gives me a mood boost to spend the entire evening in a positive way with my family. Running and work out has the same effect on me but it is not always possible and I’m not always willing to go running or working out but a shower is an option that is always at hand.
I also use physical body awareness to justify saying no to things. E.g. It is Sunday night and a friend invites me to a bar. I used to feel bad about saying no to that kind of last-minute invitations, I would agree and neglect the fact that I’m really tired. Monday morning, I would end up feeling bad about accepting the invitation, sleeping in and getting to work late. My entire week routine would be ruined because of the lack of physical awareness.
Meditation
I used to have a misconception about meditation. I used to believe that meditation is a sort of spiritual practice that provides access to some sacred knowledge and spiritual experiences. It is natural for the mind to ramble and lose focus. Most people lose large chunks of time in this rambling without even noticing it and I was convinced that meditation teaches me getting rid of unneeded thoughts in my head. On the contrary, meditation teaches to be aware of this rambling, recognize the thoughts that come and go while being able to maintain attention focus on a particular task or at least to return to the focused state fast enough once the mind wanders off.
In some way it does expand consciousness — not in a supernatural way I used to believe — but in a very practical way where it teaches to maximize the time when we are conscious. It is a very earthly and very practical tool in physiological sense and teaches to understand how the human brain works and teaches to live with the brain. Moreover, meditation affects my daily life and work where it teaches me to be focused on what I’m doing at a particular moment, it raises awareness of the states of both my body and mind thus makes me calmer and my actions more thoughtful. While writing this article, I asked my friends and colleagues how they approach mental hygiene and the most frequent answer was practicing meditation.
Therapist
One of the best decisions I make in the past year is finding an unbiased person I can run my thoughts, decisions, experiences, and feelings by in such crucial aspects as relationships, convictions, and preconceptions. The problem is that I come from a culture where having a family therapist isn’t a common practice and is even often ridiculed, in fact, my father believes that drinking vodka resolves any psychological problems. So for me, starting visits to a therapist is a very new experience and a very awakening one. Sometimes I don’t even realize something is wrong with my thinking process or in the relationships with people around me and the therapist is there to ask the right questions to guide me to awareness of the situation and to guide me to a conscious decision on to how to react to it.
Here are the things that I’ve learned so far. I’ve learned to live through specific feelings and emotions without blocking them, learned to identify underlying feelings behind my emotions and reactions, I learn to set and communicate my personal boundaries to people around me. I’ve also learned some safety language to get out of uncomfortable conversations. One of the most exciting insights was that I can be angry at people I love. I used to have an opposing misconception. I also learned to identify my genuine values and wishes and tell them apart from the values imposed by the people and society around me. All of this I was able to do with the help of my therapist and I believe there are even more things to learn since I’m at the very start of this journey.
Journaling
By journaling I understand documenting my thoughts, ideas, not necessarily reflecting on things but making sense of the things, my feeling, and the world. Doing postmortem’s and summarizing my sessions with the therapist got me into the habit of writing things down and along with my reflections, I started documenting thoughts, ideas, theories, memories, and emotions. I use journaling to document the thoughts that come while I read books or listen to podcasts. Journaling also helps me remember my feelings since with time I tend to forget minor facts and emotions. It doesn’t have to be done in text, sometimes I record a video of myself or a voice memo if I want to keep a specific intonation or emotion.
Journaling also helps get rid of some obsessive thoughts and ideas that take up much of my cognitive energy. There is a practice called morning minutes which turned to work better for me in the evening. I dump on the paper all my thoughts and plans for the following day in the evening and I go to sleep without the fear that I forgot or missed anything. It has also proven helpful for me to do a quick journaling session occasionally when I feel overwhelmed.
Writing things down
I used to keep my to-do lists in my head. That would lead to me forgetting random things, often really important ones, focusing on the wrong things and wasting much energy on trying to remember everything at the right time. E.g. I would go to the mall and forget to buy the very thing I came for so I would stroll about the mall searching for triggers to remember all the things I wanted to buy and I would end up buying things that I don’t really need along the way. This would eat up a lot of time and result in lots of stress. So now I’m writing everything down, even very simple things like bread and butter. The effect that it has had on me is I spend less time wandering around the shops, I can afford to be less focused on buying things but I can let my brain think about more important things like this article for example or listen to a podcast episode.
Learning about logical fallacies, cognitive biases and mental traps
I started reading up on these topics out of curiosity and I was surprised that they are all over around, I am full of them myself. Understanding how these three items can get me into making wrong decisions, affect my emotional state does help to maintain sanity in everyday life. Especially when I’m forced to make a decision fast.
Books that I’ve read on these topics are Mental Traps by Andre Kukla, Harry Potter and Methods of Rationality, YourBias.is and yourlogicalfallacyis.com articles by the School of Thought project. Books that other people have recommended to me but I haven’t read them yet — Thinking Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman and Rationality from AI to Zombies by Eliezer Yudkowsky. The list of cognitive biases and logical fallacies is so long, if you decide to learn about them more, two things I’d recommend:
- Don’t repeat my mistake to try to understand them all at ones. Start with most basic things, learn to identify them in yourself, and try to figure out the way of changing your behavior to avoid them.
- Be very careful if you decide to raise other people’s awareness about them, people may react negatively if you critique their thinking.
Slowing myself down
Technology is speeding up everything especially the content that we consume. I used to look up to the people that share the number of books that they read per week or year and I wanted to do the same, I was trying to learn speed-reading techniques but they turned out not to work for me. I learned to speed up my reading, I learned to skim the books and be able to grasp the ideas but after some time, the very short time I would forget everything I wasn’t able to remember what a particular book was about if somebody brings it up in a conversation.
I figured it takes time for my brain to digest things and to draw real-life analogies so I could apply the information from the books to myself. So I quit the constant race with myself and other people and I actually started reading more books than I used to while I was obsessed with the quantity. I noticed that speeding up transcends other areas of my life, so I started to slow down things and stopped looking up to other people’s results.
I now care more about the lessons I learn from each book and how I can apply them. I started making small summaries of books and podcasts that I consume, writing down the key takeaways and the insights with my own words. The same applies to watching documentaries, writing blog posts, I do it at my own pace and I’m happy with it. Things started to make sense finally.
That’s all I’ve got to share for now. One thing I’d like to ask you is to share the approaches that work for you with me and the people around you, don’t be shy to bring up the topic of mental health. I would like to raise society’s awareness about the basic mental hygiene techniques that exist out there so that people could choose the ones that suit them. I wish they taught this at school as a required discipline but until they do we gotta do it ourselves. I hope this was helpful and I will appreciate if you ask me questions and critique my thoughts. I’m really happy to chat! Feel free to hit me up in here in comments, on Twitter https://twitter.com/dinakazakevich or Instagram https://www.instagram.com/dina.kazakevich/.
