How To Look After Your Mental Health
Life lessons from a former psychiatric inpatient
Over the last ten years, I’ve learned more than I may have wanted to about looking after my mental health.
That may seem an odd thing to say, but it’s true. Five crippling periods of depression, lasting several months each, taking me out of work. Two severe manic episodes, resulting in arrest and compulsory detainment on a psychiatric ward for weeks at a time. Several false start recoveries and a lot of hard work later, I can finally appreciate the lessons I learned along the way.
Clinical or not, it’s clear that our collective hold on our mental health is becoming increasingly tenuous. Both antidepressant use and anti anxiety prescriptions are dramatically on the rise. The WHO now estimates that 1 in 4 people will suffer from some sort of “mental disorder” during their lifetime. No one is necessarily immune.
For me, dozens of different medications formed just one part of a long, hard and faltering recovery process (whether they actually helped at all is another issue — but I certainly gave them a shot). Another part was forcing myself to follow well-worn practical advice — from exercise to mindfulness. But these challenges pale in comparison to the main work I had to do to reach recovery. The main work was psychological.
It’s a lot easier to lose your mind than it is to find it again.
Looking back, I find it easy to pick out where it all went wrong — the cocktail of conditions that led to me falling ill. It’s almost a series of subconscious circumstances, choices and attitudes that unbalanced the stability of my sanity. Of course at the time I wasn’t aware where it was headed.
By contrast, pulling myself out of the hole left by those five years was the most conscious effort in my memory. And I found a lot of that effort had to do with my mindset.
I learned that to truly look after my mental health I needed to adopt certain mindsets.
And I’d go so far as to argue that these mindsets are universally valid and helpful — diagnosis or not. Whether you’re fully balanced and happy, in a mental health crisis, or anything in between, heeding these lessons can only serve to support you in being and staying as well as possible.
To that end, here are some of the key lessons I learned during my crisis and recovery.
1) Never put all your eggs in one basket
Life constantly turns up unexpected challenges — but if we’re not prepared or able to adapt, we’re in for a rough ride. One of the biggest traumatic triggers to my illness was when my passion project collapsed and failed. I’d been so invested in the dream of making it a success that I had no plan B. When it didn’t work, it was the void in purpose that first sent me spiralling into depression. It’s not just businesses — we also need to watch out for putting too much pressure on our relationships. Ultimately we need to avoid becoming attached to one particular outcome in life.
The green reed which bends in the wind is stronger than the mighty oak which breaks in a storm.
- Confucius
2) Remember that only you decide your dignity
Humiliation is something we do to ourselves — if we don’t care what people think of us, we won’t be affected by it. And when you’re struggling to overcome a mental illness, focusing on the stigma is clearly not going to help you. But this is easier said than done — and being ill showed me just how much over-thinking about other people’s opinions of us can actively worsen our mental health (this will be no surprise to those concerned about the psychological impacts of social media).
But the key realisation I had is that no one cares as much as you think they do — in fact, closest loved ones aside, most people take a passing interest in others’ lives and are really only concerned with their own issues. When I was ill, I splashed all manner of content over social media — there couldn’t be anyone who knew me who didn’t know what was going on. In the aftermath, I was mortified.
But today’s gossip is really only tomorrow’s old news. I got off social media and haven’t looked back since.
3) Focus on mission over vision
Humans are obsessed with finding out how the story ends. We constantly fantasise about our vision for how life will be when we get to a certain milestone — marriage, promotion, and even (particularly if we’re religious) death. We seek fulfilment in chasing an ever-transient happiness, designed to elude us until the end. And along the way we forget to appreciate the ride. As the Stoic thinker Seneca put it:
Life is like a play: it’s not the length, but the excellence of the acting that matters.
Seneca
Becoming ill taught me to focus on who I wanted to be and how it best serves me to approach life, rather than where I want to get to.
As Alan Watts says in one of my favourite videos, ‘Life and Music’, it’s not about just holding out for the grand finale -the final crash of cymbals — but about dancing to the music along the way. If we can focus on how we operate in the face of the challenges thrown at us, rather than desperately wishing for things to be different, then we’re more likely to make helpful choices that support us to make progress, instead of remaining stuck in the same place.
4) Choose your own story
The biggest lesson I learned during my years of mental ill health — and it’s one I’m still learning every day — is that only we have the power to be the authors of our own lives. Though we may not be able to control what challenges come our way, we do have the ability to choose our response. It takes work, but it’s within our grasp.
I could have chosen to see those five years as dead time — wilderness years — an unfortunate blip that set me back from progressing in jobs, in relationships, and reframed me as someone worthy of pity. It certainly often felt like that at the time.
Or I could see those five years as offering me a richer understanding of myself, of the potential and limitations of the human psyche, of the meaning of real support and unconditional love. And I could resolve to use that understanding as a force for good — to pay it forward to others struggling with the same issues as me.
I could choose to see myself as a survivor rather than a victim.
Which mindset better encouraged my recovery? The one that gave me a chance to move forward, rather than keeping me stuck in a negative loop. Find a way of interpreting your life events that truly serves you, and your mental health can only benefit — no matter what your starting point.
You have power over your mind — not outside events. Realize this, and you will find strength.
- Marcus Aurelius
