8 Guidelines On Living A Mentally Healthy Life, For The Mentally Healthy
You don’t need a ‘burnout’ or serious depression to start taking your mental health seriously. What I learned from a ‘ratty Thursday’.
Last Thursday I sent a string of unfiltered, harsh, and reactive messages to my co-founder Jon on Slack. They were in response to a Bruce Lee metaphor he’d used to describe our organisation’s approach to working with clients.
It’s a nice metaphor. It really neatly explains what we do (which is pretty complex and always changing) succinctly and cleverly. And in the grand scheme of our business development, it’s not super important.
But last Thursday I wasn’t as positive about it. I was a dick. I overreacted. My response was out of character. And more than that, I had all of these feelings coursing through my body: I felt angry, sad, anxious, tired, and confused.
So I cancelled the couple of calls I had scheduled, and went home for a nap.
What was going on? I wasn’t burnt out. I wasn’t depressed. I was happy. Work and life were awesome. Everything was objectively great.
But I hadn’t been attending to my mental health. Nobody is immune from encountering little bumps in the road. Here’s what I’ve learned over the last couple of days reflecting on that experience.
I’ve always been the least emotionally erratic person I know
Everyone around me seems to have much higher highs and lower lows than me. Of course I get excited about stuff, and sad about stuff. But I’m generally a happy guy. Life feels pretty good, and I just kind of get on with it.
I’ve been described as “relentlessly chipper” and “intolerably smug”.
I feel like I’m generally living between a 5 and a 7, whilst some people around me yo-yo violently between 0 and 10. I always though this was because I had it sorted. Maybe I’m just a mentally healthy person? For some reason, whether because of my genetics or lifestyle, I’ve managed to avoid the dark depressions that are afflicting my generation.
But I don’t think this mental stability is necessarily a good thing.
It means that I rarely take my mental health seriously
When I feel physically healthy and well, I feel no real desire to exercise or eat right. On the contrary. I feel great, so I eat lots of tasty cheese and drink beers with my pals and lie in the sun all day.
The same happens with my mental health.
When I’m feeling good in life (which I generally always am) I feel no real desire to introspect or listen to my emotions. On the contrary. I feel great, so I’m going to focus on helping others, on working loads, on filling my brain with books and podcasts and conversations and plans.
But if I drink too much beer and eat too much cheese, eventually I’ll get fat and lazy and die.
And if I work my brain too hard and fill it with too much crap, eventually I’ll lose focus, grow anxious, and go mad.
The last 6 months have been intense in a way that I’d never considered
Running and building my new company (flux) with Jon has demanded a completely different way of thinking and working to what I was used to as a freelancer or employee.
Everything feels important. Everything has the potential to turn into something amazing. Everything could crumble at a moment’s notice.
We could be rich, or we could lose it all.
The ups and downs have been so much greater. We’re building a creatively ambitious business, an indie management consultancy that will change people and organisations for the better, and will allow me and Jon and others to live the lives we want to live. That’s a tough gig! And it’s taken a mental toll on me.
Nothing big. Nothing bad. Nothing serious. But I need to nip this thing in the bud.
So now it’s time for a few ‘life tweaks’ to make sure I’m fighting fit to change the world and live a flourishing life
I don’t think I need strict rules. I don’t do well with rules. So what I’m going to bring into my world are some guidelines for living a mentally healthy life. These are designed to orient me in the right direction.
Jim’s Guidelines For Living A Mentally Healthy Life
Less of some things, which will make space to have more of other things.
- LESS CHECKING all of the apps that I could spend hours and hours checking: Slack, Gmail, Medium, Instagram, Facebook, Xero, Drip, LinkedIn, Float, The Guardian, Al Jazeera, Twitter, etc… 🔔
- LESS DRINKING at times when I want to be mentally sharp and physically well. I love partying with pals, but I also need to be better at not drinking during the week. A cheeky beer or wine every evening with Ellie is really lovely, but the older I get, the more I feel it the next day. And…it’s not helping my little man-belly get any smaller 🍻
- LESS GUILT about what I’m doing, or not doing, or the people I haven’t seen in ages, or the exercise I haven’t done, or the work tasks I’ve not finished, or the life plans I’ve not achieved yet. Guilt feels like such a waste of energy. So I’m going to try and stop feeling guilty 😳
- LESS BLURRED LINES between work and play. I’ve always been pretty good at this, but now my work has radically changed. I’m running and building a business now. So as work becomes bigger and more complex, I need to learn how to disconnect from it quickly and often 💻
- MORE COOKING because it’s fun and cheap and important and relaxing. It’s also an important indicator for how relaxed I feel in general 🍛
- MORE CLEANING because I really believe that a messy house leads to a messy mind. And because I cleaned the bathroom 2 days ago and instantly felt way better about life 😊 🛀
- MORE WALKING because “the something closest to doing nothing is walking” (Rebecca Solnit), and it’s just about the simplest, purest, easiest thing that you can do if you’re feeling a bit weird or angry or anxious or tired or confused🚶
- Which leads me finally to MORE NOTHING. Which I wrote a whole article about a couple of months ago. Because doing nothing sometimes feels like the hardest thing to do. But when you’ve achieved it, you feel calm and light and clear 🙌
Here’s a longer quote from Rebecca Solnit’s ‘Wanderlust: A History of Walking’ just because it’s awesome:
“Thinking is generally thought of as doing nothing in a production-oriented culture, and doing nothing is hard to do. It’s best done by disguising it as doing something, and the something closest to doing nothing is walking. Walking itself is the intentional act closest to the unwilled rhythms of the body, to breathing and the beating of the heart. It strikes a delicate balance between working and idling, being and doing. It is a bodily labor that produces nothing but thoughts, experiences, arrivals.”
Thanks to…
Ellie, Jon, Sanctus, Yuval Harari, Derevo, and the Sächsische Schweiz in Germany for some mind bogglingly beautiful nature.
In fact, our spinoff company Com4Com is hosting a comedy for mental health night in London on Thursday 25 October at 2Northdown in Kings Cross, London.
