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What was the most valuable technique you have learnt to manage or improve your mental health?
A recent thread had me reflecting on my own mental health journey and what really made a difference for me, I was interested in opening a discussion about what other people found most valuable too. I'll add my own as a comment.
Stop obsessing about things you can do nothing about. I spent most of 2016 doomscrolling Twitter, and it didn't change the world or make my life better. There's awful things in the world, and mostly I can make sure my family is fed and stay informed, but I can't care about all of it. Empathy without action is just self-flagellation, and I can't fix most of it. So I care about the things I can fix.
I'm an atheist, but I still find that prayer incredibly helpful.
Ditto.
Edit: know tildes isn't in favor of just seconding someone else's post, but I said "ditto" because the longer story isn't a lot of fun. Basically this prayer is a big deal in the substance abuse/recovery world. I'm not a fan of a lot of the AA/NA dogma, but this particular bit of wisdom is something I hold on to.
You might appreciate the works of Aurelius and Seneca bud. Give them a look.
I've read Medidations and liked it. What would you suggest from Seneca? Weren't there quite a few Seneca?
Hey,
I recommend the following for Seneca
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/3543448-dialogues-and-essays
Personally I prefer to rephrase it to be about myself finding those things. That way it empowers you more since you are not hoping for an outside entity to change your life.
But I agree, the core philosophy of it is very useful!
Yes, this is huge and the ability to do this (er, most of the time) is what I gained through learning radical acceptance.
It sounds so simple to stop obsessing about it, but it's so damn hard. I wish I had learnt the skills I needed to do it much earlier in life. People told me to stop letting it affect me so deeply, but it was only in my mid thirties anyone actually taught me techniques to actually do this.
The most valuable thing I learnt during treatment was radical acceptance.
In short this is the total commitment to accepting the world as it is. This doesn't mean agreeing with it or resigning yourself to it, just accepting that reality is what it is.
It sounds simple, it's actually much harder than it sounds if you're someone who can have their day ruined by the actions of others, or just the reality of the world. It took me time but practicing this has been life changing for me. It helps me break harmful thought patterns about things that happen around me, it helps me move past frustrations, it helps me break out of rumination and regret.
A simple example is that while driving to work someone drives like a twat and nearly causes me to have an accident. I can be angry about it because it shouldn't have happened or I can accept that it has happened, no amount of frustration or anger will change that, and move on with my day.
It's extremely freeing. I highly recommend it.
I practice something similar, and find it also helps to remain as compassionate as possible. We all make mistakes - sometimes, we are the twats on the road that almost cause an accident, and we might not even notice. The amount of people in the world who are genuinely malicious is artificially inflated online, and it's easy to forget that the average person is doing their best. I used to get really mad at people for blocking the street by walking next to each other, but at the end of the day, I do that sometimes too.
Did you happen to learn this through Buddhism? It sounds very similar to something out of the Secular Buddhism podcast from Noah Rasheta, down to the example about road rage.
I studied and practiced for a while (not the spiritual kind) and there are a lot of great lessons to be learned from Buddhism, but ultimately decided that it wasn't for me. But I still carry some of the practices that help me out, including radical acceptance.
I learnt it in DBT but I'm pretty sure it was taken from Buddhism.
The "shitty drivers are bodhisattvas here to teach you mindfulness" is an old Buddhist line.
Interesting, haven't heard about this before. Sounds a bit akin to The Serenity Prayer ("grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change") and also Meta-Cognitive Therapy. The latter is some tools to enable you to decide when and where you think about things which brings you mental augush (meta-cognitive = thinking about thinking) The thing is that thinking about painful topics feels pretty deep, so we feel like were being productive, although were just bringing ourselves down, which ironically can zap our energy and paralyze us, so we're unable to take action. And sometimes you should deal with painful topics, but how much this should dominate your daily life is entirely up to you.
One of the major takeaways from meta-cognitive therapy is that you have the power to decide what you want to do with the thoughts which pops up in your head. If I suddenly think "I'm old and I wasted my life", I can continue down on that path, but I can also say "yup that's true" but decide that I don't wish to dwell on that right now, so I gently push the thought aside and move on to another topic.
Word to anyone with ADHD: If it's worth doing, it's worth half-assing. You can full-ass it once you've half-assed it, but even if you don't, half-assing it is still better than nothing.
or quarter-ass if the size of your ass makes half-assing take too long. Jk. What has really helped me is setting up and sticking to routines, as I outlined here. If making the bed is too hard, just pull the covers up the best you can before you get up.
These are words to live by for us all. Bless you...
ooh yeah this one is good advice, it's so easy to fall into the trap of not doing something because you know you can't do it "right"
i guess it's true. i managed to drop out of university by not following this
Medication compliance was most important.
Box breathing has been useful.
I'm terrible at doing it for 20 minutes, but I find 5 minutes manageable and useful. I have a basic routine where I first observe and label everything going on then just tune into the sounds around me (non judgmentally) and breathe.
I do it once or twice a day at work when I'm getting frustrated, disheartened or stuck, just go sit somewhere else and have a 5 minute meditation to clear my head. It's effective about 75% of the time!
Big agree on the medication! I've finally got my ADHD diagnosis last year and have been on meds since September and man do they help!
Therapy is very important and useful as well, but simply being able to better control how my mind works on a physiological level has no equal.
I like to compare it to paddling upstream: Therapy teaches you a better rowing technique, meds make the river flow slower. Ideally you combine the two.
Physical activity has helped me a lot. Running and weightlifting helps to keep me on an even keel.
I think there are some great tools I picked up like box breathing and recontextualizing which help me address things that affect my mental health in time sensitive situations.
But, working out daily and journaling at the end of every work day has been so crucial on me having a baseline that I feel good about and I have complete control over.
Owning and caring for plants.
Beyond the obvious medicine and therapy, I think everyone should take care of a plant. I think it’s hard to conceptualize the effect you can have on the world, and that leads to feelings of helplessness. When you grow a plant, the change is visible each day. You can see the effects of your interactions with the plant.
When the first flower buds, the stem finally sprouts from the soil, or the first leaf unfurls itself, it’s really a testament to how we can affect change in our daily lives in a small way.
It has helped me in a bigger way to understand that things do change, and it takes care, understanding, and patience to get there. While that all seems painfully obvious, it wasn’t until I successfully planted a few very easy to maintain plants, that the illustration became clear to me.
I think taking care of something beyond yourself that doesn’t demand a ton of your attention each day has really grounded me, and made it easier for me to move through each day.
Controlled breathing.
Slow breath = calmer
Fast breath = WHERE'S THE THREAT?! I'M READY.
As @DanBC mentioned - medication compliance. Therapy.
I'm also learning how to accept where I am and meet myself there rather than blame myself for not being perfect. An example of what I mean is - I'm terrible at sweeping my floors. For years I would hate myself for not doing it as often as I should, yet I didn't do it because I don't have the time, and when I do, I dread it and put it off.
So, I accepted that sweeping regularly wasn't going to happen and bought a Roomba that self-empties and I can schedule jobs so it sweeps daily. I now get to enjoy clean floors without shaming myself for being lazy and wondering what's wrong with me.
There are many areas in my life I still need to do that sort of analysis and acceptance on, but one thing at a time.
I can so empathize with the floor thing. Just cleaning in general, though I always make sure I have clean dishes. But general cleaning has always felt like this massive waste of my time and just... Pointless and annoying and why even?
Obviously that's not right, because even if I live like a hermit there's health considerations and such.
So I got a roomba that gathers a small pile of debris every day, I can mostly ignore my broom and not dread unexpected visits.
Don't sweat the small stuff. So much in life could come under the what if I did this instead. The problem with that is that it's a never ending circle. Yes some people may look at you if you dress differently for example, but the whole world isn't looking at you. This applies in so many things, eating, doing hobbies, working set ways.
The reality is we're all different, yet similar. Even if you could change stuff after the fact, it wont make life better, just different. So don't worry about it. The switch wont go off instantly, but you need to get into the mindset of oh well, so what? The more you do it, the easier it gets. Which is everything in life.
I mean have a groan and a grumble over stuff to yourself, but put it in a box after, and move on to the next thing. Don't miss the stuff in life that matters whilst you're focusing on the small stuff not to sweat over.
Some people really don't care what others think of them. They're happy in themselves, but that comes from acceptance of whom they are and what they do, and how they think, and act. And I don't mean that gives you the right to be an Eejit, but it means to be a nice person, the better person. You're always gunna get pillocks who want to comment on stuff, or point it out, but they're now the one obsessing over you.
The sooner people get away from the hive mindset we often see at school, and into the real world when being you matters, the better you'll feel in yourself and your achievements. A small achievement is no less than a giant one, it matters just as much. But you gotta fake that attitude and eventually it'll come natural. Like anything else, muscle memory, and eventually you'll be doing what you want with out focusing on what others think, or see, or feel at it. Your life, not theirs. So live it!
I’ve learned that the only thing I can control is my reaction to things. There’s a lot going on in the split second between a triggering event and the moment I feel something. That triggering event gets filtered through all my experiences in life and my belief system. And of course there’s the self-talk, what I’m telling myself in that moment. Slowing that process down and observing the why of what I’m feeling has helped immensely.
My issue was severe low self-esteem. I do believe that achievements and experience have helped me to feel better. I know it is a kind of external solution, but for me it has worked well. I do believe therapy could have worked (I have had long therapy for other issues) but when I tried I found it misleading, artificial, forced; I did not like it.
Achievements have helped me to finally believe I am not bad on doing/learning things. By experience I mean a long time exposed to nutritive environments in which I have been able to modify destructive patterns of thought. I do believe things about myself that I 100% denied long ago. I am capable to believe good things about me.
In my experience, things like diet/exercise, a healthy sleep schedule, meditation and such, are all great and improved my life quite a bit.
But the thing that finally made a difference for me was starting medication and finding a good therapist. Unfortunately, it was the last thing I tried, but I'm in a much better space now than I had been, and it's great.
When you can feel yourself getting tired or anxious while doing work, stop. Stop immediately and don't try to push through it. It is okay to rest and come back to it later. There is nothing wrong with not pushing yourself.
If you push yourself till your anxiety gets terrible, you'll end up having to stop from being overwhelmed. And you'll end up taking a lot more time to recover than if you had just stopped to rest for a little while.
Give yourself permission to rest.
But I think this advice is specific to someone who feels like they need to work and be productive all the time.
I have adhd and have the opposite problem lol. If I let myself rest and come back to it then I won’t come back to it for days. I have to keep going with the task I don’t want to do until I physically have to stop or it’s finished
Pushing myself too hard is retraumatising and doesn’t help my mental health. It’s okay not to do things that I find upsetting. Honestly, that was a huge improvement for me. It put me on the path of self love and made me realise that I’ll never be like everyone else and that’s okay because I’m me
That's what I've been learning at therapy sessions too. I've been too eager to work things out. To figure out what's wrong with me and solve it.
And my therapist had to teach me it's okay to not have to power through difficult emotions to fix things. It makes it worse to poke at things and rip it open.
You want to accept it and be okay with it. Accept yourself as the person you are now. Just be you.
We'll slowly talk things out and if we feel healed enough and eventually talk about it, it's fine. If we don't, that's fine too.
My personal life philosophy is kinda compatible with your radical acceptance: positive nihilism.
The tl;dr version is something like "nothing in life has any meaning, so let's go make the best of it!"
I think it's great way to look at life because, after all, there unfortunately is a lot of shit going on in the world, and the question about the meaning of life has bothered humanity forever.
So why not just say "fuck it, I'll do want I want, and what I want to do is whatever makes my life and that of others better"?
We can't choose the circumstances of our lives. But we can choose what to do with them. And if we have to live with the consequences of our actions, wouldn't it be preferable for them to be good for us and others?
I like it because it can be combined with many other philosophies, like stoicism, the radical acceptance your mentioned, basically take anything that works for you and disregard the rest.
It may not give someone a clear path to follow of they struggle to find purpose in life. What it does do is tell you that you have the power to give it purpose yourself.
I should probably stop here or I'll just ramble on for ages. I'm not even sure how coherent all this is.
I try to make a note of things that leave me feeling happier (or at least productive) for a while after I have finished with them, and things that leave me feeling unhappy (or depleted, etc.) for a time after I have finished with them, and I strive to maximize the ratio of the former to the latter. I do the same for people in my life; I try to ensure most of my social experiences are with people who leave me in a better emotional state than I was before, and I try to limit my time with people who leave me in a worse mental state.
I want to emphasize that I'm looking at how I feel after I do the things, not just how I feel during. Even if I spend all day doing things I don't really enjoy, such as household chores, I will still add it to the "good thing that I need more of in my life" life if it means I go to bed with a sense of achievement. Likewise, if I spend all day doing something that I find compelling but ultimately leaves me feeling like I wasted the day, I add it to the "bad thing that I need less of in my life" list.
And some things can be good or bad depending on how much I do them or the context that I do them. For example, reading books all day feels great if I'm sick, but it feels awful if I'm feeling well and wanted to get some other things done that day. So I try to make a note of those things as well and dole them out to myself appropriately.
It does require a lot of self-reflection, which I try to make room in my day for. In practice, I try to take a break between my activities and think about the activity I just did. I also go to bed a little earlier than I strictly need to and just lie quietly for a while to think about my day and my week.
Plan for the bad times during the good times. It's incredibly difficult to be in that horrible mental state and think about what might make me feel better, but if I think about what might help before it gets to that state, I can be proactive. That might mean making a list of favourite movies to watch, favourite books to read, or making my space more comfortable by decluttering things I don't use.
I've accepted that many aspects of my mental health are chronic: I cannot un-experience my past or actively change my neurology to a significant degree. Given that, I would say that right now I am in a good place after a pretty dramatic backslide in late 2022 (which overall I think was a culmination of stress that slowly built over the course of the pandemic). I manage relatively well overall.
In particular in the last six months have been extremely good for me, largely due to being correctly diagnosed (CPTSD + ADHD) and getting health care more tuned to my circumstances. Now instead of just general "anxiety" and "depression" being something occurring to me in isolation, inexplicably, I consider those symptoms to watch out for.
I've been in and out of a lot of therapy and right now my toolkit is a mishmash of what works for me from various sources. (Some of this may be repeating others' experiences with radical acceptance or stoicism, but honestly I don't understand the philosophies enough to say I subscribe to either entirely.)
I think these are all brilliant, and it's really great how well you're able to reflect on your actions and feelings.
I've tried the grateful thing and I think it's good for me but I'm terrible with sticking to it.
I think the best bang-for-buck with improving mental health comes from breaking shame cycles. The lowest hanging shame cycle fruit for most people in this day and age is to stop watching pornography and masturbating (always done in secret, lied about, fear of getting caught, fear of having a stash/video history found etc.). After that, start chipping away at the list.
When I was very young, I remember being at a wedding and there was a lady that made fun of me for dancing (I was a toddler), and that stuck with me for my whole teenage and adult life. I never danced or tried to learn how to dance in that period and whenever people would dance around me in various situations I would feel this burning shame which would stick with me for weeks and months after the event.
Once the lockdowns ended, I started learning how to swing dance. It was very hard, not so much technically, but mentally, to go back every week and feel silly and have to humble myself and be content with the feeling of not being good at something as an adult. But after a few months I was able to dance through a song, and now in 2023 I usually go and watch a live jazz band every week and tear it up on the floor (to the best of my ability).
I'm still very apprehensive of other kinds of dance outside of jazz and swing, but it feels great to have chipped away so significantly at this particular shame cycle. It has really given me a sense of creative self that I didn't know I needed/was missing, and it's an act of reclamation that has left me feeling more and more empowered with every new move I learn or sequence I put together.
This is so true! And I love that you can now dance :)
I have grown up feeling shame for all sorts of things that shouldn't be shameful at all. I'm often scared of standing out at all because of fear of judgement and being laughed at, as if I should be ashamed of who I am. This has been reflected in my clothing - generally preferring to wear black and grey, with the occasional dark blue shades in "safe" generic styles that no one would laugh at me for, nothing that stands out.
I've started to expand my colour range in recent years (well, mainly I added green and started trusting my judgement over what I liked rather than what I thought fitted in) and get more confident with it. 6 months ago I was on a work trip for a few days and wore only my new more 'me' clothing, at the end of it someone gave me a really genuine compliment on my sense of style and jesus christ it was such a confidence boost, I was riding a high off it for a week. It's really helped me realise that it's OK to try and embrace my own style and people probably aren't laughing at me.
Last weekend I bought a pair of yellow cropped trousers, which is probably the first pair of trousers I've owned more adventurous than jeans, and I've worn them several days this week (initially in the house, then tentatively outside, then when nothing bad has happened, out to the shops, next week I want to try wearing them to work).
I LOVE them. I realise they are just a pair of trousers and I am literally talking about walking round the supermarket, but I feel like wearing them I walk taller with more confidence, like I'm no longer hiding in the shadow. Empowered is a really good word for it.
Fairly recently I forced myself to stop focusing so intensely with everything I do. What I mean is when I apply myself to a task or learning something I really engage my brain and think about what I'm doing, the process, what could go right or wrong.
It stems from heavy anxiety where I am in constant fear of getting everything wrong, I'm focused on getting the task right. But the irony is for most things we humans do better when we let our brains go auto pilot (like highway driving).
Getting better at picking and choosing has really helped.
Limit your social media.
I see it happen with my wife, my mother and my sister. Heavy use of the Internet and it's various gathering places can distort your version of reality. You forget that you get tunnel vision, so believe all the terrible things that happen are commonplace when they are not. You feel constantly judged and not good enough because everyone posts carefully curated content on their feeds, giving the illusion that they're high fliers winning at life - when in truth they're dealing with their own problems same as everyone else.
Turn off the screens, spend some time in the real world and remember the real things you have. I sometimes reflect on this when I feel down and it does cheer me up.