What are your mental health upkeep habits/lifestyle?
I've seen a few posts about sharing issues, but I don't think anything about habits. I'm former "quantitative-self" hobbyist (if you want to call it that), keener and have a side interest in psychiatry. So in my personal life I'm very active and serious about my own short and long-term mental health. I'm wondering if anyone shares my habits or has others I have not considered. I wont link any literature because there is a lot out there to support most of these habits and I can't make this exhaustive (but I'm happy to help find specific resources).
Morning quiet time. I wake up early and spend about an hour drinking tea, looking outside and reading. The major benefit here is it gives me a buffer before the start of the day. I used to get up and rush out of the door - I would be stressed from the start and wouldn't have an idea of how to go about my day effectively.
Reading fiction. I used to read a lot more non-fiction (pop sci and "self-help") but I found with fiction (and also biographies) not only is it generally easier content to process, but the narratives can be therapeutic. There is something about getting exposed to other peoples thought processes (real or not) and overcoming of challenges that can be comforting or inspiring when facing your own.
Aerobic exercise. And also anything exhaustive - as in you gave it all of your energy. The general health benefits are obviously well established at this point. But, a subjective (AFAIK) experience of mine is the feeling of self-actualization - a sense of victory and fulfillment you can get almost anytime anywhere, and fairly frequently.
Regular social contact. Specifically AFK/face-to-face. This seems banal but it's really not. I make a serious active effort here - I think about who I haven't seen in a while, who I might feel like would complement or share my vibes right now or near future and make plans ASAP. This among the most important of my habits, or at least has the most therapeutic effect. Something about social interactions, even if they're just about talking shit, can be therapeutic and energizing. And this is coming from someone who is generally an introvert and would usually prefer to stay home.
Restrict social media. I probably don't need to explain this one. But I'll also add that, after following the advice of someone on Tildes (sorry I can't find the post!) limiting my news source to only the Current Events of Wikipedia has done wonders for me! I've stayed informed and have avoided the anxiety-inducing clusterfucks of newstainment. I group this with social media because they're so close nowadays (gossip?).
Meditation. Big one right here. I've been practicing for ~7 years now, and it's very noticeable when I skip a 20 min session a few days in a row - I become more agitated, short tempered and anxious (is depressed, but mainly just too focused on myself either way). Specifically "mindfulness" (loose term) or Vipassanā style (I use and highly recommend Waking Up). Style here is important because they all exercise different neural pathways. The product of this practice 1) being much more aware of what has emotionally triggered me and 2) being more able to let go/resolve of negative states of mind. E.g. instead of grinding my teeth with a negative thought train the past 3 hours I notice it's all petty within a moment or two and am able to move on and focus on my task at hand and later sleep soundly.
Psychedelics. Namely the tried-and-true classics. This one is finally getting the attention it deserves in the public domain. As opposed to the others which I do on a near-daily basis (aim for daily), psychedelic experiences I limit to only a handful of times per year because 1) it's work, it requires planning and a day or two off; 2) the positive/resolving effects last for months/years/lifetime; and 3) it requires integration with you baseline reality life to really be effective.
This one hands down has provided me the most benefit out of all and has inspired me to actively pursue everything above, especially meditation and social life. Specifically, it's the perspective you can get from a psychedelic experience that can be like years of therapy because it's all internally-motivated - you can get an objective perspective on you own life that no one else can offer and one you normally would not accept, especially if it's self-critical.
For best results I do this with close friends, at home and/or in nature - taking long walks by the river or woods. Sometimes quiet time at some point as well, to allow self-reflection, taking a moment for an honest review and check in.
One thing that's been extremely helpful for me is to talk to other people about it when I'm feeling frustrated, angry, annoyed or whatever emotion it may be. Just getting the words out of your mouth and telling other people is a huge weight off your shoulders.
Either my wife or close friends. I've known my close friends for nearly 20 years, so we're all relatively okay with talking to one another about "uncomfortable" things like depression and mental health issues.
Obviously there's a risk of it becoming a constant cycle of complaining, but just vocalizing my issues every once in a while has been essential to my mental health for years.
I do this frequently. I'll delete my social media apps (Reddit, Tweetbot, etc) from my phone for a few days and just not use them. Sometimes it's once a month for a week, sometimes every week for a day or two. But I can generally tell when I need to pull back from social media before I hit a wall.
This is what I've been struggling with. I haven't had a reddit app on my phone for a few months but I've got a habit where when I'm bored I'll open up my browser, type in "reddit.com", and use the mobile site. I've tried blocking it with DNS66 too, but I've just turned off the DNS and browsed before. I honestly don't know what to do at this point.
Oh god I feel your pain. I was there too.
What helps me the most is actively paying attention to my triggers and evaluate my values (which meditation facilitates). It helps to have all of the obstacles up (no apps, use blockers) which prevents it from being 100% automatic. Next time you disable the blocker and start typing it in, pause and think - do I need this right now? Is this what I want compared to my other values? e.g. time spent chatting to a friend or resting your eyes or reading something useful. Also, it can be very helpful to set times where you are allowed to indulge. For me, its 20 min at lunchtime and after work. Oh and delete/unfollow anything remotely interesting that keeps enticing you - remove the stimulus!
This requires baby steps and you won't always be successful, but the trick is making it a habit an persisting. It took me several months to go from no apps to no cravings.
Thanks for the tips! Limiting usage might be really useful, actually. I really want to stop Redditing in bed, just after I get up and just before I go to bed. So I'll start there, and try re-implementing the block.
ooh I have a fix for that one too, that was one of my most dreaded behaviors. What worked for me is having a "phone station" or a dedicated spot to charge/keep your phone away from your bed. For me it started with having the phone on the dresser on the opposite side of the room and then it became a spot in the kitchen. Basically, do not rely on willpower for these changes - sculpt your environment to incentivize the person/behavior you want.
It also had the added benefit of making me get out of bed sooner (to check my phone :P )
I've tried having my phone in a different room, but maybe the kitchen (or somewhere way out of the way) is the answer. Thank you again! I'll try it this weekend.
If you've got an Android device, there's an app called NoSurf that really helped me curb my reddit compulsions. It severely limits what you can see (only top posts, only top three comments), and grays out things once you look at them. For me, it moved reddit from being a bottomless hole of content to something more like checking for new emails. I would pop in, see the highlights, run out of new stuff, and then stop. I used it for a while, and it was a great middle-ground between full reddit access and quitting cold-turkey.
Oh this sounds amazing! AND it's on F-Droid, how'd you know!?!? :)
I generally live my life with no regard for my "mental health."***** I've had various degrees of success and failure with this model. I'm not sweating it, though. The panic attacks will happen when they do and I'll bear down and ride 'em out (which is very easy to say when you're not experiencing one).
I do think aerobic exercise (running, in my case) is good for building a tolerance for discomfort (read: a bit out of breath and sore). And once you've run long enough that discomfort becomes normalized and fine and maintainable and that can kinda feel ~zen~.
*****that is to say, none of the "healthy living" choices I engage in have had any demonstrable effect on improving the condition of my mental state. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Edit: Re: psychedelics - that's one thing that I can point to that had a detrimental effect on my mental health. I've recounted my experiences here before, suffice it to say it was a hell of a year (in my head) for the next year or so after I did shrooms.
I would reconsider this. We notice the bad things going wrong far more often than the good things going well. There are also the long-term effects that you can't experience in the present. Still worth doing.
The impression I'm getting from your comment is that you may have contraindications against it and/or you didn't have the appropriate resources to support you.
True enough. But I doubt I'll correlate the effects, positive or negative. Still, I take my vitamins, exercise, create, etc. and let the cards fall where they may. Neuroticism over whether or not I'm maximizing my outcomes is something I (mostly) try to avoid.
Quite possibly. All I know is that it was bad for me (and maybe could be for others) and I feel no urge to test those waters again.
Yeah, all we can ask for is to do our best with the cards we're dealt!
At the end of the day, we want to live whether we think we do or not. I've been down (very down) at times, to the point of seriously wondering why go on. Yet, I experience panic attacks on occasion (which really feel like dying) and during them I can only feel fear and want to stay alive.
I wonder if that's just the biological imperative to live, or something more...
Totally fair, and psychedelics are definitely not for everyone. That being said, so much of the experience is dependent upon whom you’re with and where you’re at. Careful planning of those two pieces can prevent a bad time.
Speaking of which, I’ve had a bad trip or two, but the positive experiences I’ve had outweighed the negatives. If anything, they were life lessons to help me understand the sources of my anxieties and fears. That being said, they aren’t necessarily anything I couldn’t have figured out on my own, and had I not been somewhat experienced in what I was doing it could have ended much worse.
Overall, I use psychedelic experiences to further appreciate life. Too long sober, and my depression can manage to find only negatives in a bright and lively world.
I was amongst experienced friends. It was my first time and I didn't expect to do shrooms that night, but the fact that they were so non-chalant in doing them made me feel comfortable giving them a go. The experience was pretty alright, until it wasn't. The "bad" part of the trip was extremely disturbing. There were many simultaneous events happening in my head and I died in terrible ways in each (probably deserving death in one or two, as my mind came up with ways for me to be a horrific person....like, really bad).
As bad as that was, though, it was the year that followed that out me off. I experienced some paranoid delusions for quite a while after. Not to the point of disrupting my life, as I was able to maintain my composure, nevertheless I was on edge for quite a bit.
Like I said, not some dice I'd like to roll again. Anyhow, I value life and experience sans psychedelics.
Sorry to hear that you had lingering negative effects from your trip, but it sounds like you’ve worked past it so I’m glad you’re in a better place now.
I had a psychotic break along with a panic attack on acid a year ago, and I wouldn’t wish that existential dread on anyone. Luckily for me, my thoughts were so absurd that they didn’t stick with me after the trip was over, but I did have to take some pause afterwards and contemplate the fragility of my psyche. I don’t blame you for not wanting to go down that road again. The important part is that you can find comfort in every day life, as that’s where you do all your living.
100% agree. I have gained at least as much from my challenging experiences as I have from my easy/entertaining ones.
Though sometimes this can be therapeutic too. In the right context.
Oh yea this one is huge for some people like my partner. Especially in polar latitudes!
That's right. Most songs were too joyous, and it didn't feel right to listen to them, there was a disconnect. Gloomy songs felt like friends that understood you.
But after some years of this, it definitely felt like playing these songs trained my brain to be depressed whenever I'd listen to them.
sauna
Not only is it healthy, (reduce all cause mortality risk up to ~40% depending on dose) it is tremendously useful for dealing with incoming stress as a proactive measure.
health smoothies
Our bodies are complex chemical machines, we need proper nutrition for all the chemical machinery to work effectively. Think of nutrition as limiting reagents in a chemical process.
A simple rule for smoothies is greens, deep color, sulfur.
I usually get everything pre-washed from Costco to make smoothies easy to reduce barriers.
Plus any other good things to consume.
Oh god yes saunas! Rhonda Patrick raves about them and I am super interested in doing it more often. It's so hard to find convenient access to them, though.
Regarding smoothies - I would also recommend sprouts (broccoli and others). It's not the sulfur per se but the sulforaphane (video).
If you have a basement/garage handy, I've built a 5x8 sized one for about ~4k.
Oh neat, any recommended guides for that?
I don't much right but playing an instrument definitively helps me. I used to play a lot of kalimba, like every morning, now I play more guitar. Otherwise I don't use any electronic device (I have a dumb phone that I switch on only when I really need it), and read in the public transports instead. I used to listen to music all the time and it was a bit hard to stop (it's almost an addiction).
It's been two things for me, mainly - listening to music, and just walking around or sitting down in a park, enjoying the sun, the breeze, the fresh air, the birds, and the peace. I've long held a suspicion that there must be some potential in nature therapy, so to speak, to help folks with depression and anxiety in particular, and it's been interesting to see some preliminary scientific support for that in the past few years. I find that I get a little more irritable during wintertime, and it being too cold to relax outside is a pretty big factor in that.
Oh totally! The Japanese have Forest Bathing
I find that having a lot of plants in the house also helps, and like wooden furniture and art. Specifically fractal art with dimensionality 1.3-1.5, which is what nature usually produces, is soothing for humans.
Cold showers. They feel really, really good. They're also a lot better for your skin than hot showers and apparently improve circulation or something.
Yea definitely better for the skin. I love the invigorating feeling of mustering through a cold shower. Like a sense of accomplishment lmao
Zero social media/networking. Perhaps it's because I'm old and long ago made the decision to cut toxic people out of my life, family included, but I simply don't see the point. The boring day to day activities of others hold no interest and anyone I wanted to keep in touch with over the years, I have done so via the old fashioned way, a phone call/text/email. I have no twitter, linkedin, myspace, or anything of the sort. I do technically have a facebook page for my dog to buy car parts and even it is kept in a completely separate browser that is only used for facebook. I get on about once a week to look for parts and then take a shower after feeling dirty.
As stated above, I cut out every toxic person, no matter who they are. I carefully take into account their histories with me, pros and cons of being in contact with them, and remove any that have more negatives than positives. My well-being and mental health is worth more to me than the well-being and mental health of any left behind by my absence.
Tying in with the above is the ability to say "no" and just generally not care about things that simply do not matter.
Doing things I enjoy. I absolutely love working with my hands and the feeling of accomplishment after a day's hard work or finishing building something is better than any drug I've tried. In fact I don't like psychedelics or anything much more than a good beer after a productive day as they put me in a state of mind I do not have full control of and therefore do not enjoy.
A good cathartic cry from time to time. Shit happens, things build up, even my brush it off approach and stress relief isn't always good enough. So I'll have a ugly cry, let it all out, and then move on until I feel like I need to do so again. Happens about once a year or so. Although haven't needed to manually do so in awhile as the deaths of several close to me have triggered it automatically.
What do you mean?
I've found it really helpful going to a therapist for the past year and a half. Just talking -- saying out loud the negative feelings I've had -- has helped me taxonomize and recognize the unhealthy patterns in my mental life. I'm still trying to break those patterns, but I wouldn't be able to do that without therapy, a professional who knows what's "normal" (i.e., common) and what's not.
It's kind of the point to tell them private stuff, they're there as an objective observer to point out the weak points in your own view of self. I've told my therapist things I haven't even mentioned to my fiance, which isn't great, but only because I should be telling my fiance everything -- but sometimes it's scary to tell her things about my darkest thoughts, you know? So I can tell my therapist, whose only interest in my life is professional, which means that I don't have to worry about the future of our relationship.
My therapist has never tried to meddle or steer me away from anything -- I'm sorry your classmates have had that experience. I don't think that's what a therapist is supposed to be, and in fact I think that it could cause greater trauma for the patient. I'd say if you start going to therapy, and your therapist makes you uncomfortable in any way, stop seeing them. They work for you, after all.
I started seeing a therapist about a year and a half ago for depression and anxiety. I've always had periods of sadness and dark thoughts, but they'd gotten worse in my late twenties, and were really affecting my enjoyment of life. So I finally decided, let's see a therapist about it. I found one who took my insurance and I just started seeing him. It took a while to get there, though -- it was hard to get the gumption to take all those steps, and my depressed brain kept telling me stuff like I didn't deserve it, I was scared, what would he say, etc. So I didn't ask Am I mad? per se, but I knew that I had some issues and went to someone to talk them out. It's really been working for me.
I hope this helps you a little. Feel free to reply or message me if you have further questions about it.
Arketamine! Totally eradicates most of my depressive symptoms for months at a time.
Oh nice! Have you also tried Esketamine?
I have! Wouldn't recommend it., though; it did relatively little for me, but the "positive" effects I've had described to me by others I've taken it with don't really seem to be worth much, and anecdotally (though also backed by a bit of research) it tends to be drastically more short-term.
Riding a motorcycle, learning new things or going to new places.
Yea? How often? Are there enough opportunities to be always doing new things?
Have you learned to juggle?
I have actually, not well. I was into fire/flow props for a while though (poi, contact staff, double staff).
But I do see your point.
Yes, I have also done the fire staff thing for a while, although I never did end up taking it back to burning man like I originally planned.
Sounds like you just need to write down a list of more cool stuff you might want to learn and just do it.
Oh I never meant to say I don't have enough to do - quite the contrary! I was just wondering how you balance your time to constantly be doing new things.
I had a kid, so now I get to do so many cool new things, and more importantly I get to see the world again through a brand new pair of eyes.
On the aspect of Psychedelics, I'm outlining a potential protocol to maximize success based on my understanding of how they work. On a trip, it significantly reduces the activity of the Default Mode Network (DMN) in the brain which is responsible for one's ego. An overactive DMN is thought to be the source of anxiety and maybe depression(?). One thing to understand is that while on trip, as the DMN is shut down and ego-death occurs to some extent, it becomes possible to analyze your deepest feelings as a 3rd party observer and provide objective feedback.
It also releases(?) a bunch of brain derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF), which from my readings describe it as miracle grow from the brain. It's essentially a catalyst to rework/rewire neural connections, or in other words very accelerated learning, so the aftermath has potential to be tremendously positive or negative on some long-term basis as there is a literal rewiring of connectivity.
In the way the brain works, (no one knows), but I have a basic theory that what we behold/focus/contemplate, is what we become. So in this tremendously accelerated state of learning/rewiring, it acts as a compounding & leveraging mechanism. This is like investing with leverage. Use $100 to borrow $10,000 and buy an asset. If the asset price goes up to $10,500 and you sell, you've gained $400, a 400% return. If the asset price goes down to $9,500, and you sell, you are now -$400 in the hole and have lost your original $100. I suspect this is why bad trips can be so terrible for some and so rewarding for others, and thus I think it illustrates why preparation to maximize the chances of a good trip is so crucial.
With a trip, the neural connections that can be obtained over ~6 months of therapy may happen in ~8 hours. This is the potential panacea that's offered.
So, the way I think a trip should run is as follows over a 3 to 5 day period.
Day 1 & Day 2:
Day 3:
Day 4:
Day 5:
I think this could be compressed into say a 3-day thing, but I think taking the extra time is really useful. Perhaps it makes sense to do this on a week-long vacation. where you can approach the psych in a well-rested and positive state of mind.
I suspect/theorize that being in non-optimal bodily health (sleep is sooooooo important for the brain) can just stress the brain out in a state to form connections where it should not.
One thing from my experiences I can say is that, just taking the substance doesn't yield as much benefit. Just taking it can make one feed good for some time, then after it wears off, it was just a nice hit of serotonin for a while. One must put in the hard work and learning to then derive the benefits of the hard work.
Yea, I pretty much go by that kind of schedule now just by habit (though definitely not at the beginning!)
I envision/dream one day of having mainstream public retreat centers like this, where you follow a set schedule and have everything provided (like a Vipassana retreat centre). They already exist for Ayahuasca and Iboga but those are fairly esoteric.
I guess none... yay chronic depression
It's a tough cycle to make even a bit of progress out of but baby steps, baby steps will help.