Mental Health Awenness Month For All Humans |
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Hello Human! May is the Month of Mental Health Awareness, so on this first weekend of the month, let’s plan something for celebrating it. I realise mental health should be important every month, but since we’re still not so good with it, let’s manage expectations and start small. Before we dive into the main topic here is a couple of announcements: Are you going to POINT conference in Sarajevo this week? If yes, on Saturday I'm leading an anti-burnout workshop! If you have seen my recent webinar on burnout and activists, it will be a deeper, face-to-face version with a lot more place for questions and discussions. Looking forward to seeing you there! I wrote a blog post for the Open Heroines community and it is about Codes of Conduct during events like conferences or forums and is drawing from my personal experience. I believe community-care goes beyond individual self-care and with this post I explore what needs to be done around creation of safe conditions where everybody can feel safe, included and welcome. If you want to celebrate the Mental Health Awareness Month with some new techniques, my friend Susan Comfort is inviting you for a free webinar on Seven Stress Solutions for a Mentally Resilient Work Team. It's designed for anyone with a nervous system and a palpable level of stress. Susan Comfort knows a lot about human brain + stress + resilience. Highly recommended! The date is May 23, 8 p.m. Berlin time. |
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So let me share my 1 biggest challenge for this month and how I deal with it. How not to break my mental health when trying to improve it.
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The balance was never my best side. Finding the balance in the practice of finding balance also proved to be a challenge. Because the more I learn and know, the more I see space for my improvement and this is how I end up with an endless battle and constant lack of satisfaction - the exact opposite to what I look for: a gentle progress and contentment with being where I am. I needed to abandon the need and efforts for improving myself, optimizing, and constantly trying new ideas. I just couldn’t go on anymore and I decided it was enough. If you wonder how it looked like (still looks like this from time to time), let’s see a process of making a decision for going for a walk: thinking about how walks are improving blood pressure and how blood pressure is important for general health and how keeping myself healthy is my duty… I can go on endlessly... This is only a decision about going for a walk. Can you imagine my train of thoughts when preparing this newsletter? ;) |
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And the more we focus on something, the more important it seems. That, in addition to Maslow’s: “I suppose it is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail.” forces me look deeper and deeper for solutions because I want a fully equipped toolbox, not just a hammer. And then a discover more complexities and more issues and more tools and it is all hypnotically fascinating, but at the end profoundly overwhelming.
Btw, there was a very interesting Invisibilia Podcast episode about teenagers' extreme chronic pain and how the treatment for it can be surprising and in a way counter-intuitive. |
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So the question is how not to kill myself with self-development / mental health practices. And I found out 3 ways to do it: |
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1. SURPRISE YOUR BRAIN
Reading funny books. Funny and smart. For me the more absurd, the better. My favorites are Douglas Adams' Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency books (there is a not bad tv show on Netflix too); Jonas Jonasson’s books about an illiterate girl who could count, and about The Hundred-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out the Window and Disappeared. The absurdity - something far away from reality is the only thing that keeps me away from analyzing, contextualizing and going into “the coach mode” of constantly researching better tools. The surprise factor keeps my mind entertained and engaged enough to let me let go of thinking about everything else.
For me books work better than movies or stand-up or anything else that is funny, but this solution is about the surprise rather than the form, so you can choose what will work best for you. 2. SURPRISE YOUR BODY
... aka the silly adrenaline of fun. I’m not an excitement seeker. I find my passion in books and conversations, but I recently reminded myself of the power of screaming and laughing out loud and how helpful it is for me when I need to get rid of overwhelming mazes of thoughts. I went to a People’s Fest (Volksfest in German) and took an amusement ride (you know, the one spinning around with losing the sense of control and depending on simple physics and gravity). And I could scream at the top of my lungs and I was laughing out loud. And after that, I felt lighter, even if it was only for some time, it was helpful in making the next decision about how to keep the balance. 3. NOT-SO-SOPHISTICATED TOOLS FOR EMOTIONS
Instead of focusing on my thoughts, I looked at my emotions with, what Emily and Amelia Nagoski describe as “observational distance”. It is one of the mindfulness techniques, but I didn’t want to think about yet another big method, and I just needed something that will help me break the cycle of over-analyzing and at the same time not being able to focus on anything in particular. I felt drowning in too many layers of thoughts and feelings and in consequence not being able to distinguish what was important. That is why I prioritized emotions as signs of something that might be important, and I sifted them and observe them from a distance but also with all the self-compassion I could find. |
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So for the mental health month, my question for you is: How can you keep your balance in progressing in building your mental health, and not killing yourself with your own expectations for it? |
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