I really don't think the best way of building up mental health reserves is to approach this thinking like an entrepreneur or an investor. To be honest that sounds like the broken record that is the Silicon Valley or general capitalism BS machine.
Instead, I would advocate participating in communities, working for social and environmental justice, volunteering and acting in a spirit of generosity that is directed away from the self. You can do this in many ways and one of them is to participate in non-toxic open source communities that build together and give away the product freely.
What is the difference, to you? To me, working for improvement can too easily become redirected towards self-aggrandisement. I did this, I accomplished this. Working for justice implies that laws and rights, natural or human-made, are being denied and broken.
Improvements are (often) incremental, and easier to break down in to actionable tasks. You can also already start on existing work/not working parts. Justice on the other hand is (often) focused on the end-goal, which is much harder to break down to actionable task.
Work on social and environmental improvements by the day, asses it on social and environmental justice every month.
Yes, one should avoid that. I mean there are a few problems with focussing on justice (you might disagree of course):
- justice cannot be achieved. Look at the courtrooms (which is actually there to serve justice), but is the verdict really justice? So persuing justice can make you cynical
- for the example of social justice, you could approach it by thinking it is just (or solves the justice problem) to take away the wealth of the rich. Does this improve the social condition of the unfortunate? Also this can make you radical and bitter.
- Also if you go for justice, you might start to see a lot of things as 'unfair' this is a negative feeling
Generally I believe a mindset of helping others/nature by planning to improving things is better (for the cause itself and for oneself) than trying to fight perceived injustices.
It just seems like if you rally under the flag of justice, meaning to improve the condition of the world, you also attract people who are interested in retribution and punishment (another element of justice).
Lots of middle-class activists for justice, for example, don't actually seem like most of the poor very much (understandable: the poor are a basket of useful idiot deplorables). They're more motivated by their hatred for the rich, and punishing someone is still justice, even if that won't actually improve the material conditions of the poor (which isn't that big a problem, because some of them are trump voters and we still have to punish them).
In my experience focusing on political causes of any kind is not a great path to happiness, as it almost inevitably results in anger, frustration or sadness at the state of the world.
I think that you will find that directly helping those around you who are in need is a lot more beneficial to your well-being than you might believe otherwise.
The poster I was replying to used the phrase "working for social and environmental justice". My understanding of that phrase is that it refers to trying to bring about political change, which can be a stressful experience.
If I worked for my own happiness, how would I look at myself in the mirror knowing that my happiness is based on an unsustainable lifestyle? How can I be happy knowing that that my sisters can't get three square meals a day and my brothers can't breathe?
>If I worked for my own happiness, how would I look at myself in the mirror knowing that my happiness is based on an unsustainable lifestyle?
Clearly you have goals/values other than just "maximising own happiness". If your goal was purely that (not suggesting it should be), then those other values would just stand in the way of happiness.
I would argue that you are in a better position to help your brothers and sisters from a place of happiness. You know, put on your oxygen mask before you help the passenger next to you. Otherwise you’ve passed out and are of no use to anyone.
Neglecting and suppressing emotions definitely doesn't improve mental health. The belief that everything must be happy and bring pleasure is delusional and hurtful.
In this article the author covers a few areas to consider in managing mental health:
Sleep,
Diet,
Exercise,
Stress Management,
Exogenous Compounds (from coffee to melatonin to Prozac, and anything in between)
These are certainly important factors, and I think we need to look much more broadly at underlying factors than just these (or just drugs).
I've been reading about mental health issues for years with my own ups and downs, and the best book I've read on this topic so far is Lost Connections by Johann Hari.
In the book he describes the ways modern life has disconnected us from a lot of what humans find meaningful, and given that it's not surprising that rates of depression and anxiety have skyrocketed. For me, learning what those underlying causes are has meant I could start making a conscious effort to address them in my own life. It's a lot of work, but it's been far more effective than just trying to make myself feel better by improving my mood with exercise, sleep etc.
I think as a society we've become so good at dealing with symptoms, but we're afraid to spend the time to look deeply and investigate causes. Politicians think that riots are the problem and if they stop the riots with force the problem goes away. But riots are just a symptom of a sick system.
I'm working on pretty much all of the suggestions from the book so I'd highly recommend giving it a read if you can. Some big ones are moving closer to nature, spending more time with a close group of friends (at least pre-lockdown), looking back into my past for things I'd avoided thinking or talking about.
Also meditation was for me a pretty good mood improver, but it's more recently helped me uncover some painful thoughts and surface emotions that I'd essentially avoided without realising it.
Lastly, the value of exploring all these things with a therapist can't be overstated, if you have the privilege to afford it.
I don't know the contents of the books, but nature and friends are great ones. Also teaching others, helping kids and people younger than you. I think you can get a lot from their enthusiasm and excitement for life. And it feels good to feel like you're passing on stuff you've learned to people who may be around after you're gone.
>looking back into my past for things I'd avoided thinking or talking about
For a long time I had many small and (apparently) inconsequential triggers which brought up past anxieties, or memories of the awkward and the nervous. Previously, I would remember such event and feel a brief stab of shame, etc. and then throw the memory back into the recesses of the mind to come back again whenever it felt like tormenting me. So a few a months ago I started catching these repressive thoughts - delibrately pulling them back after discarding them - and analysing them. I quickly realised that I had been letting them hassle me without giving them adequate thought as to why.
I think this is also relevant to some of the other comments about proactivity in challanging mental illnesses (not that I am qualified, or that it really covers anything or everything), in that the plunge into the icy and dark waters maybe harder to handle than the swim.
I find this to be a very frequent occurrence for me. What exactly did you do with those thoughts that made you feel better? Oftentimes I find that even if I face the thoughts head on it just leads to more shame.
For me, I try to dissect why they make me feel a given way.
I have come to realize that I have a lot of weird trust issues that stem from my desire to be perceived in a given way. Further analysis has helped me realize I want to be perceived that way because it's a defense mechanism for me - by being seen as the person who can fix anything, I feel better about things I can't control like pandemics and unrest. For me this also ties into how I self perceive my own value - being useful gives me value. This then begs the question of why I feel such a strong need to be externally validated...
And obviously your particulars are different but the goal is to open the dust covers and understand what is driving and controlling the mental machine.
This is where a good therapist can help, regardless of mental health. Having a third party to dissect the thoughts with you can give you a new perspective on the situation.
Generally the situation doesn't warrant shame, and there's underlying reasons for you feeling the shame about that situation. You can learn a lot about yourself from those.
A good friend can do the same thing, but even with the best of intentions not everyone knows how to non-judgmentally help you address issues without unintentionally causing more shame. Sometimes the reasons we keep these thoughts to ourselves is because we shared them in the past and were hurt by the response.
I'm not the OP, but I made many changes I'd love to share. They have been very simple -- trade off salary for time. And trade that time for health.
I took a somewhat lower salary so I can have a lower commute. My commute currently is 5min drive (never), 20min metro, 60min walk, or 15min leisurely cycling. I usually choose the walk or bike, unless it is raining. I have not driven even once to work in 2.5yrs.
Similarly, i "traded" money for beauty -- an apartment on the bike trail. I'm paying about $150/mo more but my daily commute is now 95% through the forest on a bike trail. The commute has almost no traffic. I either think, listen to audiobooks, or catch up with my mom on the phone during commutes. Sometimes I try to just relax with the goal of Shinrin-yoku https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nature_therapy
I realize this isnt possible for everyone. It may not even be possible for me long-term -- how often do you get an office and apartment along a wooded bike trail? In my case, I did take a hit on level/salary to achieve this (temporarily?) I was previously a startup CTO and usually get headhunter messages for CTO jobs (20-30 person companies) and FAANG jobs, etc. I generally cant explain it but I'm just taking a breather for myself. I still work hard now, but my daily time on the trails are sacrosanct.
It seems like another world given previous jobs (trading floor in NYC, management consultant with global travel, startup CTO with overseas sales/operations.) But I'm so happy I tried this out and continue to keep with it, despite the many seemingly better opportunities out there.
The sad thing is these geographical situations are not usually available with the types of jobs i'd like, or I'd try to have both! Before, I could have done the same thing, say, at Central Park or Hyde Park -- but -- lets be honest and ask whether it happens or not? It rarely did for me outside weekends. Now, I "force" myself to do this twice a day.
I find fairly crowded parks in the middle of big cities are not even close to nature trails. It would be interesting if the work-from-home culture takes hold and allows more people to live closer to nature.
> Politicians think that riots are the problem and if they stop the riots with force the problem goes away. But riots are just a symptom of a sick system.
No the system and other systemic or social problems are just a excuse.
Riots, at least those in recent events are an example of contagious social behavior. That is evidenced by the fact that the blamed issues have been known problems for longer than two weeks with people actively working for years to raise awareness of them. If other people are so passionate about these social problems that they are drawn to riot then where was this passion more than two weeks ago? Why suddenly congregate into emotional hysteria, especially since other people have been actively addressing these concerns for years, when the problems of complaint are preexisting and were clearly previously known to these congregants?
Have you ever, individually, faced a crisis? Reached a point at which - something you've been slowly working on for years - the progress just isn't quick enough, it feels hopeless, and then you lash out?
As an Army guy with a family embarking on his fifth overseas deployment spontaneous bursts of rage are frowned upon. I don’t do that. I have gotten comfortable to sparse, tiny, lonely living conditions and learned to regulate my mental health according to the expectations at hand.
> the progress just isn't quick enough
I suspect the majority of people engaging in riots, and possibly the protests as well, have provided little to no participation of any kind towards these social concerns before two weeks ago, and if that is true the speed of progress is irrelevant.
Of course the riots are just a symptom. And of course a lot of people of in those riots are not there for the cause.
Would there be riots right now had Floyd not been killed? Have you even seen a riot started out of nothing? Just for fun?
I doesn't change the original point that if a politician's first goal is to stop the riots, it's only to cover a symptom while the real problem is not fixed. And it's a matter of time before everything starts over again.
When I read about your overseas deployment, something goes off in my chest - about which country you're going to be deployed to and what horrors await the people there. It is not about you, but about the historical imperialism America has been perpetrating over rest of the world, starting in 1899 with the Philippines.
And I've read enough history to wonder why and how the black population has suffered so much injustice for so long. You ask "why now" and you question their motives. But the only explanation I could come up with - for why they suffered in silence for the last few decades - was that the enemy was too formidable. Yet there is a breaking point, and George Floyd probably was it. I'm not hopeful that there will be any change though. On the contrary the American system will make black people pay, in a long, insidious, and institutional manner.
> As an Army guy with a family embarking on his fifth overseas deployment
Seen any riots in Iraq? What did you think the Arab Spring was?
(Conversely I suspect the people in the protests are almost certainly all politically engaged and at least vote. The previous political engagement of BLM has not achieved anywhere near the same results as the protests have. The protests appear to be the only way to get police charged for murder even when there is clear video evidence.)
Having been there I can honestly tell you it isn’t the same. The conditions are very different. No matter how bad things get in the US there is still a very large gap between US conditions and those that would drive people to self-immolation.
Relative deprivation will do the trick. Double the prices of essential goods in the US overnight, and watch how fast a revolt forms, and what violence it will resort to if it meets resistance. Nevermind that everyone here'd still be very well-off by global standards—they'll hang the politician who doesn't give in to their demands, anyway.
Sure, and if a meteor crushes the capitol while Yellowstone violently explodes in apocalyptic volcanic doom all while running out of toilet paper again due to Covid I suspect people will be upset. I don’t envision the hanging of any politicians though.
I think one difference might be that, before now, self-immolation wouldn't have earned any positive attention in the US, while it might have more cultural significance as protest elsewhere. There might have been people in the US who would have self-immolated if they thought it would make a difference.
No, I'm going to have to lean harder on this question: you're a military man, in the US Army, who's been deployed overseas, and you can't recognise insurgency/counterinsurgency when you see it? I mean, I'm just following along at home and that's clearly what the situation is and also why the police are losing for exactly the same reasons as Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq. Because they're making the same mistakes.
The thing about counterinsurgency is that shooting insurgents makes more insurgents. Especially the indiscriminate use of "non lethal" rounds to cause severe and permanent injuries: shooting people, including reporters and medics, in the face with rubber bullets. Every act of filmed violence (e.g. https://twitter.com/Reuters/status/1268759072876224514 ) makes the situation worse.
From a military perspective I would be hard pressed to recognize my fellow citizen peaceful protesters as enemy combatants. Those that are not peaceful (actively destructive) are petty criminals and still not enemy combatants.
According to the definitions though it is not an insurgency. An insurgency is violent opposed to a non-violent rebellion. Most peaceful protesters appear to disavow violent rioters.
I suspect their point was that quoted line. I didn’t miss it so much as I just didn’t comment on it when the rest of the comment is just such nonsense.
Your argument is basically since you were not aware of what others in society were doing, they must not have been doing it?
Do you see how superficial this appears?
In case you didn't know, BLM has been around for a long time and NAACP has been around even longer. The issue of systemic violence against minorities has also been an issue in the American social scene for at least the last 100 years.
People are coalescing into groups more so for non cognitive behaviors than for deliberate premeditated concerns but when confronted by that reasoning deflect. When confronted they don’t deny it or excuse it but instead argue defense of positions that were never in question.
> Do you see how superficial this appears?
Good. That is my point. If you find the subjects that people are protesting about concerning and important you should very much care whether outside observers see something sincere or superficial.
The rest of your comment I agree with 100% and have been repeating this numerous times without directly specifying organizations by name.
> If other people are so passionate about these social problems that they are drawn to riot then where was this passion more than two weeks ago?
Might be that they were busy working/worrying about corona? Busy making a living? Being under circumstances that were already straining the limits, but not straining enough to actually riot?
>Riots, at least those in recent events are an example of contagious social behavior. That is evidenced by the fact that the blamed issues have been known problems for longer than two weeks with people actively working for years to raise awareness of them.
I also believe rioting is contagious. But that doesn't mean it doesn't require justification. Otherwise, wouldn't we see riots totally disconnected from any justification? But few people, when they see vandalism and don't agree with the cause, won't join in. Not enough to spark a riot.
>Why suddenly congregate into emotional hysteria, especially since other people have been actively addressing these concerns for years, when the problems of complaint are preexisting and were clearly previously known to these congregants?
There have been protests, lawsuits, smaller violent reactions, and other riots for decades. It doesn't seem sudden to me.
I don't like the framing of the behavior as somehow irrational or random or clinically-diagnosible. It's not irrational to get involved more in a movement when it is a movement, and seems like it might be gaining traction. Just like it's not irrational to not-boycott some useful, cheap product even if you strongly disagree with some of the practices that go into its production, but to join a boycott if it starts and seems to be gaining traction. In fact, it's less rational and more tied up with self-image than with utility to do the former—and even so it doesn't mean that people who do things like solo-boycotts are wrong, or bad, or misguided, at all.
[EDIT] to put it another way, there's a cost to political action. That a lot of people might see that cost WRT anti-police-brutality protests as lower, and the benefit it yields higher, this week than they did two weeks ago, and so be willing to participate, is not "emotional hysteria". Not that nothing that could be described as that has been involved at any point in the process, but that seems reductionist to the point of being very wrong as a characterization for the overall movement.
Objectively speaking becoming involved in a trend only for the sake of a given trend becoming more trendy strikes me as directly irrational. It’s following for the sake of following only because that’s what followers do which is circular and absent of any original consideration.
There is nothing objective about your comments. That's just another veneer of credibility.
Same with calling protestors "irrational" -- maybe to your point of view, they are but this is not an objective statement by any definition of the word.
But humans are social creatures, beholden to social norms. Doing something just because other people do it is literally how society works. There are very, very few (if any) "well-adjusted" members of society who don't do many things just because that's how other people do it (a.k.a. it's "trendy"). If you behave otherwise, you're likely be socially outcasted.
Of course, if you're saying society at large is irrational I pretty much agree... but within the context of social expectation, I'd say it's pretty rational to compute that your contribution is more likely to land once a movement has already started. If anything, those who first begin the movement are the most irrational (since the likelihood of success is much lower compared to the personal cost to the individual).
In other words: if you live in an irrational system, the only way to be rational is to behave irrationally.
I am not sure why that word comes across as offensive given that people were rioting. I can’t think of any better example of a sudden burst of excess emotion.
Trying to find a single explanation for the motivations of a large group of people will lead to overly simplistic explanations.
In the case of the protests I expect people are turning out for at least a few different reasons:
* this is an issue they are concerned about, and now there seems to be sufficient attention on it to actually cause change;
* this is an issue they are concerned about, and they have nothing else to do given the coronavirus lockdown;
* they're bored and it could be fun;
* it could be an opportunity to cause destruction (videos suggest a number of police see the protests in this light).
In terms of protests and riots being a symptom of a sick system, that is absolutely the case. History has many examples of change that was only brought about by the large scale demonstrations (e.g. women's suffrage, civil rights). In a better system this would not be required. Effecting change that is not in the interests of the ruling class is incredibly difficult in most of our democracies.
I hear what you are saying but it seems insufficient. You are suppling a carefully considered highly cognitive set of decisions as answers to qualify non-cognitive group convergence. For example anger/dissent and group convergence are completely orthogonal. This is probably a form of conservatism, which is logical considerations as evidence to qualify behaviors after the fact.
I'm using my own experience attending protests. As someone who is concerned about a number of issues, but not sufficiently concerned to base my life around those issues, I'm willing to show up when it seems my presence will contribute to an effort large enough to be noted. My observations of others at these events is that there are many different motivations. Some people base their identity and social life around protesting. Some people are there for related but distinct causes (e.g. when protesting the Iraq invasion we marched ahead of a group who carried signs calling for Palestine to be freed). Some show up to take selfies to show their friends.
I'm in the UK. I cannot recall any recent protests against racism or police brutality (apart from the current ones) that I might have joined. There probably have been some, because racism and police brutality are certainly issues in the UK, but they did not get enough coverage to register with me. The most recent protest, prior to the current ones, that I can recall is the Extinction Rebellion. The most recent protest I did attend was against leaving the EU, for which one of my motivations for attending was to take a stand against the xenophobia that I see as a core part of the Brexit platform.
It seems perfectly rational, or if not rational at least intuitive, that momentum of a movement would increase participation from people who already agreed with the movement, but weren't doing anything about it.
I guess I'm not totally sure what point you're trying to make, what's your theory exactly?
People are coalescing into groups more so for non cognitive behaviors than for deliberate premeditated concerns but when confronted by that reasoning deflect. When confronted they don’t deny it or excuse it but instead argue defense of positions that were never in question.
The final spark was one that has no excuse and was essentially a public lynching in broad daylight while onlookers openly recorded and pleaded for it to stop.
There are few things more loaded with terrible, horrifying historical imagery in America than a white police officer lynching a black man.
And I promise you, the significance of this horrific imagery was not lost on a single black American.
People always carry with them these passions but without a clear channel to direct their passions, it remains in tension without expression. The pre-existing efforts to address these concerns could very well be seen more as tension-defusers as people are content to believe that someone else is doing the hard work.
It's quite clear that recent events, specifically the death of George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery and Breonna Taylor are the exact reason why people have decided to "suddenly congregate into emotional hysteria". Yes, these issues have been present, but, undoubtedly, those deaths sparked something across the country. Are riots and violence the solution? That's debatable, but they do send a message in a society where money is a significant source of power.
As someone who is black and impacted by these recent events - think of them as a giant pouring of gasoline on an already present fire. People are grieving pain that has been present for years. People grieve in different ways. I don't agree with using violence, looting, rioting as a means of grieving, yet I can fully understand why others have taken that route. The riots are in fact a symptom...not an excuse. It's a fact. Slavery was a "well known problem", but it took the Civil War to see the Emancipation Proclamation come into fruition.
Getting rid of racism in America's systems and in individuals is going to take a lot of effort along with moments like this where everyone is reminded of exactly how much progress is left.
I think you misunderstand my comment by choosing to focus on the subjective importance of the problem. It is necessary to achieve active awareness for those things of personal importance which requires some degree of deliberate effort, otherwise all actions to the effect are reactive instead of proactive. Proactive is not waiting for a reminder from the sudden burst of energy that follows from a single event.
The reason why recognizing group dynamics is important is because it can serve as a means to deprive individual liberty.
> People are grieving pain that has been present for years. People grieve in different ways. I don't agree with using violence, looting, rioting
I stumbled on an interesting phrase for the looting: "looters are not protestors, and protestors are not looters." Some may even distinguish protesters from rioters. Indeed, there are black people still peacefully protesting, even against the use of uncontrolled destruction. It doesn't make sense for people (of different races) to destroy and at the same time rake the reputation of black people through the mud for a moment of... satisfaction (?) without care for the people - even black people - who will be suffer for it.
But I am certain that whoever, regardless of race, is stealing from some designer store does not give a flying fuck about the movement - at least when compared to their greed. BLM is not about the use of slave labor predominant in the clothing industry.
Changes often happen slowly, and then all at once. Think of the tension like an earthquake, slowly building for years beneath the ground, and then unleashed all at once.
> In the book he describes the ways modern life has disconnected us from a lot of what humans find meaningful, and given that it's not surprising that rates of depression and anxiety have skyrocketed.
Yeah. See Yvain's excellent review of "Empire of the Summer Moon":
All of the white people who joined Indian tribes loved it and refused to go back to white civilization. All the Indians who joined white civilization hated it and did everything they could to go back to their previous tribal lives.
There was much to like about tribal life. The men had no jobs except to occasionally hunt some buffalo and if they felt courageous to go to war. The women did have jobs like cooking and preparing buffalo, but they still seemed to be getting off easy compared to the white pioneer women or, for that matter, women today. The whole culture was nomadic, basically riding horses wherever they wanted through the vast open plains without any property or buildings or walls. And everyone was amazingly good at what they did; the Comanche men were probably the best archers and horsemen in the history of history, and even women and children had wilderness survival and tracking skills that put even the best white frontiersmen to shame. It sounds like a life of leisure, strong traditions, excellence, and enjoyment of nature, and it doesn't surprise me that people liked it better than the awful white frontier life of backbreaking farming and endless religious sermons.
Whites who met Comanches would almost universally rave about how imposing and noble and healthy and self-collected and alive they seemed; there aren't too many records of what the Comanches thought of white people, but the few there are suggest they basically viewed us as pathetic and stunted and defective.
>Having an abundance of natural resources that are easily accessible at a low tech level seems like it's a very large precondition to making this work
Disagree, "civilized" societies have vast surpluses of the resources needed for survival (Level 1 and 2 of Maslows Hierarchy) compared to tribal societies, although those resources may not be distributed properly -- which is indicative of that which we truly lack: community belongingness and love (Level 3 of Maslows Hierarchy).
"Civilized" societies don't have more natural resources available, they are just able to access a much, much higher portion of the available resources.
I think the original criteria was "easily accessible at a low tech level". Civilized societies are efficient and can access difficult-to-reach resources. It seems the OP's argument is that to be a tribal society you need easier-to-access resources, resources that are now controlled by the civilized society.
You're right, I think I misread their meaning. Even though still now that I understand it, tribes still exist across the world living in extremely inhospitable environments with very scarce resources, and they still manage to have much stronger community ties than many civilized socieities.
There is a lot of fantasy in this. Traditional Native Americans had to deal with a lot of things we don’t: famine, drought, disease, rotten teeth. And depending on the tribe, war could be part of your culture and age-appropriate males could be expected to risk their lives very regularly.
Ostracization was a death sentence: there was no space for LGBTQ or anyone significantly different than the norm.
Do you know what they did for entertainment? Games similar to horseshoes. No books, no video, no computer, etc.
Hunting is really hard when it’s 10 degrees outside with snow on the ground and your shoes are made of plain leather with no modern water proofing.
I could go on but I’m tired of trying to convince you. Every culture has it’s pros and cons.
This is the Noble Savage. There's a grain of truth in there, though, hunter-gatherer societies in a resource-rich environment have plentiful access to a varied diet and are in excellent physical shape. But there is continuous war between neighbours over these resources (just because you can, everyone is well-fed and healthy). So, yes, people lived well and had fun while doing so.
> there aren't too many records of what the Comanches thought of white people, but the few there are suggest they basically viewed us as pathetic and stunted and defective.
How much worse then to have been completely defeated by such a race!
It always surprises me how little value is given to positive human relationships and community when considering mental well-being.
It's in my opinion the second most important thing after sleep.
It's harder advice to give. Trying to wake up at the same time every day and not drink coffee before bed is, at least in theory, something anybody could do without too much difficulty. Going out and making more friends, getting more involved in the community, is a scarier idea to propose, especially if somebody already has some kind of social anxiety.
I agree it's not as easy as drinking a cup of coffee, but does it have to be easy or does it have to be effective ? Mental health is too important to leave it up to quick fixes.
While social anxiety seems to be definitely more prevalent these days, I am wondering if this might be something that actually increases due to the precise lack of sufficient positive community experiences.
Meeting new people has always been uncomfortable and a bit scary for most people, but being part of something low key like a community garden or a group of people playing sports for fun will in my opinion do more for one's mental health than drinking coffee or taking melatonin.
That said, of course not every experience counts as positive nor will every activity suit everyone, it might take some time to find what you enjoy - but it's worth it.
But let's also turn it around and follow the advice, you sleep well, eat healthy, do your round in the gym, meditate and drink your coffee every day. Well, you're still going to feel pretty sad and lonely if the rest of the time you're locked up in your room reading Reddit.
The advice given is not bad per se, it's just not complete.
> But let's also turn it around and follow the advice, you sleep well, eat healthy, do your round in the gym, meditate and drink your coffee every day. Well, you're still going to feel pretty sad and lonely if the rest of the time you're locked up in your room reading Reddit.
By doing these things you legitimately improve your physical and mental faculties. Of course it's a cycle that feeds back to itself: socializing and having friends will give you motivation to keep up your habits and so on.
Sometimes the first step is fixing the basics so that you have the energy and mood to go out and explore the world and to make people want to befriend you. You have to break the cycle somewhere and it has to be where you are in control, not where other people are in control.
I think the author is mistaking cause with effect.
When the things mentioned (Sleep, Diet, Exercise, Stress Management, Exogenous Compounds) go out of balance, that "unbalancing" may well be a symptom (consequence) of the mental issue and not the cause as is implied in the article.
You can invest all you want decades in advance in creating balanced habits in those areas and still be disrupted down the line with negative mental health events.
It may not be clear that those things can completely prevent mental issues, but I think it's fairly clear that poor diet, sleep, stress management and exercise can contribute to an increase in the frequency of mental health issues.
Genuine question: how would someone define "mental health" or be able to determine if someone is mentally healthy? Even for myself, I really have no clue whether I'm mentally healthy or not.
How do you define physical health?
In a sense, nobody is really healthy. We're all afflicted with a long-term progressive wasting disease that has 100% mortality (so far).
You can say 'healthy' is just a good-enough arbitrary cut-off. For mental health, no glaring neuroses, you usually feel good or neutral about yourself, no suicidal ideation, basically just if none of the markers people've said are unhealthy show up.
I only skim read the article, but I think it's missing a key section which is "strong relationships". Having the right people around you and having a sense of connection with those people can have a dramatically positive effect on your well-being. Aside from that I agree that it's good to invest in your mental health like you would physical. Definately take the time out to learn how to look after your own mental well-being and you will probably see benefits translate to all areas of your life.
I wouldn't put much stock in Ayurveda or even worse, Traditional Chinese Medicine, except some of the treatments which have been proven to work. There's a reason why western medicine is superior - it follows evidence-based modern scientific and research principles, not hogwash.
Instead of “western” medicine, I prefer to call it “evidence based, tested with randomized controlled experiments, mechanism of action deduced” medicine. No data, no medicine.
Even then, medicine is super hard since there is so much complexity in the human body and variations across populations, and experiments are extremely costly.
Yes, that's what I meant. The article was blaming western medicine and the comparisons are often made between eastern and western medicine - western referring to the current mainstream approach.
The current mainstream approach of western medicine does not follow this - eg. there is little evidence that anti-depression drugs actually cure depression, and the side-effects are horrible. Yet the pharma industry profits greatly by selling snake oil that just makes people more sick.
>Antidepressants are supposed to work by fixing a chemical imbalance, specifically, a lack of serotonin in the brain. Indeed, their supposed effectiveness is the primary evidence for the chemical imbalance theory. But analyses of the published data and the unpublished data that were hidden by drug companies reveals that most (if not all) of the benefits are due to the placebo effect. Some antidepressants increase serotonin levels, some decrease it, and some have no effect at all on serotonin. Nevertheless, they all show the same therapeutic benefit. Even the small statistical difference between antidepressants and placebos may be an enhanced placebo effect, due to the fact that most patients and doctors in clinical trials successfully break blind. The serotonin theory is as close as any theory in the history of science to having been proved wrong. Instead of curing depression, popular antidepressants may induce a biological vulnerability making people more likely to become depressed in the future.
They do seem to work for some people. If you are in that group, they are a good deal. Unfortunately a lot of people are not helped by them or find the side effects too hard to deal with.
>Instead of “western” medicine, I prefer to call it “evidence based, tested with randomized controlled experiments, mechanism of action deduced” medicine
If that's the definition, then there are zero psychiatric drugs that can be classified as western "medicine", as we have yet to understand how drugs like anti-depressants intercourse with the mind ("the mechanism of action deduced").
"psychiatric diagnosis still relies exclusively on fallible subjective judgments rather than objective biological tests" -Allen Frances
Yes, mechanism of action is an ideal, but not attainable yet with current technology. Of course, we have to make do with what we have, and there is higher probabilities of errors with medicines which we don't understand the mechanism of action.
I have to double this comment. I understand that this is shorthand for "Medicine developed by following the scientific process conceptualized in the West during the Enlightenment", but it's a pretty big misnomer. Language matters, and the continual use of the term "Western medicine" makes it sound like non-Western places don't create & practice science-based medicine.
He mentions that in the post. Ayurveda is designed for prevention whereas modern medicine is designed for fixing. I used to be skeptic of traditional medicine but on close observation, I realize that these cultures have incorporated some or many aspects of Ayurveda or Chinese traditional medicine into everyday life which, at least in the past, have contributed to better mental and physical health. So, Ayurveda might not fix cancer but could potentially prevent you from getting diabetes.
>When it comes to mental health, our society approaches it like we did with physical health 50 years ago. We only think about it when something is wrong.
I'm not sure about the broader society, but I think this mentality is still prevalent in both physical and mental health these day.
My mother was a very health conscious person (to the level of insanity) but one attitude she showed that I think lead to long term mental/physical health improvement is what your attitude towards medicine is. She saw medicine never as a solution but a temporary band-aid and if you use one medication more than once, it is a indication that something in your life is terribly wrong. I don't share that absolutist attitude, some situations are only solvable with medical interference. But where you draw this line seems to have an profound effect.
I've observed that people that consider medicine (both for physical & mental health) as a part of the solution to a problem they have in life never achieve to get out of their trouble. If you're living a unhealthy lifestyle, any health complications are amplified and taking medicine might suppress it for now, but unless you change the underlying life-style, it will slowly make things worse. Same goes for mental health; If your mental life style is unhealthy (bad social interaction, information consumption that most lead to negative emotions etc), any amount of anti-depressant won't get you out of trouble. You're only delaying it.
You're suggesting that I shouldn't get the same chemotherapy for relapsed cancer or that my relapse is because of "something in my life is terribly wrong".
Because the treatment worked to get it in remission, fuck me for wanting to take the same medicine again?
Lots of people suffer from poor health through no fault of their own. Arguing that their ills must be because of poor life choices is victim blaming.
Just because you're lucky enough to not have suffered chronic ill health doesn't mean others have been so lucky.
Take pleasure in your fortune, but don't try to take all credit for it.
It's possible to have the parents post view and still believe chemotherapy is an incredible tool in the right circumstances.
I don't feel they were talking about it in an over-generalizing way, just saying that if you're living unhealthily you're going to continue to be/get unhealthy. Medicine and treatment can help though, as a band aid in these cases. Of course this doesn't preclude someone who's generally healthy from getting sick, unfortunately.
But your comment is also correct, just misdirected in this case I feel :)
There's a good comment[1] that really stuck with me from a while back, and it strikes a balance between the two. Basically, avoid using medicine for minor issues -- instead focusing on general wellness through diet and exercise -- but for terminal conditions, be willing to take more extreme treatments.
To quote the key paragraphs:
>>I have seen what modern medicine does to people. "You cholesterol is too high, take this statin and your number will get better. Don't take it and you will have a heart attack". And then you have family members and friends take the drugs, and start having side effects.. random pain, random problems that stop them from being physically active. So then they go back to a doctor and get some new medicines, that maybe fixes the pain, but then adds a new side effect. And pretty soon they are bed ridden and taking 14 pills to stay alive. What a bunch of crap.
>>I am not anti-medicine, but I am anti-cutting-edge-for-margain-gain medicine. If you have AIDs, you probably should take some medicine. I vaccinate myself and my children. However I think that if you are active and eat well, I don't care what my cholesterol is. Maybe it is high, maybe it isn't. And if you aren't active or eating well - you need to fix that (not take medicine). If I start dying of cancer, I will throw every medicine I can find at it. But if I am good and healthy, I am going to leave well enough alone.
The first half talks about how to treat mental health like we treat physical health, and we treat physical health in a transactional "businesslike" way.
The second half of the article proposes doing exactly the same: extreme measurement of pathologies and solutions instead of going for what feels right to your body.
I find articles like this one where 100% of the onus for coping with mental health problems is put on the individual quite annoying. There's nothing in the article about getting help from other people, or how to cope with problems that you can't fix easily. It's kind of a toxic attitude because it makes others believe people with mental health issues just aren't trying hard enough and completely ignores individual circumstances or our ability to help ourselves. It's all very well to tell people with mental health problems that they should sleep better, eat better and get some exercise, but that ignores the fact that mental health problems can physically stop people doing that.
If fixing your mental health was simple then it wouldn't be such a prevalent problem.
I think you're being a bit harsh toward the article here. I think it's well supported that just like physical health (e.g. being overweight), maybe even more so, it's near impossible to help someone with mental health issues that doesn't want to be helped. That's not to say that others can't affect you or that you don't have a responsibility to care about and protect the mental health of those you interact with. But it needs to start and end with each person themselves. Yes, there are network effects, but each person needs to acknowledge the problem themselves before they can become a part of the solution, both toward themselves and others - and this article helps people do that by highlighting the issue.
Actually the article right at the beginning asks the reader not to equivocate mental health with mental illness and heath, or rather wholistic well-being, is actually almost entirely the proactive responsibility of the individual. The basic starting point is fitness which applies to mental health conditioning just as it does to physical exercise.
To be fair to your point though the article does say we should shift our thinking on mental health to the same perceptions granted towards physical health. That should mean the mental health evaluation equivalent of a physical every four years. That is absolutely beneficial to everybody because even perfectly healthy people get regular physicals even when they are perfectly healthy.
I'm always wary of anyone leveraging concepts such as "investing in mental wealth" or "focussing on self improvement" in order to pander 5 bullet methodologies. Even more so when the author interjects a plug, both shameless as well as irrelevant, for their own book - Beyond Coffee - in their argument.
The fallacy hidden in the article is that each of us is completely in control over our physical and mental well-being. That your well being isn't an inevitability but a choice. If it's a choice, then this implies that making the right choices is 100% your own responsibility.
Sure, the author does raise a number of fair points about mental healthcare and how some good daily habits affect your own well being.
But then the author completely misses the mark in the conclusion.
No two human lives are the same. Everyone's experience is uniquely different and shaped by an infinite number of events and circumstances past, present and future. Most of which humans don't even get to control directly. The idea of controlling your life and the optimistic view that one is able to mould it towards an ideal stems in Modernistic tradition.
Human minds are doing poorly at self diagnosing, while it's very hard for others to spot the signs of mental health issues. Mental health is also deeply woven into the identity and the personality of individuals. Personal struggles are very much part of being an individual.
Rather then pandering "we should invest in our mental wealth" or even "we should go for a yearly mental health check up", start by sitting down and listening compassionately to those around you first, without offering any practical solutions. If someone lost a loved one, they don't want to hear "maybe you should see a therapist" right off the bat, they are addressing you directly, and they hope you're just willing to listen and acknowledging their pain and not much more.
If someone states they suffer depression, anxiety or PTSD, rather then arguing semantics, the more important questions to ask would be: Am I listening to this person, what are they trying to say and do I understand what they are saying?
Finally, statements that start with "we should..." without backing up their claim, tend to rustle my Jimmies. Who's this "we" anyway? And why am I being dragged into the argument from the outset?
Nobody is contesting that uniquenesses apply to everyone. People should never self diagnose mental or physical ailments, but that also is not an excuse to ignore deliberate decisions to advance personal health.
> If someone lost a loved one, they don't want to hear "maybe you should see a therapist" right off the bat, they are addressing you directly, and they hope you're just willing to listen and acknowledging their pain and not much more.
While you directly address listening I think, more broadly, you mean to suggest active empathy. I fully agree and it’s a skill many people inadequately develop or practice.
> The fallacy hidden in the article is that each of us is completely in control over our physical and mental well-being. That your well being isn't an inevitability but a choice. If it's a choice, then this implies that making the right choices is 100% your own responsibility.
This is nonsense. The author makes no such argument, you're just projecting it onto him.
"Here are some things you can do to proactively manage your mental health, rather than ignoring it until you have a crisis" is in no way putting 100% of the responsibility on the individual.
I was in an accident many years ago that split my chin and chipped or cracked about a dozen of my teeth, resulting in over $10k of dental work since. But when my dentist advises me to proactively manage my dental health by brushing and flossing daily I don't accuse her of fallaciously implying that I am in complete control of my dental wellbeing.
> I don't accuse her of fallaciously implying that I am in complete control of my dental wellbeing.
Of course not. Your dentist does understand the difference between what you can do and can't do. But context matters. And I'd venture your insurance may hold a different idea about personal responsibility.
The same applies to a self-described silicon valley angel investor, founder, podcaster, author and general start-up helper who writes about "investing in mental wealth".
> And these are creating the current environment where we can explore these topics in the abstract collectively — or the acute symptoms we are feeling with loved ones and therapists alike with more positive encouragement from others than ever before, and that helps us zoom in on our individual underlying root causes… and for better or worse, it seems more and more clear that optimal mental health is an individual sport.
Full, hard stop there. Mental health being an individual sport? No. Not by a long shot.
Sure, our own human experience is utterly individual. That is, nobody can feel what you as an individual feel. Barring telepathy, it's not possible to get to the bottom of what someone else is going through. That doesn't mean that your mental health is shaped in a vacuum nor that you are managing your own mental health entirely solo at the end of the day.
Your mental health is tied into your circumstances, your past, your upbringing, the people you met, your current family situation, job, culture, religion, politics, financial situation and so on and so on. How you feel right now is the net result of infinite external and internal factors tying into each other balancing out what goes on in your subconscious.
> Progress is being made, but we have a long way to go in continued open, public dialogue and destigmatization of these common ailments. So when you get a chance to talk about your direct or indirect experience with a mental illness, seize the opportunity to talk about it openly. There’s never been more receptivity to open dialogue than now.
This is true. And those are first steps.But that's not nearly enough. My gripe with the article is that it only lightly brushes the topic of discussing underlying root causes.
For instance, PTSD caused by domestic or child abuse. Sure, you can openly talk about coping with PTSD, have group sessions or do an awareness campaign, but actually creating a socio-economic and judicial environment in which abuse within large communities can be addressed and prevent through strong ties and support networks? It's not exactly like the ball gets pushed forward on this front in a way that a tangible impact has been made, right? If anything, modern life very much puts the focus on the individual with all the unintentional downsides that this brings.
Moreover, this the article simply moves into the opposite direction.
> It goes from a lens of “fixing” to “investing” — in other words, instead of fixing something that is by implication broken, it’s investing in its durability to withstand the wear and tear that comes with modern life. And this begins well before the internal or external life-interrupting event itself (in fact, that is the whole point).
I read this as: there's somehow a way to build "mental credit" that you can expend when you fall on hard times. Yet, the author disregards individual social and economic background, personality traits, and so on.
As I said, sure, to an extent managing stress and sleep are things you do to maintain your own well being... in the present moment. I'd feel down as well if I eat unhealthy, don't get enough sleep and just don't manage the basics in my life properly in general.
But they aren't a silver bullet that solves anxiety and depression caused by losing your job and your house in a pandemic. Neither does a strict and health-focussed training inoculates soldiers against the horrors of the battlefield. The numbers on mental health issues and suicide in veterans serve as a stark reminder here. And they sure aren't a golden hammer that does away with anxiety and depression in teenagers caused by peer pressure or meeting the high expectations by parents and guardians.
> For example, instead of just thinking about fixing an acute financial problem like personal debt, wiser heads are thinking about investing in the optimal outcome with almost every economic decision; financial freedom.
Thanks for fighting the good fight. I have a disability, and it's greatly shaped my experiences. I've arrived at a similar place as you, I think.
So much of mental health advice can be boiled down to "you must adapt to your environment, and if you can't, then your struggles are your fault for failing to adapt." The burden falls on the individual, but not on the systems they live in. The context surrounding a person is rarely acknowledged, and is often treated as an invisible normal.
But, it's not always reasonable to expect someone to adapt. Change takes a hell of a lot of effort! And, as you've pointed out, there are factors that could make it hard or impossible for someone to change. Asking someone to adapt themselves to fit rigid expectations and norms might erase parts of their identity in the process, too. Is that a sacrifice worth making?
That's why I advocate for adapting the environment to the person whenever possible. Providing accommodations, addressing the root causes of stress, and carving out little spaces of safety and comfort. And, if it's not possible, then I think it's important to acknowledge that sometimes things are just shitty. Sometimes your mental health is fucked, and there's not much you could have done to avoid it. That helps stop me from falling into a guilt spiral where I blame myself and get even more anxious/depressed.
But, overall, these days my mental health is so much more community-oriented than it was before. IMO, people deserve to live in better conditions, and shouldn't carry the burden of making that happen entirely on their own.
"Here are some things you can do to proactively manage your mental health, rather than ignoring it until you have a crisis" is in no way putting 100% of the responsibility on the individual.
The problem is that the implication of articles like this one is that if you don't do those things any resulting mental health problems are your own fault. It reinforces the awful reasoning stupid people use like "Oh, you didn't exercise or get good sleep? No wonder you're depressed then! It's your own fault."
My original comment intended to discuss mental health by pointing out that the author skipped several fundamental aspects and instead packaged general advice points and tried to sell it as "investing in mental wealth".
My criticism is that the article could have said:
Here's some great basic overall advice that helps you day-to-day. But let's acknowledge that mental health isn't shaped in a vacuum. Environmental and societal issues do have a big impact on the experience of individuals. And unless there's an honest debate about that, many people will keep on struggling.
Equally, it's perfectly valid to talk about preventative dental care. But let's also acknowledge that dental health doesn't exist in a void and that it is very much tied into one's socio-economic place in society, and the affordances that allow one to maintain their dental health in the first place.
> The idea of controlling your life and the optimistic view that one is able to mould it towards an ideal stems in Modernistic tradition.
Okay, that's your view. I've taken control in the areas listed, I pay attention to what I'm doing, I'm journaling, noticing what improves my well-being and it's been a great journey that is helping me with my depression tendencies. I am proud to feel that I now have control to go to sleep over Youtube rabbit holes till the sun comes up, etc. etc. I am moulding myself and it's largely thanks to helpful material that doesn't just say you are good as you are, keep being a slob who never exercises, procrastinates eternally, etc. Keeping my wakeup time constant and going running first thing in the morning has helped me a ton. The exercise and the regular wake up makes me sleepy in the evening, I don't need coffee in the morning etc. Things do work.
> Human minds are doing poorly at self diagnosing, while it's very hard for others to spot the signs of mental health issues. Mental health is also deeply woven into the identity and the personality of individuals. Personal struggles are very much part of being an individual.
I don't want my struggles with my sleep schedule to be part of being an individual. Nor do I want my gaming addiction to define myself. Nor my anxieties.
You don't realize that this attitude of "anything goes", "you are okay", "no lifestyle can be ever better than any other" can give people the idea that there is nothing for them to do. That things will necessarily stay the same until some big social revolution comes sometime in a few... decades?
People can take action here and now however small. The feeling of a bit of control and agency can do wonders and can snowball into great things.
The point is that statements like "you are not okay" can be misconstrued depending on the mentality of the subject.
The simplistic version of this is telling a depressed person they should "lighten up." But such a person may not have the resources to just change their mood on a whim, and when they also realize this and internalize it, they may become defensive. If they are unable to follow this "simple advice" to just become "okay" again in the context of society at large, their reaction could only reinforce those self-destructive thoughts. Because I am unable to just do these simple things, then what is my value in life, and so on.
There can be a meta to this mentality. A lot of such people could be well aware they are not okay, and still not have any intention to get better, for a variety of reasons. The assumption is that every person wants to act for their own benefit. There are some people who only want to act for their own detriment. Someone defensive enough could just twist the words of "you could do better," which are completely well-intended, into meaning "but I'm failing to, and that is my fault, and that means I am not good enough for you." They can just believe the helper thinks less of them because they just can't do what they say, and ignore anything they say to the contrary, to make a point. And that is what is defined as "success" for them - proving that they are not good enough to the people that want them to improve, through their own actions. So with that mindset it is an endless negative feedback loop that will frustrate everyone trying to genuinely help the person, until they all give up or nothing ever improves and then said person is left alone with their own thoughts. And then anything could happen.
But that is not to say that it's the same with anyone who is genuinely willing to listen and take advice to heart. You can choose to say "yes, and here are the steps I'll take to get to 'okay'". It's just that not all people are open to advice, and sometimes the only way to make those people listen is to pay other people to force their own worldviews on them (therapists), "for their own good," like a parent would to a naive child who refuses to listen.
And in the end, some people still cannot be changed.
Someone suffering depression, anxiety or any mental health issue rarely follows rational logic in their thinking about themselves or the world. That's what makes it so hard on their support network. It's not something you solve by readily giving particular advice.
Therapists usually don't force their views on their patients either. On the contrary. My therapist explained to me that they simply listen and act as a mirror who reflects without judging on what's being said in a session. They act like a guide you're free to follow. A good therapist is able to establish a bond of trust.
Even so, therapy isn't a magic bullet either. Plenty of patients drop out after a few sessions because they fail to connect with their therapist. This isn't a bad thing in itself: it's better to find someone with whom you do connect. Paradoxically, therapy failing is just as often validating that confirmation bias mental health patients have about therapy.
> It's not something you solve by readily giving particular advice.
For sure. I think of it more as something that gets stored in the back of the mind, so it can be recalled when the person is ready. That may come in 1 year, in 3 years, in 10 years or never.
Making someone want to do stuff is futile. Just like it is futile to make yourself want stuff. It has to come from the inside (and what's "inside" gets there over a long time from the outside). And for every such blog post there may be someone out there who goes: I've been hearing this stuff for so long now, you know what, I'm gonna actually try it and will wake up at a regular time for the next 7 days and will do a short morning exercise. Now how and why someone will get in this receptive phase is a mystery. But it happens and when it does, it's good to have good advice material out there, because people may google for this kind of stuff. You decide you want to fix some of your issues, and by the "grace of god" you feel like you can take a step towards this for some reason so you google tips for your situation and then you may actually do it.
Now, will everyone do it reliably just because they read a blog post? Of course not. But it's better than just leaving it all to only pills and doctors (note: of course take your meds) and not telling people anything about what they could do right now based on evidence. The body is a machine that reacts to what you put into it and how you treat it. It's not a mystery and just hearing this or knowing this CAN (in some cases, not all) help people gain a bit of control and see that even if they cannot control much, they can move their body parts and can at least a little bit move in the direction that they want to go towards. Little by little.
It's very hard to give advice in general. That's why the wise teachers used to mentor mentees one on one, there's little wisdom that applies in all circumstances. Advice expresses a direction, and if you are already too far in the other way, you need to be pointed backwards.
If you think all it takes is willpower and you force and force till you break down and conclude that you're just worthless, then you're doing it wrong. There is a sense in which self-improvement as a concept is bullshit, in the sense that Alan Watts expresses here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vlNVQ-_y4-0
Ultimately nothing is "deeply broken" in some metaphysical sense in this universe. When we say something is "bad" it just a shorthand to mean we don't want it to be like that. It isn't bad deep down in the fabric of the physical universe. The universe is very aloof and unresponsive and ignorant of what we want or not. It's not trying to spite you when you fail, it just doesn't know what the hell we want from it. When my shoes get dirty, it's not because the world has decided to spite me and make me angry. Reality has no concept of "dirt", it doesn't know that I didn't intentionally scoop up the dirt with my shoes while walking. It's the same mechanism that we sometimes use to intentionally get sticky materials onto a surface. The way to communicate what you want from reality is through action, because that's the language that reality speaks.
The whole self-improvement business has to be done in an intricate balance between taking it playfully and taking it seriously. This is really hard to express properly in a comment. Ultimately you will always have something else to desire, something else to work towards, nothing will be ultimately and finally satisfactory unless you also work on your mindset.
But there are better and worse states of being in some sense. Having anxiety, depression, insomnia, brain fog, addiction, obesity etc. is in some very real sense worse than being fit and in a good mood by default. With the caveats above.
Making people want something is almost impossible. Nobody could ever make me exercise a few years ago. It was just not part of my identity. I thought the gym was for just for loud tough gym bros on steroids looking to get more one night stands. Blog posts and articles like this slowly accumulate in the back of one's mind. And when shit gets really rough and you by yourself come to the realization that you will now do something. Not because you have to or it's your duty or because anything, but you just know that you will now do something because you know things are not going well. Then if you stored these tips up, you may say, you know what, I'm going to actually try that thing I've read about so much in the context of mental health and depression. You will have something to reach for.
Sure there can be other underlying causes for why your life is derailed. But first and foremost you need to fix yourself as a biological homo sapiens to a certain level so that you can engage in the complex task of untangling why you slid off the road. (Beyond a certain point you need a therapist clearly, but only beyond a certain point). Once you have the mental clarity and energy and a baseline okayish mood, you can think of what lead to all this. Maybe you're giving 200% at work, trying to satisfy everyone, while others are actually taking credit for your work who work way less intensely. Maybe you're pushing hard at work to become a martyr and aren't actually using your energy in an efficient manner and others are more ahead because they are working more efficiently not harder. Maybe you seek validation in your professional life because your intimate relationships are failing. Why are they failing, why do you have no friends, are there perhaps practical issues involved, do you commute to...
Don't get me wrong here. I hold a similar frame of reference towards my own mental state and my own thinking.
But at the same time, it's important to recognize that there's far to the story then this. Mental health is just as much rooted and so many other factors not in the least social and economic circumstances.
This just half the story. The other half is actually the difficult part of addressing root causes. Such as growing up in a dysfunctional or abusive family situation. Or having a disposition towards addiction. Or being the butt of systemic discrimination i.e gender, physical appearance, disabilities, cultural background, skin colour, income level,...
Sure, you could tell someone "the cause of your fatigue and latent depression is your 4 hour daily commute." but that's not something you can readily change if that individual doesn't have the affordances - degree, income, dependents,... - that allows them to either get a job closer to home or move closer to their job.
Neither does it do to tell someone "Your lack of self-confidence and anxiety is a matter of stress management and lack of sleep" if they are under tremendous peer pressure compelling them to conform to particular culture or mentality at school, among friends, at work or at home which is at odds with their personality and who they are.
The entire picture matters.
My gripe with the article isn't that it dispenses advice in line with what you're saying - advice I wholeheartedly agree with in it's own right - my gripe is that the article simply doesn't even begin to address the complex reality that underpins mental health issues. Instead it deprecates entire fields of study because either "they don't know what they're talking about" and "it's been in stasis for decades now without any new insights" and then substitutes that by launching new concepts called "mental wealth" making bold claims about "investing" and "durability" rather then "fixing".
Putting your shoes on, no thinking, start walking. I can get behind that. It helps to clear the air and get in the present moment. And I'm sure a part of the audience will take that advice and apply it tot heir own betterment. But it shouldn't detract from the real hard work up ahead.
I understand where you're coming from. I have similar thoughts when people try to blame individual choices for environmental issues, and put little pictograms and cute comics that teach you to always make sure not to leave taps running and other tiny tips that pale in relation to what effects industrial water use has. Putting the focus on the individual can result in forgetting another much bigger contributor.
So I see that not just this article, but articles like this in general floating around half-assedly in public consciousness can create an atmosphere where the attitude is that everyone who is down there got there by their lack of will, by their corrupt soul, and deserve it etc. which seems to be a common framing in the US. I don't live in the US and I myself are pretty far from that framing and may be too blind to its bad effects. So by all means, fighting for political change and for creating a social net that catches people and bounces them back up is very important.
But certainly in another sense, for a particular person it's a bad strategy to wait for others to pull them out of the mud. It may never happen. There are plenty of people who remain in that type of cycle, get all types of disease, die early etc. There won't be any dramatic music or moral lesson in the end, they just die with perhaps few people caring about even that fact. I like the quote "Start where you are. Use what you have. Do what you can." It's also similar to the Christian idea of Christ embracing the sinful and loves them in their humanity as they are right now, not only in some idealized version of them. Or the 12 step program for addicts, etc. If you take note of where you are, you can make a deliberate small move to where you want to be, instead of doing a random walk. Of course this only benefits you in some sense, but after a while it can expand and snowball to improvements for your family etc.
The top-down solution and the bottom-up solution can and should coexist.
> When we say something is "bad" it just a shorthand to mean we don't want it to be like that. It isn't bad deep down in the fabric of the physical universe. The universe is very aloof and unresponsive and ignorant of what we want or not. It's not trying to spite you when you fail, it just doesn't know what the hell we want from it.
This is a good way to view it, thanks.
I'm just trying to figure out how humans, with personal intentions of constructing things, fit into this framework.
You're at this point because you came to an understanding about yourself and that you don't have to let those issues define who you are. At the same time, who you are today is very much someone who faces this challenge, and this is intrinsically a part of your identity. This is neither good or bad. There's no judgement or value attribution here.
The observation here is that you wouldn't be who you are today if your life took a different road, either by your own choice or by circumstance.
My point isn't that life is pre-destined or pre-determined. Each moment is an opportunity to do something that pushes your life in one way or another. But the opportunities and the choices life hands you? Those aren't infinite and neither are you in complete control over what will cross your road.
Sleep, eating, stress management, exercise,... those are all good habits that will help open doors to other sets of opportunities and choices which you wouldn't have if you didn't mind them at all.
But in my view, the author overstates their importance to the point where he simply ends up disregarding many other factors that determine one's mental well being which often have a larger impact.
I can agree with that. I think it all depends on the person and only someone who deeply knows them can give them the right advice. And that CAN in some cases be a harsh one, if all their life they were coddled, it can be good to hear a stern voice that tells them that they are shit right now, a disgrace of their species, but they have the power to change etc. This is indeed the strategy of some gurus or even clinicians (perhaps with different words). In other cases you just listen, you just nourish, just hug and radiate love and they can, over the years, perhaps open up as a flower and work their way through their issues. If done in the wrong way around, the person may just get crushed under the weight of it all, while in the other case they may grow comfortable in all the coddling and now won't even want to fix things, because "having issues" is what gets them all the hugs and kisses.
Some respond more to rational reasoning, some to emotional ones.
Spot on: telling people to "sleep better" is good advice - in isolation.
Telling people to do that when they are struggling with big social problems (unemployment, poor access to education, discrimination...) or already existing mental issues is very harsh.
Really? I'd think if you're poor and uneducated, and you have bad sleep habits, you could benefit from the advice to sleep better a lot more (relatively) than someone better off.
Sure, that's a devil's circle/negative feedback loop. But, especially for those lacking the mental energy to initiate this stuff, wouldn't it be good to have some sort of boot camp for healthy living/exercise/meditation, where a man in a hat shouts at you to make you do pushups for 2 weeks and you're forced to not eat the shit you've been shovelling into your maw?
This entreprenurial opportunity could only help the more well-off with mental issues, of course.
On a broader scale, whenever I read comments like yours, I wonder what the point is. What do you suggest people in those situations do? What's your alternative advice as to how they might improve their lives? Because all I hear, in general, is 'well, this is good advice, except it'll be hard for some people to follow it because x'. I never hear the next part where people explain what those in those situations should do before following the above advice.
Or are we just taking it for granted that there will be people who will just live in misery until the day the revolution comes?
But the article isn't about fixing your mental health, it's about investing in it. Your comment is like getting angry that a blog post that goes "take care of yourself, eat fruit every day!" is "putting 100% of the onus for dealing with obesity on the individual".
Your comment is just you being a word nazi. The words 'investing' and 'fixing' are similar enough for it to not be an issue. Are you trying to impose your definitions of these words on others?
I’ve seen firsthand how blaming outside circumstances for mental health can be damaging. Both for myself and others. It’s very tempting to blame lack of happiness on your job, where you live, your partner, or an upstairs neighbor who rearranges their entire apartment at 2am. In most cases (not all) these were misattributed.
Also I think your attitude is unnecessarily defeatist. So what are you suggesting instead, that rather than attempting to build healthy habits, depressed people should give up?
Both can be true at the same time. This is totally analogous to the extremely flammable topic of whether telling your daughter not to go to dark alleys at night in skimpy clothing reinforces the victim blaming narrative or is just rational advice for the harshness of real life. Or "don't teach web designers how to write standards compliant HTML, because then next-gen browsers will be less lenient and then other people's websites will be broken".
The thing is, there are testimonies of tons of people online who fixed so much about their life, based on tips like this. I'm very much against this attitude of "let's keep good advice secret, so we don't look too judgmental". This is what leads to things like "health at every size" and "fat acceptance". That you can no longer spread advice on how you can massively improve your well-being and life expectancy by losing weight, because this is somehow too judgmental towards people with conditions that make weight loss unusually hard.
Second order effects are important, sure, and there can be counterintuitive consequences and other weird smart stuff. But first and foremost, there are tons of stuff that people can do right now to improve their lives. I am really greatful for the existence of articles like this, because this stuff helped me and if it was for you, we'd only have articles that make us all resentful, bitter and give up trying.
And OF COURSE the system needs to change, especially in the US. How they treat mental illness by policing, the whole consumerist propaganda, the stress inducing, hyperoptimized apps, the hyperpalatable foods that are engineered to trick us to eat more and get fat etc. etc. they all need to be addressed. We cannot expect people on a massive scale to suddenly be able to counteract these immense forces raining down on them all day every day from all channels, billboards, ads etc. guiding them towards a harmful life.
In summary
1) When giving advice to an individual it's about how to thrive in a cold hard world that doesn't care a bit about whether they are happy or suffer or live or die. What you can do, you should because ultimately you have different paths forward and working step by step, little by little, while not beating up yourself in the process can be immensely helpful. Not because you will get praise or because you obeyed the commands of the white coats, but because you will genuinely be better for your own sake.
2) When talking to people who have their shit together, advocate for compassion towards those who are in a messy situation. But really helping is hard. Teaching to fish vs giving fish etc. Just because someone has a messed up life with mental health issues doesn't make them into angels, that would be some variant of "noble savage". It can be difficult to help, you may be used, you may be tricked, and progress is not guaranteed.
Think of it as an analogue of the Liskov Substitution Principle. Prepare the person to be strong in a harsh environment and simultaneously work on making the environment less harsh so that less strong people can also thrive.
By the title, I thought this would be about the idea of defining wealth by your mental state, mood, or knowledge, and not yet another "let's apply overly-rational financial analysis to everything but not actually question the bigger systems at play" article.
If a man empties his purse into his head, no man can take it away from him. An investment in knowledge always pays the best interest.
- Benjamin Franklin
> my experience has taught me that there are five foundations towards a concept I will call ‘mental wealth’ — sleep, diet, exercise, stress management, and exogenous compounds (anything from coffee to alcohol to prescription medication).
I think these are accurate but a glaring omission is the overarching element of "how good is your life". You can take care of your physiology (and you should) but that won't get you too far if, for example, you're also stuck at a dead end job or if you're completely isolated and have no friends and no intimate partner.
It's easier to get friends/a partner, or negotiate for promotion/a raise, or do what you have to to get a better job when you're not fat, sleep-deprived, and spending all you free time on reddit/tumblr/4chan whining about trump/men/women.
I've been working on an app that allows me to send messages to my past and future selves, as well as posting today's thoughts (for reading by my future self). I had initially created it over a weekend as a fun side project, but it turned out to be a great tool for self reflection. An ios beta is coming out next week, fill out this form if you'd like to try it out:
Every day of your life gets its own page so you can post a comment there.
Usually people write to their past selves regarding some regrets in order to ease the pain. Simply putting your thoughts out of the mind and onto the screen helps. And treating your past self as another person helps, too.
Also people write to their future selves to encourage/overcome the fear of the unknown.
I use the schedule future email feature in Gmail it's nice to reflect on in the future my current fears/concerns at that time, am I still alive, etc...
You could write a message as if your past self would read it, and then maybe it will be read by the subprocess in your mind which continues to emulate your past self, which quietly and often secretly affects how your present self feels.
That was quite a long article. It could’ve been made much shorter and still conveyed the points. I was surprised that the author is ok with alcohol in moderation but seems to be against coffee (that’s the sense I got).
The mention of older medicinal systems being focused on prevention and listing Dr. Andrew Weil put me off. IMO, these should be last on your list when you’re looking for help or solutions.
I agree with the premise: be proactive about mental health.
However, this should be read with some skepticism. The author relies on their own authority as someone who "has been thinking about mental health for 19 years." I was intentional about not googling whoever this is, perhaps they're a medical professional or something. But if that were the case, I would hope they would cite better sources than describing themself as "someone that has paid close attention to this cross-lattice work of interweaving disciplines for a while now". Skimming over buzzwords like "detoxification, and anti-inflammation" is a red flag. The article's first side bar goes on to talk about how "the first medical professionals were surgeons saving a soldier’s life". This is line is particularly disconcerting, but the entire "sidebar" sounds like conjecture. The whole article sounds like conjecture, which should NOT be sold as a source of authority on a topic like health. That is how we get essential-oil anti-vaxxers.
Could shorten this by starting with what wealth is. You can measure relative wealth roughly by how long you can reasonably plan into the future. This is what separates it from money.
The author's notion of Mental wealth, using that definition, would be how long can you can reasonably plan to be self assured and make decisions using that frame of mind. An hour? A day? Still looking forward to a positive time period? Even if you are depressed or grieving, you can have mental wealth by accepting those circumstances and recognizing you are making decisions with that as a factor.
Extending that model, mental poverty could be when you are essentially paralyzed or a slave to intrusive thoughts, where you cannot go a few minutes without being interrupted by fears, memories, or imagined conflicts. It's hard to separate the notion of "you," from your thoughts, and there is a part of our mind that needs to convince us they're the same thing, but recognizing that the mind that produces these thoughts can be just like a finger or an appendage that is injured without taking all of you with it is a big leap toward mental "wealth."
Viewed this way, you are not your stubbed toe, or even your broken leg, and the part of your mind that is in pain and cutting you off from the present is not all of you either. You may need to compensate for it until it heals, or even adapt to the injury, but it doesn't mean you should stop making decisions and plans. Recognizing when you aren't making decisions and plans, and exercising the ability to actively decide to do so could be the foundation for building this mental wealth. I like the author's model, it could be useful.
If the author has an rss I’d love to add it to my reader. Liked the article and has given me things to think about. Allergy testing sort of stuck out for me most.
Yeah, I was also curious and did some research about the "Everlywell" food allergy test this article recommends, and the evidence behind it seems INCREDIBLY weak. From what I'm reading the product seems to be some Shark Tunk funded non-FDA reviewed no-oversight pseudoscience. Apparently many "at home testing kits" are not FDA regulated at all.
Worse, it seems that many doctors and organizations think they can actually do harm given the misinformation they provide:
......
"Patients who ask Dr. Robert Wood, an allergist at Johns Hopkins Children’s Center, whether they have a food sensitivity would never undergo an immunoglobulin G test. Immunoglobulin G tests “are completely useless and do dramatic harm” because they may compel patients to unnecessarily avoid broad swaths of a healthy diet, Wood said.
“In all my years of practice, I have never sent an immunoglobulin G test because they have no ability to predict food sensitivity,” he said.
That’s because immunoglobulin G stems from the body’s normal immune response to exposure to many substances, including food. High levels don’t indicate a problem; they simply point to foods a person recently has eaten.
For these reasons, a 2008 European Academy of Allergy and Clinical Immunology task force recommended against testing for a type of immunoglobulin G to evaluate for food intolerance. In the report, the group wrote that the test was “irrelevant for the laboratory work-up of food allergy or intolerance and should not be performed in case of food-related complaints.”" [0]
......
"Dr. Neha Shah, a rheumatologist and immunologist at Stanford University, is one doctor who is skeptical.
"What we don't have is proof that having a high IgG level against a particular food item means that that food is causing your symptoms," says Shah.
"A lot of this kind of huxterist testing is keying off of the placebo effect," says Dr. Norman Paradis, a clinical lab expert who teaches at the Geisel School of Medicine at Dartmouth College, referring to the industry in general and not to a particular product. "[1]
......
"The presence of IgG is likely a normal response of the immune system to exposure to food. In fact, higher levels of IgG4 to foods may simply be associated with tolerance to those foods.
Due to the lack of evidence to support its use, many organizations, including the American Academy of Allergy, Asthma & Immunology, the Canadian Society of Allergy and Clinical Immunology and the European Academy of Allergy and Clinical Immunology have recommended against using IgG testing to diagnose food allergies or food intolerances / sensitivities" [2]
......
The author should seriously consider removing this from their article.
Extrapolating personal health observations to a general population is one of the most annoying types of misinformation the internet tends to amplify. Use site:.gov on Google as a better source of medical advice, folks
However, I'd absolutely change the order of things to pay attention to. The first one of the mentioned ones should be 'Stress Management'.
If you get this one right, you'll have better sleep, more time (and willingness) for exercise, as well as less of a need for any substances to get you through the day.
Also, he doesn't mention metacognition at all. Paying attention to one own's thought processes is a big part of staying sane in the long term.
- fresh air and sunlight (high CO2 indoors is detrimental to cognition and sun is needed for the circadian rythm and vitamin D and other stuff)
- social contact (appropriate to personality), so friends, family and romantic relationships to the extent and intensity that one's personality needs them
- career success and stable finances: makes one feel useful and takes away a lot of stress and frees up mental energy to think about all the other things mentioned in the article
- winding down sometimes, unplugging from phones, TV etc. One way is meditation, but can also be just sitting with a cup of tea thinking about nothing particular
- learning and trying new things, new foods, new languages, new books or genres
- challenging oneself and overcoming discomfort, physically such as cold showers, or mentally such as public speaking or whatever seems scary/hard
I think the overall idea is a scaffolding of routine and stable structure in life punctuated with deliberate, planned and conscious reaches out of the comfort zone. Like yeah waking up every day is great and much better than a whacky schedule. What's probably even better is having exceptions and whacking up your sleep for one or two weeks per year for a festival or a hike or a few days of intense creative work.
The point is to return to the default every time, but religiously sticking to a rigid routine where you cancel and refuse anything that may conflict with it is only to be recommended to people with really low change tolerance like certain autists. Even they should play with their own limits even if those limits are at a different place.
Recently I had an epiphany and I felt as if I had cracked the code to living a good life - 1. Exercise everyday 2. Eat and drink clean.
As cliche as it sounds it felt like if I took care of these two things, everything else will take care of itself. Since last 15 days, I feel reinvigorated once again as I focus on these two things. There is a long way to go to fully undo all the damage, but I feel I am on track.
Made me feel like an idiot when I saw how well this works. Physician have been banging this drum for decades. Exercise, drink enough water and eat clean.
This really is so much of it! I started this journey a couple of years ago. A few more steps I've found since:
- Clean the spaces you are in, bedroom, kitchen, office, living room, etc
- Learn to communicate with an open heart. The book "Nonviolent Communication" is a great resource.
- Be careful of your thoughts. Don't even joke negatively about yourself. It really does affect you even if you're not aware.
I've seen many people do a slightly wrong thing once and throw their bodies out of whack for days or weeks, if not longer, when weights are involved. With cardio, you can pretty much do what you want with cycling without too much risk of injury (aside from falling or collisions) so long as you don't overdo it. But with cardio in general (running, swimming, cycling), people often get too excited and start off wrong, or have wrong form in running, and either injure themselves or exhaust themselves and drop out.
No matter what the exercise is, ease in, find a trainer (you don't need one for long depending on what you're doing), and be smart.
Worked until some time in my early 20s. Ate an astounding quantity of junk food, often got 6 or fewer hours of sleep days in a row. Looked great, felt pretty good, almost never even got the sniffles.
Go figure, at some point your body stops being able to find something (I still have no idea what) to do with an extra 2-2.5k calories a day of crap, 6hrs a night of sleep starts to leave you dragging after one night of it, and you can't live like that anymore (well, you can, but it'll be... very bad).
Yeah, as we get older, taking care of ourselves becomes more of an imperative. You can drive a car with 10,000 miles pretty aggressively, skip maintenance, etc. and it'll probably still drive great.
Doing the same with a car at 80,000 miles is outright dangerous. But if taken care of properly, older cars can drive just as great as newer ones, and sometimes a well-maintained older car can drive even better than a neglected newer car.
It's all about sticking to fundamentals and laying good foundations. As you said, the rest tends to take care of itself if you get your sleep, exercise, and nutrition right.
After college, my body was awful, but I switched to this code and my body & mind improved.
Though, I wouldn't say it was the only "code to living a good life". After a problematic job, I'd also add work/life balance, on top ofrelationships (friends and family) and your faith.
Ultimately we all have to figure our own ways. I am 44 and after reading my share of self-help books, YouTube videos, teachings from gurus and whatnot - this is where I have arrived. Lot of things have have been left out on purpose.
Although exercising and eating well are very important for our well being, they're not enough. The most fundamental thing is having the right mindset:
Some beliefs are so destructive that no amount of exercise will alleviate their effect. For instance, some people are what I call blamers. They believe that their misery is because of life, others, society... They refuse to accept what life has given them (whether their look, family...). They honestly believe that their misery is result of external consequences. No amount of exercise will fix that. Contrast that to those who are always grateful. Always glad with what they got. Happiness for these is simple.
You say that, but I've actually seen people with that exact mindset start to make progress when I've helped them keep a consistent workout schedule and designed an appropriate training regimen for them. All of a sudden, they're 3 months in and they feel good, their body doesn't hurt anymore, they're stronger, they look better, their cardiovascular fitness has noticeably improved, and they realized that THEY did that. They put in the work, consistently, and changed things they had previously been blaming on their genetics and parents.
> ...when I've helped them keep a consistent workout schedule and designed an appropriate training regimen for them.
This is a significant, non-scalable investment of time and effort in the well-being of another. It wouldn't surprise me if such experiences were in extremely short supply in those people's lives. From my experience, there's a significant chunk of the population for which this sort of investment is a required component for their on-going sense of self-worth.
I'm not sure why, but my experience is that tech culture is particularly prone to an almost axiomatic rejection of this aspect of human interaction and well-being, and often exhibits significant prejudice towards those for whom this external requirement for well-being manifests.
I think this suggests a false dichotomy, although I'm sure that's not what you meant to write.
Quick thought experiment: would you tell a physically abused child, to their face, "Do you honestly believe your misery is a result of external consequences? Be grateful for what you do have."
Some people habitually blame things that they caused themselves on others. Others commit the converse and blame things other people did on themselves. I don't think either of these facilitates your mental health.
If you are an adult, almost certainly things happened to you that weren't your fault, but that are your responsibility. That's life. Life is the process of dealing with those things, and then you die. It sucks, but it's worth it. Am I out of platitudes yet?
All these habits are founded on a desire to be better, which in turn needs to be rooted, at least partly, in compassion for yourself. If you don't want to be better, because you don't think you deserve it, because you have had that beaten into you, why would you exercise or eat better? And the only way you're guaranteed to have compassion for you when you need it is to learn how to generate it yourself. You're not going to exercise or eat clean or anything healthy sustainably if you're sustaining it by abusing yourself verbally or emotionally. So don't do that.
Agreed on having the right mindset. Dalai Lama's "The book of Joy" is a good one talking about the perspectives that would help you navigate through difficult time and emotions.
Some examples:
* treating all human beings as a whole, which allows people to share happiness on other people's achievement - this kind of resonates with the theory of Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins, where it argues that the goal of all humans is to maximize the chance that the entire gene pool will continue to exist
* reduce sense of one's own identity - which helps people during hard times by thinking about how small one single person is compared to the entire race, maybe even the entire universe
And of course, there's the advocate around being grateful, being compassionate, do more meditation etc.
All good things!
I would also say that STRESS KILLS. It has real physical harm to the body. I love working in high-stress situations but it has taken a long time to learn how to make stressful situations not stress me out.
Finally, find meaning in the things you do even if they are not 'meaningful things'.
Can confirm, since the lockdown I've been cycling a lot more and I feel amazing after I cycle. I feel like cycling also does wonders for the mind, I can think a lot more clearly after and my mood improves significantly.
Improving access to nature would go a long way to improve city dwellers sense of mental health and well being. Especially making it easier for owning a cottage.
1) I live in Canada, a giant country. But camping is super expensive, $50/night camping. Its unaffordable for any length of time. And many provincial parks sell out.
2) Buying a small piece of land and hand building a tiny cottage is basically outlawed in Ontario. You need building permits and build at least 800 sqft. 100K is probably the base price for the land alone.
3)Despite all the land, there is no program for providing allotment gardens to citizens. Having a small patch of land you can grow vegetables on is rare. But its a thing in many European countries.
4) Where I live all the forests have been cut down, and turned to giant farms long ago. Almost all land is private. You can't just go and wonder.
TV, Video games and Computers are cool and all, but its obviously not something you should be spending most of your day on. But it seems like thats the only affordable entertainment option left for many people.
People are bored, cooped up in tiny apartments because of Covid. I can see why people are rioting in cities. And since so many people seem to be stacking up at zero or negative wealth. Capitalism seems to be under direct attack now, and some serious cracks are forming. The politicians need to revaluate the situation.
Lots of land in North America, why not have a program where poor citizens can get a small lot somewhere, and let them build a small cottage there. Without it costing 100s of thousand and thousands a year in taxes. A place they can take their kids to.
Regarding 3), maybe it's just a small exception, but in Toronto's Chinatown you can see that a lot of the houses have gardens with vegetables. It's just that the overall lots are small and the gardens are small. But they are still there.
In Vancouver, even downtown, there are a number of community gardens with various vegetables growing.
It's a good list. Another contributor to mental health is "doing things that you enjoy". That can trade off against some of the other items. So, eating a delicious (but unhealthy) meal gives you points in the happiness column but takes some away from the diet column.
I was curious and did some research about the "Everlywell" food allergy test this article recommends, and the evidence behind it seems INCREDIBLY weak. From what I'm reading the product seems to be some Shark Tunk funded non-FDA reviewed no-oversight pseudoscience. Apparently many "at home testing kits" are not FDA regulated at all.
Worse, it seems that many doctors and organizations think they can actually do harm given the misinformation they provide:
......
"Patients who ask Dr. Robert Wood, an allergist at Johns Hopkins Children’s Center, whether they have a food sensitivity would never undergo an immunoglobulin G test. Immunoglobulin G tests “are completely useless and do dramatic harm” because they may compel patients to unnecessarily avoid broad swaths of a healthy diet, Wood said.
“In all my years of practice, I have never sent an immunoglobulin G test because they have no ability to predict food sensitivity,” he said.
That’s because immunoglobulin G stems from the body’s normal immune response to exposure to many substances, including food. High levels don’t indicate a problem; they simply point to foods a person recently has eaten.
For these reasons, a 2008 European Academy of Allergy and Clinical Immunology task force recommended against testing for a type of immunoglobulin G to evaluate for food intolerance. In the report, the group wrote that the test was “irrelevant for the laboratory work-up of food allergy or intolerance and should not be performed in case of food-related complaints.”" [0]
......
"Dr. Neha Shah, a rheumatologist and immunologist at Stanford University, is one doctor who is skeptical.
"What we don't have is proof that having a high IgG level against a particular food item means that that food is causing your symptoms," says Shah.
"A lot of this kind of huxterist testing is keying off of the placebo effect," says Dr. Norman Paradis, a clinical lab expert who teaches at the Geisel School of Medicine at Dartmouth College, referring to the industry in general and not to a particular product. "[1]
......
"The presence of IgG is likely a normal response of the immune system to exposure to food. In fact, higher levels of IgG4 to foods may simply be associated with tolerance to those foods.
Due to the lack of evidence to support its use, many organizations, including the American Academy of Allergy, Asthma & Immunology, the Canadian Society of Allergy and Clinical Immunology and the European Academy of Allergy and Clinical Immunology have recommended against using IgG testing to diagnose food allergies or food intolerances / sensitivities" [2]
......
The author should seriously consider removing this from their article.
261 comments
[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 64.3 ms ] threadInstead, I would advocate participating in communities, working for social and environmental justice, volunteering and acting in a spirit of generosity that is directed away from the self. You can do this in many ways and one of them is to participate in non-toxic open source communities that build together and give away the product freely.
Work on social and environmental improvements by the day, asses it on social and environmental justice every month.
- justice cannot be achieved. Look at the courtrooms (which is actually there to serve justice), but is the verdict really justice? So persuing justice can make you cynical - for the example of social justice, you could approach it by thinking it is just (or solves the justice problem) to take away the wealth of the rich. Does this improve the social condition of the unfortunate? Also this can make you radical and bitter. - Also if you go for justice, you might start to see a lot of things as 'unfair' this is a negative feeling
Generally I believe a mindset of helping others/nature by planning to improving things is better (for the cause itself and for oneself) than trying to fight perceived injustices.
Lots of middle-class activists for justice, for example, don't actually seem like most of the poor very much (understandable: the poor are a basket of useful idiot deplorables). They're more motivated by their hatred for the rich, and punishing someone is still justice, even if that won't actually improve the material conditions of the poor (which isn't that big a problem, because some of them are trump voters and we still have to punish them).
In my experience focusing on political causes of any kind is not a great path to happiness, as it almost inevitably results in anger, frustration or sadness at the state of the world.
Clearly you have goals/values other than just "maximising own happiness". If your goal was purely that (not suggesting it should be), then those other values would just stand in the way of happiness.
The stability gained from institution should not be undervalued and easily discarded/bypassed.
Neglecting and suppressing emotions definitely doesn't improve mental health. The belief that everything must be happy and bring pleasure is delusional and hurtful.
Sleep, Diet, Exercise, Stress Management, Exogenous Compounds (from coffee to melatonin to Prozac, and anything in between)
These are certainly important factors, and I think we need to look much more broadly at underlying factors than just these (or just drugs).
I've been reading about mental health issues for years with my own ups and downs, and the best book I've read on this topic so far is Lost Connections by Johann Hari.
In the book he describes the ways modern life has disconnected us from a lot of what humans find meaningful, and given that it's not surprising that rates of depression and anxiety have skyrocketed. For me, learning what those underlying causes are has meant I could start making a conscious effort to address them in my own life. It's a lot of work, but it's been far more effective than just trying to make myself feel better by improving my mood with exercise, sleep etc.
I think as a society we've become so good at dealing with symptoms, but we're afraid to spend the time to look deeply and investigate causes. Politicians think that riots are the problem and if they stop the riots with force the problem goes away. But riots are just a symptom of a sick system.
Also meditation was for me a pretty good mood improver, but it's more recently helped me uncover some painful thoughts and surface emotions that I'd essentially avoided without realising it.
Lastly, the value of exploring all these things with a therapist can't be overstated, if you have the privilege to afford it.
For a long time I had many small and (apparently) inconsequential triggers which brought up past anxieties, or memories of the awkward and the nervous. Previously, I would remember such event and feel a brief stab of shame, etc. and then throw the memory back into the recesses of the mind to come back again whenever it felt like tormenting me. So a few a months ago I started catching these repressive thoughts - delibrately pulling them back after discarding them - and analysing them. I quickly realised that I had been letting them hassle me without giving them adequate thought as to why.
I think this is also relevant to some of the other comments about proactivity in challanging mental illnesses (not that I am qualified, or that it really covers anything or everything), in that the plunge into the icy and dark waters maybe harder to handle than the swim.
I have come to realize that I have a lot of weird trust issues that stem from my desire to be perceived in a given way. Further analysis has helped me realize I want to be perceived that way because it's a defense mechanism for me - by being seen as the person who can fix anything, I feel better about things I can't control like pandemics and unrest. For me this also ties into how I self perceive my own value - being useful gives me value. This then begs the question of why I feel such a strong need to be externally validated...
And obviously your particulars are different but the goal is to open the dust covers and understand what is driving and controlling the mental machine.
Generally the situation doesn't warrant shame, and there's underlying reasons for you feeling the shame about that situation. You can learn a lot about yourself from those.
A good friend can do the same thing, but even with the best of intentions not everyone knows how to non-judgmentally help you address issues without unintentionally causing more shame. Sometimes the reasons we keep these thoughts to ourselves is because we shared them in the past and were hurt by the response.
I took a somewhat lower salary so I can have a lower commute. My commute currently is 5min drive (never), 20min metro, 60min walk, or 15min leisurely cycling. I usually choose the walk or bike, unless it is raining. I have not driven even once to work in 2.5yrs.
Similarly, i "traded" money for beauty -- an apartment on the bike trail. I'm paying about $150/mo more but my daily commute is now 95% through the forest on a bike trail. The commute has almost no traffic. I either think, listen to audiobooks, or catch up with my mom on the phone during commutes. Sometimes I try to just relax with the goal of Shinrin-yoku https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nature_therapy
I realize this isnt possible for everyone. It may not even be possible for me long-term -- how often do you get an office and apartment along a wooded bike trail? In my case, I did take a hit on level/salary to achieve this (temporarily?) I was previously a startup CTO and usually get headhunter messages for CTO jobs (20-30 person companies) and FAANG jobs, etc. I generally cant explain it but I'm just taking a breather for myself. I still work hard now, but my daily time on the trails are sacrosanct.
It seems like another world given previous jobs (trading floor in NYC, management consultant with global travel, startup CTO with overseas sales/operations.) But I'm so happy I tried this out and continue to keep with it, despite the many seemingly better opportunities out there.
The sad thing is these geographical situations are not usually available with the types of jobs i'd like, or I'd try to have both! Before, I could have done the same thing, say, at Central Park or Hyde Park -- but -- lets be honest and ask whether it happens or not? It rarely did for me outside weekends. Now, I "force" myself to do this twice a day.
No the system and other systemic or social problems are just a excuse.
Riots, at least those in recent events are an example of contagious social behavior. That is evidenced by the fact that the blamed issues have been known problems for longer than two weeks with people actively working for years to raise awareness of them. If other people are so passionate about these social problems that they are drawn to riot then where was this passion more than two weeks ago? Why suddenly congregate into emotional hysteria, especially since other people have been actively addressing these concerns for years, when the problems of complaint are preexisting and were clearly previously known to these congregants?
Via anger, sadness, depression - whatever?
As an Army guy with a family embarking on his fifth overseas deployment spontaneous bursts of rage are frowned upon. I don’t do that. I have gotten comfortable to sparse, tiny, lonely living conditions and learned to regulate my mental health according to the expectations at hand.
> the progress just isn't quick enough
I suspect the majority of people engaging in riots, and possibly the protests as well, have provided little to no participation of any kind towards these social concerns before two weeks ago, and if that is true the speed of progress is irrelevant.
Would there be riots right now had Floyd not been killed? Have you even seen a riot started out of nothing? Just for fun?
I doesn't change the original point that if a politician's first goal is to stop the riots, it's only to cover a symptom while the real problem is not fixed. And it's a matter of time before everything starts over again.
It's a pretty well-known phenomenon. You hold a sports riot when your team wins, not when it loses.
And I've read enough history to wonder why and how the black population has suffered so much injustice for so long. You ask "why now" and you question their motives. But the only explanation I could come up with - for why they suffered in silence for the last few decades - was that the enemy was too formidable. Yet there is a breaking point, and George Floyd probably was it. I'm not hopeful that there will be any change though. On the contrary the American system will make black people pay, in a long, insidious, and institutional manner.
> It is not about you, but about the historical imperialism America
This host nation invited American presence as a partner.
Seen any riots in Iraq? What did you think the Arab Spring was?
(Conversely I suspect the people in the protests are almost certainly all politically engaged and at least vote. The previous political engagement of BLM has not achieved anywhere near the same results as the protests have. The protests appear to be the only way to get police charged for murder even when there is clear video evidence.)
The thing about counterinsurgency is that shooting insurgents makes more insurgents. Especially the indiscriminate use of "non lethal" rounds to cause severe and permanent injuries: shooting people, including reporters and medics, in the face with rubber bullets. Every act of filmed violence (e.g. https://twitter.com/Reuters/status/1268759072876224514 ) makes the situation worse.
And the two feed off each other. The overseas wars return to domestic strife. A historical example: https://twitter.com/BeijingPalmer/status/1267539424549769219
According to the definitions though it is not an insurgency. An insurgency is violent opposed to a non-violent rebellion. Most peaceful protesters appear to disavow violent rioters.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Insurgency
I suspect their point was that quoted line. I didn’t miss it so much as I just didn’t comment on it when the rest of the comment is just such nonsense.
Do you see how superficial this appears?
In case you didn't know, BLM has been around for a long time and NAACP has been around even longer. The issue of systemic violence against minorities has also been an issue in the American social scene for at least the last 100 years.
People are coalescing into groups more so for non cognitive behaviors than for deliberate premeditated concerns but when confronted by that reasoning deflect. When confronted they don’t deny it or excuse it but instead argue defense of positions that were never in question.
> Do you see how superficial this appears?
Good. That is my point. If you find the subjects that people are protesting about concerning and important you should very much care whether outside observers see something sincere or superficial.
The rest of your comment I agree with 100% and have been repeating this numerous times without directly specifying organizations by name.
Might be that they were busy working/worrying about corona? Busy making a living? Being under circumstances that were already straining the limits, but not straining enough to actually riot?
I also believe rioting is contagious. But that doesn't mean it doesn't require justification. Otherwise, wouldn't we see riots totally disconnected from any justification? But few people, when they see vandalism and don't agree with the cause, won't join in. Not enough to spark a riot.
>Why suddenly congregate into emotional hysteria, especially since other people have been actively addressing these concerns for years, when the problems of complaint are preexisting and were clearly previously known to these congregants?
There have been protests, lawsuits, smaller violent reactions, and other riots for decades. It doesn't seem sudden to me.
Sensitive people like you make me sad. [from your own bio]
To me labelling people who collectively rise up against systemic domination as 'emotional hysteria' is just the epitome of cruelty.
#blacklivesmatter
[EDIT] to put it another way, there's a cost to political action. That a lot of people might see that cost WRT anti-police-brutality protests as lower, and the benefit it yields higher, this week than they did two weeks ago, and so be willing to participate, is not "emotional hysteria". Not that nothing that could be described as that has been involved at any point in the process, but that seems reductionist to the point of being very wrong as a characterization for the overall movement.
Sure, but that's not what I described.
Same with calling protestors "irrational" -- maybe to your point of view, they are but this is not an objective statement by any definition of the word.
Of course, if you're saying society at large is irrational I pretty much agree... but within the context of social expectation, I'd say it's pretty rational to compute that your contribution is more likely to land once a movement has already started. If anything, those who first begin the movement are the most irrational (since the likelihood of success is much lower compared to the personal cost to the individual).
In other words: if you live in an irrational system, the only way to be rational is to behave irrationally.
EDIT: Italicizing.
I am not sure why that word comes across as offensive given that people were rioting. I can’t think of any better example of a sudden burst of excess emotion.
In the case of the protests I expect people are turning out for at least a few different reasons:
* this is an issue they are concerned about, and now there seems to be sufficient attention on it to actually cause change;
* this is an issue they are concerned about, and they have nothing else to do given the coronavirus lockdown;
* they're bored and it could be fun;
* it could be an opportunity to cause destruction (videos suggest a number of police see the protests in this light).
In terms of protests and riots being a symptom of a sick system, that is absolutely the case. History has many examples of change that was only brought about by the large scale demonstrations (e.g. women's suffrage, civil rights). In a better system this would not be required. Effecting change that is not in the interests of the ruling class is incredibly difficult in most of our democracies.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conservatism_(belief_revisio...
I guess I'm not totally sure what point you're trying to make, what's your theory exactly?
People are coalescing into groups more so for non cognitive behaviors than for deliberate premeditated concerns but when confronted by that reasoning deflect. When confronted they don’t deny it or excuse it but instead argue defense of positions that were never in question.
There are few things more loaded with terrible, horrifying historical imagery in America than a white police officer lynching a black man.
And I promise you, the significance of this horrific imagery was not lost on a single black American.
As someone who is black and impacted by these recent events - think of them as a giant pouring of gasoline on an already present fire. People are grieving pain that has been present for years. People grieve in different ways. I don't agree with using violence, looting, rioting as a means of grieving, yet I can fully understand why others have taken that route. The riots are in fact a symptom...not an excuse. It's a fact. Slavery was a "well known problem", but it took the Civil War to see the Emancipation Proclamation come into fruition.
Getting rid of racism in America's systems and in individuals is going to take a lot of effort along with moments like this where everyone is reminded of exactly how much progress is left.
The reason why recognizing group dynamics is important is because it can serve as a means to deprive individual liberty.
I stumbled on an interesting phrase for the looting: "looters are not protestors, and protestors are not looters." Some may even distinguish protesters from rioters. Indeed, there are black people still peacefully protesting, even against the use of uncontrolled destruction. It doesn't make sense for people (of different races) to destroy and at the same time rake the reputation of black people through the mud for a moment of... satisfaction (?) without care for the people - even black people - who will be suffer for it.
But I am certain that whoever, regardless of race, is stealing from some designer store does not give a flying fuck about the movement - at least when compared to their greed. BLM is not about the use of slave labor predominant in the clothing industry.
Yeah. See Yvain's excellent review of "Empire of the Summer Moon":
All of the white people who joined Indian tribes loved it and refused to go back to white civilization. All the Indians who joined white civilization hated it and did everything they could to go back to their previous tribal lives.
There was much to like about tribal life. The men had no jobs except to occasionally hunt some buffalo and if they felt courageous to go to war. The women did have jobs like cooking and preparing buffalo, but they still seemed to be getting off easy compared to the white pioneer women or, for that matter, women today. The whole culture was nomadic, basically riding horses wherever they wanted through the vast open plains without any property or buildings or walls. And everyone was amazingly good at what they did; the Comanche men were probably the best archers and horsemen in the history of history, and even women and children had wilderness survival and tracking skills that put even the best white frontiersmen to shame. It sounds like a life of leisure, strong traditions, excellence, and enjoyment of nature, and it doesn't surprise me that people liked it better than the awful white frontier life of backbreaking farming and endless religious sermons.
Whites who met Comanches would almost universally rave about how imposing and noble and healthy and self-collected and alive they seemed; there aren't too many records of what the Comanches thought of white people, but the few there are suggest they basically viewed us as pathetic and stunted and defective.
https://www.gwern.net/docs/history/2012-11-13-yvain-bookrevi...
Sounds like someone drank the "Noble savage" koolaid in writing that.
Disagree, "civilized" societies have vast surpluses of the resources needed for survival (Level 1 and 2 of Maslows Hierarchy) compared to tribal societies, although those resources may not be distributed properly -- which is indicative of that which we truly lack: community belongingness and love (Level 3 of Maslows Hierarchy).
"Civilized" societies use far less land per person to produce food.
Until a century ago, frequent crop failures, disease, and other ailments were a hallmark of sedentary societies.
Ostracization was a death sentence: there was no space for LGBTQ or anyone significantly different than the norm.
Do you know what they did for entertainment? Games similar to horseshoes. No books, no video, no computer, etc.
Hunting is really hard when it’s 10 degrees outside with snow on the ground and your shoes are made of plain leather with no modern water proofing.
I could go on but I’m tired of trying to convince you. Every culture has it’s pros and cons.
This is just racism in a different form.
How much worse then to have been completely defeated by such a race!
While social anxiety seems to be definitely more prevalent these days, I am wondering if this might be something that actually increases due to the precise lack of sufficient positive community experiences.
Meeting new people has always been uncomfortable and a bit scary for most people, but being part of something low key like a community garden or a group of people playing sports for fun will in my opinion do more for one's mental health than drinking coffee or taking melatonin.
That said, of course not every experience counts as positive nor will every activity suit everyone, it might take some time to find what you enjoy - but it's worth it.
But let's also turn it around and follow the advice, you sleep well, eat healthy, do your round in the gym, meditate and drink your coffee every day. Well, you're still going to feel pretty sad and lonely if the rest of the time you're locked up in your room reading Reddit. The advice given is not bad per se, it's just not complete.
By doing these things you legitimately improve your physical and mental faculties. Of course it's a cycle that feeds back to itself: socializing and having friends will give you motivation to keep up your habits and so on.
Sometimes the first step is fixing the basics so that you have the energy and mood to go out and explore the world and to make people want to befriend you. You have to break the cycle somewhere and it has to be where you are in control, not where other people are in control.
When the things mentioned (Sleep, Diet, Exercise, Stress Management, Exogenous Compounds) go out of balance, that "unbalancing" may well be a symptom (consequence) of the mental issue and not the cause as is implied in the article.
You can invest all you want decades in advance in creating balanced habits in those areas and still be disrupted down the line with negative mental health events.
You can say 'healthy' is just a good-enough arbitrary cut-off. For mental health, no glaring neuroses, you usually feel good or neutral about yourself, no suicidal ideation, basically just if none of the markers people've said are unhealthy show up.
Even then, medicine is super hard since there is so much complexity in the human body and variations across populations, and experiments are extremely costly.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4172306/
If that's the definition, then there are zero psychiatric drugs that can be classified as western "medicine", as we have yet to understand how drugs like anti-depressants intercourse with the mind ("the mechanism of action deduced").
"psychiatric diagnosis still relies exclusively on fallible subjective judgments rather than objective biological tests" -Allen Frances
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allen_Frances
It's a very odd use of the world "western"...
I'm not sure about the broader society, but I think this mentality is still prevalent in both physical and mental health these day.
My mother was a very health conscious person (to the level of insanity) but one attitude she showed that I think lead to long term mental/physical health improvement is what your attitude towards medicine is. She saw medicine never as a solution but a temporary band-aid and if you use one medication more than once, it is a indication that something in your life is terribly wrong. I don't share that absolutist attitude, some situations are only solvable with medical interference. But where you draw this line seems to have an profound effect.
I've observed that people that consider medicine (both for physical & mental health) as a part of the solution to a problem they have in life never achieve to get out of their trouble. If you're living a unhealthy lifestyle, any health complications are amplified and taking medicine might suppress it for now, but unless you change the underlying life-style, it will slowly make things worse. Same goes for mental health; If your mental life style is unhealthy (bad social interaction, information consumption that most lead to negative emotions etc), any amount of anti-depressant won't get you out of trouble. You're only delaying it.
You're suggesting that I shouldn't get the same chemotherapy for relapsed cancer or that my relapse is because of "something in my life is terribly wrong".
Because the treatment worked to get it in remission, fuck me for wanting to take the same medicine again?
Lots of people suffer from poor health through no fault of their own. Arguing that their ills must be because of poor life choices is victim blaming.
Just because you're lucky enough to not have suffered chronic ill health doesn't mean others have been so lucky.
Take pleasure in your fortune, but don't try to take all credit for it.
I would say what it means that medical intervention should be used only as a last resort (or quick) measure.
I don't feel they were talking about it in an over-generalizing way, just saying that if you're living unhealthily you're going to continue to be/get unhealthy. Medicine and treatment can help though, as a band aid in these cases. Of course this doesn't preclude someone who's generally healthy from getting sick, unfortunately.
But your comment is also correct, just misdirected in this case I feel :)
To quote the key paragraphs:
>>I have seen what modern medicine does to people. "You cholesterol is too high, take this statin and your number will get better. Don't take it and you will have a heart attack". And then you have family members and friends take the drugs, and start having side effects.. random pain, random problems that stop them from being physically active. So then they go back to a doctor and get some new medicines, that maybe fixes the pain, but then adds a new side effect. And pretty soon they are bed ridden and taking 14 pills to stay alive. What a bunch of crap.
>>I am not anti-medicine, but I am anti-cutting-edge-for-margain-gain medicine. If you have AIDs, you probably should take some medicine. I vaccinate myself and my children. However I think that if you are active and eat well, I don't care what my cholesterol is. Maybe it is high, maybe it isn't. And if you aren't active or eating well - you need to fix that (not take medicine). If I start dying of cancer, I will throw every medicine I can find at it. But if I am good and healthy, I am going to leave well enough alone.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11506599
The first half talks about how to treat mental health like we treat physical health, and we treat physical health in a transactional "businesslike" way.
The second half of the article proposes doing exactly the same: extreme measurement of pathologies and solutions instead of going for what feels right to your body.
If fixing your mental health was simple then it wouldn't be such a prevalent problem.
To be fair to your point though the article does say we should shift our thinking on mental health to the same perceptions granted towards physical health. That should mean the mental health evaluation equivalent of a physical every four years. That is absolutely beneficial to everybody because even perfectly healthy people get regular physicals even when they are perfectly healthy.
The fallacy hidden in the article is that each of us is completely in control over our physical and mental well-being. That your well being isn't an inevitability but a choice. If it's a choice, then this implies that making the right choices is 100% your own responsibility.
Sure, the author does raise a number of fair points about mental healthcare and how some good daily habits affect your own well being.
But then the author completely misses the mark in the conclusion.
No two human lives are the same. Everyone's experience is uniquely different and shaped by an infinite number of events and circumstances past, present and future. Most of which humans don't even get to control directly. The idea of controlling your life and the optimistic view that one is able to mould it towards an ideal stems in Modernistic tradition.
Human minds are doing poorly at self diagnosing, while it's very hard for others to spot the signs of mental health issues. Mental health is also deeply woven into the identity and the personality of individuals. Personal struggles are very much part of being an individual.
Rather then pandering "we should invest in our mental wealth" or even "we should go for a yearly mental health check up", start by sitting down and listening compassionately to those around you first, without offering any practical solutions. If someone lost a loved one, they don't want to hear "maybe you should see a therapist" right off the bat, they are addressing you directly, and they hope you're just willing to listen and acknowledging their pain and not much more.
If someone states they suffer depression, anxiety or PTSD, rather then arguing semantics, the more important questions to ask would be: Am I listening to this person, what are they trying to say and do I understand what they are saying?
Finally, statements that start with "we should..." without backing up their claim, tend to rustle my Jimmies. Who's this "we" anyway? And why am I being dragged into the argument from the outset?
> If someone lost a loved one, they don't want to hear "maybe you should see a therapist" right off the bat, they are addressing you directly, and they hope you're just willing to listen and acknowledging their pain and not much more.
While you directly address listening I think, more broadly, you mean to suggest active empathy. I fully agree and it’s a skill many people inadequately develop or practice.
This is nonsense. The author makes no such argument, you're just projecting it onto him.
"Here are some things you can do to proactively manage your mental health, rather than ignoring it until you have a crisis" is in no way putting 100% of the responsibility on the individual.
Of course not. Your dentist does understand the difference between what you can do and can't do. But context matters. And I'd venture your insurance may hold a different idea about personal responsibility.
The same applies to a self-described silicon valley angel investor, founder, podcaster, author and general start-up helper who writes about "investing in mental wealth".
> And these are creating the current environment where we can explore these topics in the abstract collectively — or the acute symptoms we are feeling with loved ones and therapists alike with more positive encouragement from others than ever before, and that helps us zoom in on our individual underlying root causes… and for better or worse, it seems more and more clear that optimal mental health is an individual sport.
Full, hard stop there. Mental health being an individual sport? No. Not by a long shot.
Sure, our own human experience is utterly individual. That is, nobody can feel what you as an individual feel. Barring telepathy, it's not possible to get to the bottom of what someone else is going through. That doesn't mean that your mental health is shaped in a vacuum nor that you are managing your own mental health entirely solo at the end of the day.
Your mental health is tied into your circumstances, your past, your upbringing, the people you met, your current family situation, job, culture, religion, politics, financial situation and so on and so on. How you feel right now is the net result of infinite external and internal factors tying into each other balancing out what goes on in your subconscious.
> Progress is being made, but we have a long way to go in continued open, public dialogue and destigmatization of these common ailments. So when you get a chance to talk about your direct or indirect experience with a mental illness, seize the opportunity to talk about it openly. There’s never been more receptivity to open dialogue than now.
This is true. And those are first steps.But that's not nearly enough. My gripe with the article is that it only lightly brushes the topic of discussing underlying root causes.
For instance, PTSD caused by domestic or child abuse. Sure, you can openly talk about coping with PTSD, have group sessions or do an awareness campaign, but actually creating a socio-economic and judicial environment in which abuse within large communities can be addressed and prevent through strong ties and support networks? It's not exactly like the ball gets pushed forward on this front in a way that a tangible impact has been made, right? If anything, modern life very much puts the focus on the individual with all the unintentional downsides that this brings.
Moreover, this the article simply moves into the opposite direction.
> It goes from a lens of “fixing” to “investing” — in other words, instead of fixing something that is by implication broken, it’s investing in its durability to withstand the wear and tear that comes with modern life. And this begins well before the internal or external life-interrupting event itself (in fact, that is the whole point).
I read this as: there's somehow a way to build "mental credit" that you can expend when you fall on hard times. Yet, the author disregards individual social and economic background, personality traits, and so on.
As I said, sure, to an extent managing stress and sleep are things you do to maintain your own well being... in the present moment. I'd feel down as well if I eat unhealthy, don't get enough sleep and just don't manage the basics in my life properly in general.
But they aren't a silver bullet that solves anxiety and depression caused by losing your job and your house in a pandemic. Neither does a strict and health-focussed training inoculates soldiers against the horrors of the battlefield. The numbers on mental health issues and suicide in veterans serve as a stark reminder here. And they sure aren't a golden hammer that does away with anxiety and depression in teenagers caused by peer pressure or meeting the high expectations by parents and guardians.
> For example, instead of just thinking about fixing an acute financial problem like personal debt, wiser heads are thinking about investing in the optimal outcome with almost every economic decision; financial freedom.
> Instead ...
So much of mental health advice can be boiled down to "you must adapt to your environment, and if you can't, then your struggles are your fault for failing to adapt." The burden falls on the individual, but not on the systems they live in. The context surrounding a person is rarely acknowledged, and is often treated as an invisible normal.
But, it's not always reasonable to expect someone to adapt. Change takes a hell of a lot of effort! And, as you've pointed out, there are factors that could make it hard or impossible for someone to change. Asking someone to adapt themselves to fit rigid expectations and norms might erase parts of their identity in the process, too. Is that a sacrifice worth making?
That's why I advocate for adapting the environment to the person whenever possible. Providing accommodations, addressing the root causes of stress, and carving out little spaces of safety and comfort. And, if it's not possible, then I think it's important to acknowledge that sometimes things are just shitty. Sometimes your mental health is fucked, and there's not much you could have done to avoid it. That helps stop me from falling into a guilt spiral where I blame myself and get even more anxious/depressed.
But, overall, these days my mental health is so much more community-oriented than it was before. IMO, people deserve to live in better conditions, and shouldn't carry the burden of making that happen entirely on their own.
The problem is that the implication of articles like this one is that if you don't do those things any resulting mental health problems are your own fault. It reinforces the awful reasoning stupid people use like "Oh, you didn't exercise or get good sleep? No wonder you're depressed then! It's your own fault."
My original comment intended to discuss mental health by pointing out that the author skipped several fundamental aspects and instead packaged general advice points and tried to sell it as "investing in mental wealth".
My criticism is that the article could have said:
Here's some great basic overall advice that helps you day-to-day. But let's acknowledge that mental health isn't shaped in a vacuum. Environmental and societal issues do have a big impact on the experience of individuals. And unless there's an honest debate about that, many people will keep on struggling.
Equally, it's perfectly valid to talk about preventative dental care. But let's also acknowledge that dental health doesn't exist in a void and that it is very much tied into one's socio-economic place in society, and the affordances that allow one to maintain their dental health in the first place.
Okay, that's your view. I've taken control in the areas listed, I pay attention to what I'm doing, I'm journaling, noticing what improves my well-being and it's been a great journey that is helping me with my depression tendencies. I am proud to feel that I now have control to go to sleep over Youtube rabbit holes till the sun comes up, etc. etc. I am moulding myself and it's largely thanks to helpful material that doesn't just say you are good as you are, keep being a slob who never exercises, procrastinates eternally, etc. Keeping my wakeup time constant and going running first thing in the morning has helped me a ton. The exercise and the regular wake up makes me sleepy in the evening, I don't need coffee in the morning etc. Things do work.
> Human minds are doing poorly at self diagnosing, while it's very hard for others to spot the signs of mental health issues. Mental health is also deeply woven into the identity and the personality of individuals. Personal struggles are very much part of being an individual.
I don't want my struggles with my sleep schedule to be part of being an individual. Nor do I want my gaming addiction to define myself. Nor my anxieties.
You don't realize that this attitude of "anything goes", "you are okay", "no lifestyle can be ever better than any other" can give people the idea that there is nothing for them to do. That things will necessarily stay the same until some big social revolution comes sometime in a few... decades?
People can take action here and now however small. The feeling of a bit of control and agency can do wonders and can snowball into great things.
The simplistic version of this is telling a depressed person they should "lighten up." But such a person may not have the resources to just change their mood on a whim, and when they also realize this and internalize it, they may become defensive. If they are unable to follow this "simple advice" to just become "okay" again in the context of society at large, their reaction could only reinforce those self-destructive thoughts. Because I am unable to just do these simple things, then what is my value in life, and so on.
There can be a meta to this mentality. A lot of such people could be well aware they are not okay, and still not have any intention to get better, for a variety of reasons. The assumption is that every person wants to act for their own benefit. There are some people who only want to act for their own detriment. Someone defensive enough could just twist the words of "you could do better," which are completely well-intended, into meaning "but I'm failing to, and that is my fault, and that means I am not good enough for you." They can just believe the helper thinks less of them because they just can't do what they say, and ignore anything they say to the contrary, to make a point. And that is what is defined as "success" for them - proving that they are not good enough to the people that want them to improve, through their own actions. So with that mindset it is an endless negative feedback loop that will frustrate everyone trying to genuinely help the person, until they all give up or nothing ever improves and then said person is left alone with their own thoughts. And then anything could happen.
But that is not to say that it's the same with anyone who is genuinely willing to listen and take advice to heart. You can choose to say "yes, and here are the steps I'll take to get to 'okay'". It's just that not all people are open to advice, and sometimes the only way to make those people listen is to pay other people to force their own worldviews on them (therapists), "for their own good," like a parent would to a naive child who refuses to listen.
And in the end, some people still cannot be changed.
Someone suffering depression, anxiety or any mental health issue rarely follows rational logic in their thinking about themselves or the world. That's what makes it so hard on their support network. It's not something you solve by readily giving particular advice.
Therapists usually don't force their views on their patients either. On the contrary. My therapist explained to me that they simply listen and act as a mirror who reflects without judging on what's being said in a session. They act like a guide you're free to follow. A good therapist is able to establish a bond of trust.
Even so, therapy isn't a magic bullet either. Plenty of patients drop out after a few sessions because they fail to connect with their therapist. This isn't a bad thing in itself: it's better to find someone with whom you do connect. Paradoxically, therapy failing is just as often validating that confirmation bias mental health patients have about therapy.
For sure. I think of it more as something that gets stored in the back of the mind, so it can be recalled when the person is ready. That may come in 1 year, in 3 years, in 10 years or never.
Making someone want to do stuff is futile. Just like it is futile to make yourself want stuff. It has to come from the inside (and what's "inside" gets there over a long time from the outside). And for every such blog post there may be someone out there who goes: I've been hearing this stuff for so long now, you know what, I'm gonna actually try it and will wake up at a regular time for the next 7 days and will do a short morning exercise. Now how and why someone will get in this receptive phase is a mystery. But it happens and when it does, it's good to have good advice material out there, because people may google for this kind of stuff. You decide you want to fix some of your issues, and by the "grace of god" you feel like you can take a step towards this for some reason so you google tips for your situation and then you may actually do it.
Now, will everyone do it reliably just because they read a blog post? Of course not. But it's better than just leaving it all to only pills and doctors (note: of course take your meds) and not telling people anything about what they could do right now based on evidence. The body is a machine that reacts to what you put into it and how you treat it. It's not a mystery and just hearing this or knowing this CAN (in some cases, not all) help people gain a bit of control and see that even if they cannot control much, they can move their body parts and can at least a little bit move in the direction that they want to go towards. Little by little.
If you think all it takes is willpower and you force and force till you break down and conclude that you're just worthless, then you're doing it wrong. There is a sense in which self-improvement as a concept is bullshit, in the sense that Alan Watts expresses here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vlNVQ-_y4-0
Ultimately nothing is "deeply broken" in some metaphysical sense in this universe. When we say something is "bad" it just a shorthand to mean we don't want it to be like that. It isn't bad deep down in the fabric of the physical universe. The universe is very aloof and unresponsive and ignorant of what we want or not. It's not trying to spite you when you fail, it just doesn't know what the hell we want from it. When my shoes get dirty, it's not because the world has decided to spite me and make me angry. Reality has no concept of "dirt", it doesn't know that I didn't intentionally scoop up the dirt with my shoes while walking. It's the same mechanism that we sometimes use to intentionally get sticky materials onto a surface. The way to communicate what you want from reality is through action, because that's the language that reality speaks.
The whole self-improvement business has to be done in an intricate balance between taking it playfully and taking it seriously. This is really hard to express properly in a comment. Ultimately you will always have something else to desire, something else to work towards, nothing will be ultimately and finally satisfactory unless you also work on your mindset.
But there are better and worse states of being in some sense. Having anxiety, depression, insomnia, brain fog, addiction, obesity etc. is in some very real sense worse than being fit and in a good mood by default. With the caveats above.
Making people want something is almost impossible. Nobody could ever make me exercise a few years ago. It was just not part of my identity. I thought the gym was for just for loud tough gym bros on steroids looking to get more one night stands. Blog posts and articles like this slowly accumulate in the back of one's mind. And when shit gets really rough and you by yourself come to the realization that you will now do something. Not because you have to or it's your duty or because anything, but you just know that you will now do something because you know things are not going well. Then if you stored these tips up, you may say, you know what, I'm going to actually try that thing I've read about so much in the context of mental health and depression. You will have something to reach for.
Sure there can be other underlying causes for why your life is derailed. But first and foremost you need to fix yourself as a biological homo sapiens to a certain level so that you can engage in the complex task of untangling why you slid off the road. (Beyond a certain point you need a therapist clearly, but only beyond a certain point). Once you have the mental clarity and energy and a baseline okayish mood, you can think of what lead to all this. Maybe you're giving 200% at work, trying to satisfy everyone, while others are actually taking credit for your work who work way less intensely. Maybe you're pushing hard at work to become a martyr and aren't actually using your energy in an efficient manner and others are more ahead because they are working more efficiently not harder. Maybe you seek validation in your professional life because your intimate relationships are failing. Why are they failing, why do you have no friends, are there perhaps practical issues involved, do you commute to...
But at the same time, it's important to recognize that there's far to the story then this. Mental health is just as much rooted and so many other factors not in the least social and economic circumstances.
This just half the story. The other half is actually the difficult part of addressing root causes. Such as growing up in a dysfunctional or abusive family situation. Or having a disposition towards addiction. Or being the butt of systemic discrimination i.e gender, physical appearance, disabilities, cultural background, skin colour, income level,...
Sure, you could tell someone "the cause of your fatigue and latent depression is your 4 hour daily commute." but that's not something you can readily change if that individual doesn't have the affordances - degree, income, dependents,... - that allows them to either get a job closer to home or move closer to their job.
Neither does it do to tell someone "Your lack of self-confidence and anxiety is a matter of stress management and lack of sleep" if they are under tremendous peer pressure compelling them to conform to particular culture or mentality at school, among friends, at work or at home which is at odds with their personality and who they are.
The entire picture matters.
My gripe with the article isn't that it dispenses advice in line with what you're saying - advice I wholeheartedly agree with in it's own right - my gripe is that the article simply doesn't even begin to address the complex reality that underpins mental health issues. Instead it deprecates entire fields of study because either "they don't know what they're talking about" and "it's been in stasis for decades now without any new insights" and then substitutes that by launching new concepts called "mental wealth" making bold claims about "investing" and "durability" rather then "fixing".
Putting your shoes on, no thinking, start walking. I can get behind that. It helps to clear the air and get in the present moment. And I'm sure a part of the audience will take that advice and apply it tot heir own betterment. But it shouldn't detract from the real hard work up ahead.
So I see that not just this article, but articles like this in general floating around half-assedly in public consciousness can create an atmosphere where the attitude is that everyone who is down there got there by their lack of will, by their corrupt soul, and deserve it etc. which seems to be a common framing in the US. I don't live in the US and I myself are pretty far from that framing and may be too blind to its bad effects. So by all means, fighting for political change and for creating a social net that catches people and bounces them back up is very important.
But certainly in another sense, for a particular person it's a bad strategy to wait for others to pull them out of the mud. It may never happen. There are plenty of people who remain in that type of cycle, get all types of disease, die early etc. There won't be any dramatic music or moral lesson in the end, they just die with perhaps few people caring about even that fact. I like the quote "Start where you are. Use what you have. Do what you can." It's also similar to the Christian idea of Christ embracing the sinful and loves them in their humanity as they are right now, not only in some idealized version of them. Or the 12 step program for addicts, etc. If you take note of where you are, you can make a deliberate small move to where you want to be, instead of doing a random walk. Of course this only benefits you in some sense, but after a while it can expand and snowball to improvements for your family etc.
The top-down solution and the bottom-up solution can and should coexist.
This is a good way to view it, thanks.
I'm just trying to figure out how humans, with personal intentions of constructing things, fit into this framework.
You're at this point because you came to an understanding about yourself and that you don't have to let those issues define who you are. At the same time, who you are today is very much someone who faces this challenge, and this is intrinsically a part of your identity. This is neither good or bad. There's no judgement or value attribution here.
The observation here is that you wouldn't be who you are today if your life took a different road, either by your own choice or by circumstance.
My point isn't that life is pre-destined or pre-determined. Each moment is an opportunity to do something that pushes your life in one way or another. But the opportunities and the choices life hands you? Those aren't infinite and neither are you in complete control over what will cross your road.
Sleep, eating, stress management, exercise,... those are all good habits that will help open doors to other sets of opportunities and choices which you wouldn't have if you didn't mind them at all.
But in my view, the author overstates their importance to the point where he simply ends up disregarding many other factors that determine one's mental well being which often have a larger impact.
Some respond more to rational reasoning, some to emotional ones.
There is no general recipe.
Imagine if we simply observed obesity as "what happens to x% of the human population after y years of exposure to this environment".
Imagine if we observed the growing disconnect between intelligence and critical thinking ability as a function of changes in the information ecology.
Telling people to do that when they are struggling with big social problems (unemployment, poor access to education, discrimination...) or already existing mental issues is very harsh.
A lot of people with two jobs and a rent to pay have no time to sleep/exercise/meditate/read/whatever.
A lot of people with mental issues have no mental energy to sleep/exercise/meditate/read/whatever.
This entreprenurial opportunity could only help the more well-off with mental issues, of course.
On a broader scale, whenever I read comments like yours, I wonder what the point is. What do you suggest people in those situations do? What's your alternative advice as to how they might improve their lives? Because all I hear, in general, is 'well, this is good advice, except it'll be hard for some people to follow it because x'. I never hear the next part where people explain what those in those situations should do before following the above advice.
Or are we just taking it for granted that there will be people who will just live in misery until the day the revolution comes?
As a mindset, it just doesn't seem complete.
But the article isn't about fixing your mental health, it's about investing in it. Your comment is like getting angry that a blog post that goes "take care of yourself, eat fruit every day!" is "putting 100% of the onus for dealing with obesity on the individual".
Also I think your attitude is unnecessarily defeatist. So what are you suggesting instead, that rather than attempting to build healthy habits, depressed people should give up?
The thing is, there are testimonies of tons of people online who fixed so much about their life, based on tips like this. I'm very much against this attitude of "let's keep good advice secret, so we don't look too judgmental". This is what leads to things like "health at every size" and "fat acceptance". That you can no longer spread advice on how you can massively improve your well-being and life expectancy by losing weight, because this is somehow too judgmental towards people with conditions that make weight loss unusually hard.
Second order effects are important, sure, and there can be counterintuitive consequences and other weird smart stuff. But first and foremost, there are tons of stuff that people can do right now to improve their lives. I am really greatful for the existence of articles like this, because this stuff helped me and if it was for you, we'd only have articles that make us all resentful, bitter and give up trying.
And OF COURSE the system needs to change, especially in the US. How they treat mental illness by policing, the whole consumerist propaganda, the stress inducing, hyperoptimized apps, the hyperpalatable foods that are engineered to trick us to eat more and get fat etc. etc. they all need to be addressed. We cannot expect people on a massive scale to suddenly be able to counteract these immense forces raining down on them all day every day from all channels, billboards, ads etc. guiding them towards a harmful life.
In summary
1) When giving advice to an individual it's about how to thrive in a cold hard world that doesn't care a bit about whether they are happy or suffer or live or die. What you can do, you should because ultimately you have different paths forward and working step by step, little by little, while not beating up yourself in the process can be immensely helpful. Not because you will get praise or because you obeyed the commands of the white coats, but because you will genuinely be better for your own sake.
2) When talking to people who have their shit together, advocate for compassion towards those who are in a messy situation. But really helping is hard. Teaching to fish vs giving fish etc. Just because someone has a messed up life with mental health issues doesn't make them into angels, that would be some variant of "noble savage". It can be difficult to help, you may be used, you may be tricked, and progress is not guaranteed.
Think of it as an analogue of the Liskov Substitution Principle. Prepare the person to be strong in a harsh environment and simultaneously work on making the environment less harsh so that less strong people can also thrive.
If a man empties his purse into his head, no man can take it away from him. An investment in knowledge always pays the best interest. - Benjamin Franklin
I think these are accurate but a glaring omission is the overarching element of "how good is your life". You can take care of your physiology (and you should) but that won't get you too far if, for example, you're also stuck at a dead end job or if you're completely isolated and have no friends and no intimate partner.
https://forms.gle/C9KebsV2u64Wqvc56
Usually people write to their past selves regarding some regrets in order to ease the pain. Simply putting your thoughts out of the mind and onto the screen helps. And treating your past self as another person helps, too.
Also people write to their future selves to encourage/overcome the fear of the unknown.
I use the schedule future email feature in Gmail it's nice to reflect on in the future my current fears/concerns at that time, am I still alive, etc...
The mention of older medicinal systems being focused on prevention and listing Dr. Andrew Weil put me off. IMO, these should be last on your list when you’re looking for help or solutions.
However, this should be read with some skepticism. The author relies on their own authority as someone who "has been thinking about mental health for 19 years." I was intentional about not googling whoever this is, perhaps they're a medical professional or something. But if that were the case, I would hope they would cite better sources than describing themself as "someone that has paid close attention to this cross-lattice work of interweaving disciplines for a while now". Skimming over buzzwords like "detoxification, and anti-inflammation" is a red flag. The article's first side bar goes on to talk about how "the first medical professionals were surgeons saving a soldier’s life". This is line is particularly disconcerting, but the entire "sidebar" sounds like conjecture. The whole article sounds like conjecture, which should NOT be sold as a source of authority on a topic like health. That is how we get essential-oil anti-vaxxers.
The author's notion of Mental wealth, using that definition, would be how long can you can reasonably plan to be self assured and make decisions using that frame of mind. An hour? A day? Still looking forward to a positive time period? Even if you are depressed or grieving, you can have mental wealth by accepting those circumstances and recognizing you are making decisions with that as a factor.
Extending that model, mental poverty could be when you are essentially paralyzed or a slave to intrusive thoughts, where you cannot go a few minutes without being interrupted by fears, memories, or imagined conflicts. It's hard to separate the notion of "you," from your thoughts, and there is a part of our mind that needs to convince us they're the same thing, but recognizing that the mind that produces these thoughts can be just like a finger or an appendage that is injured without taking all of you with it is a big leap toward mental "wealth."
Viewed this way, you are not your stubbed toe, or even your broken leg, and the part of your mind that is in pain and cutting you off from the present is not all of you either. You may need to compensate for it until it heals, or even adapt to the injury, but it doesn't mean you should stop making decisions and plans. Recognizing when you aren't making decisions and plans, and exercising the ability to actively decide to do so could be the foundation for building this mental wealth. I like the author's model, it could be useful.
Worse, it seems that many doctors and organizations think they can actually do harm given the misinformation they provide:
......
"Patients who ask Dr. Robert Wood, an allergist at Johns Hopkins Children’s Center, whether they have a food sensitivity would never undergo an immunoglobulin G test. Immunoglobulin G tests “are completely useless and do dramatic harm” because they may compel patients to unnecessarily avoid broad swaths of a healthy diet, Wood said.
“In all my years of practice, I have never sent an immunoglobulin G test because they have no ability to predict food sensitivity,” he said.
That’s because immunoglobulin G stems from the body’s normal immune response to exposure to many substances, including food. High levels don’t indicate a problem; they simply point to foods a person recently has eaten.
For these reasons, a 2008 European Academy of Allergy and Clinical Immunology task force recommended against testing for a type of immunoglobulin G to evaluate for food intolerance. In the report, the group wrote that the test was “irrelevant for the laboratory work-up of food allergy or intolerance and should not be performed in case of food-related complaints.”" [0]
......
"Dr. Neha Shah, a rheumatologist and immunologist at Stanford University, is one doctor who is skeptical.
"What we don't have is proof that having a high IgG level against a particular food item means that that food is causing your symptoms," says Shah.
"A lot of this kind of huxterist testing is keying off of the placebo effect," says Dr. Norman Paradis, a clinical lab expert who teaches at the Geisel School of Medicine at Dartmouth College, referring to the industry in general and not to a particular product. "[1]
......
"The presence of IgG is likely a normal response of the immune system to exposure to food. In fact, higher levels of IgG4 to foods may simply be associated with tolerance to those foods.
Due to the lack of evidence to support its use, many organizations, including the American Academy of Allergy, Asthma & Immunology, the Canadian Society of Allergy and Clinical Immunology and the European Academy of Allergy and Clinical Immunology have recommended against using IgG testing to diagnose food allergies or food intolerances / sensitivities" [2]
......
The author should seriously consider removing this from their article.
[0]: https://www.statnews.com/2018/01/23/everlywell-food-sensitiv...
[1]: https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2018/05/28/6141252...
[2]: https://www.aaaai.org/conditions-and-treatments/library/alle...
However, I'd absolutely change the order of things to pay attention to. The first one of the mentioned ones should be 'Stress Management'.
If you get this one right, you'll have better sleep, more time (and willingness) for exercise, as well as less of a need for any substances to get you through the day.
Also, he doesn't mention metacognition at all. Paying attention to one own's thought processes is a big part of staying sane in the long term.
- fresh air and sunlight (high CO2 indoors is detrimental to cognition and sun is needed for the circadian rythm and vitamin D and other stuff)
- social contact (appropriate to personality), so friends, family and romantic relationships to the extent and intensity that one's personality needs them
- career success and stable finances: makes one feel useful and takes away a lot of stress and frees up mental energy to think about all the other things mentioned in the article
- winding down sometimes, unplugging from phones, TV etc. One way is meditation, but can also be just sitting with a cup of tea thinking about nothing particular
- learning and trying new things, new foods, new languages, new books or genres
- challenging oneself and overcoming discomfort, physically such as cold showers, or mentally such as public speaking or whatever seems scary/hard
I think the overall idea is a scaffolding of routine and stable structure in life punctuated with deliberate, planned and conscious reaches out of the comfort zone. Like yeah waking up every day is great and much better than a whacky schedule. What's probably even better is having exceptions and whacking up your sleep for one or two weeks per year for a festival or a hike or a few days of intense creative work.
The point is to return to the default every time, but religiously sticking to a rigid routine where you cancel and refuse anything that may conflict with it is only to be recommended to people with really low change tolerance like certain autists. Even they should play with their own limits even if those limits are at a different place.
As cliche as it sounds it felt like if I took care of these two things, everything else will take care of itself. Since last 15 days, I feel reinvigorated once again as I focus on these two things. There is a long way to go to fully undo all the damage, but I feel I am on track.
- Clean the spaces you are in, bedroom, kitchen, office, living room, etc - Learn to communicate with an open heart. The book "Nonviolent Communication" is a great resource. - Be careful of your thoughts. Don't even joke negatively about yourself. It really does affect you even if you're not aware.
At some level our bodies are like machines. Feed it crappy fuel (food) and don’t give it good maintenance (exercise and sleep) and it won’t run well.
those are actually the 4 pillars of health: eat right, exercise, get enough sleep, minimize stress
No matter what the exercise is, ease in, find a trainer (you don't need one for long depending on what you're doing), and be smart.
Go figure, at some point your body stops being able to find something (I still have no idea what) to do with an extra 2-2.5k calories a day of crap, 6hrs a night of sleep starts to leave you dragging after one night of it, and you can't live like that anymore (well, you can, but it'll be... very bad).
Doing the same with a car at 80,000 miles is outright dangerous. But if taken care of properly, older cars can drive just as great as newer ones, and sometimes a well-maintained older car can drive even better than a neglected newer car.
Though, I wouldn't say it was the only "code to living a good life". After a problematic job, I'd also add work/life balance, on top ofrelationships (friends and family) and your faith.
Eat well, get some sun, drink water. You are like a houseplant with more complex emotions.
90% of the time when I’m feelint crabby it’s because I’m hungry or dehydrated. Moving also always helps.
Some beliefs are so destructive that no amount of exercise will alleviate their effect. For instance, some people are what I call blamers. They believe that their misery is because of life, others, society... They refuse to accept what life has given them (whether their look, family...). They honestly believe that their misery is result of external consequences. No amount of exercise will fix that. Contrast that to those who are always grateful. Always glad with what they got. Happiness for these is simple.
So, for some, it can help.
This is a significant, non-scalable investment of time and effort in the well-being of another. It wouldn't surprise me if such experiences were in extremely short supply in those people's lives. From my experience, there's a significant chunk of the population for which this sort of investment is a required component for their on-going sense of self-worth.
I'm not sure why, but my experience is that tech culture is particularly prone to an almost axiomatic rejection of this aspect of human interaction and well-being, and often exhibits significant prejudice towards those for whom this external requirement for well-being manifests.
Quick thought experiment: would you tell a physically abused child, to their face, "Do you honestly believe your misery is a result of external consequences? Be grateful for what you do have."
Some people habitually blame things that they caused themselves on others. Others commit the converse and blame things other people did on themselves. I don't think either of these facilitates your mental health.
If you are an adult, almost certainly things happened to you that weren't your fault, but that are your responsibility. That's life. Life is the process of dealing with those things, and then you die. It sucks, but it's worth it. Am I out of platitudes yet?
All these habits are founded on a desire to be better, which in turn needs to be rooted, at least partly, in compassion for yourself. If you don't want to be better, because you don't think you deserve it, because you have had that beaten into you, why would you exercise or eat better? And the only way you're guaranteed to have compassion for you when you need it is to learn how to generate it yourself. You're not going to exercise or eat clean or anything healthy sustainably if you're sustaining it by abusing yourself verbally or emotionally. So don't do that.
Some examples:
* treating all human beings as a whole, which allows people to share happiness on other people's achievement - this kind of resonates with the theory of Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins, where it argues that the goal of all humans is to maximize the chance that the entire gene pool will continue to exist
* reduce sense of one's own identity - which helps people during hard times by thinking about how small one single person is compared to the entire race, maybe even the entire universe
And of course, there's the advocate around being grateful, being compassionate, do more meditation etc.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brain#Metabolism
As mental health deteriorates the consumption of resources required by the brain can fall out of rhythm to the detriment of the rest of the body.
1) I live in Canada, a giant country. But camping is super expensive, $50/night camping. Its unaffordable for any length of time. And many provincial parks sell out.
2) Buying a small piece of land and hand building a tiny cottage is basically outlawed in Ontario. You need building permits and build at least 800 sqft. 100K is probably the base price for the land alone.
3)Despite all the land, there is no program for providing allotment gardens to citizens. Having a small patch of land you can grow vegetables on is rare. But its a thing in many European countries.
4) Where I live all the forests have been cut down, and turned to giant farms long ago. Almost all land is private. You can't just go and wonder.
TV, Video games and Computers are cool and all, but its obviously not something you should be spending most of your day on. But it seems like thats the only affordable entertainment option left for many people.
People are bored, cooped up in tiny apartments because of Covid. I can see why people are rioting in cities. And since so many people seem to be stacking up at zero or negative wealth. Capitalism seems to be under direct attack now, and some serious cracks are forming. The politicians need to revaluate the situation.
Lots of land in North America, why not have a program where poor citizens can get a small lot somewhere, and let them build a small cottage there. Without it costing 100s of thousand and thousands a year in taxes. A place they can take their kids to.
In Vancouver, even downtown, there are a number of community gardens with various vegetables growing.
Worse, it seems that many doctors and organizations think they can actually do harm given the misinformation they provide:
......
"Patients who ask Dr. Robert Wood, an allergist at Johns Hopkins Children’s Center, whether they have a food sensitivity would never undergo an immunoglobulin G test. Immunoglobulin G tests “are completely useless and do dramatic harm” because they may compel patients to unnecessarily avoid broad swaths of a healthy diet, Wood said.
“In all my years of practice, I have never sent an immunoglobulin G test because they have no ability to predict food sensitivity,” he said.
That’s because immunoglobulin G stems from the body’s normal immune response to exposure to many substances, including food. High levels don’t indicate a problem; they simply point to foods a person recently has eaten.
For these reasons, a 2008 European Academy of Allergy and Clinical Immunology task force recommended against testing for a type of immunoglobulin G to evaluate for food intolerance. In the report, the group wrote that the test was “irrelevant for the laboratory work-up of food allergy or intolerance and should not be performed in case of food-related complaints.”" [0]
......
"Dr. Neha Shah, a rheumatologist and immunologist at Stanford University, is one doctor who is skeptical.
"What we don't have is proof that having a high IgG level against a particular food item means that that food is causing your symptoms," says Shah.
"A lot of this kind of huxterist testing is keying off of the placebo effect," says Dr. Norman Paradis, a clinical lab expert who teaches at the Geisel School of Medicine at Dartmouth College, referring to the industry in general and not to a particular product. "[1]
......
"The presence of IgG is likely a normal response of the immune system to exposure to food. In fact, higher levels of IgG4 to foods may simply be associated with tolerance to those foods.
Due to the lack of evidence to support its use, many organizations, including the American Academy of Allergy, Asthma & Immunology, the Canadian Society of Allergy and Clinical Immunology and the European Academy of Allergy and Clinical Immunology have recommended against using IgG testing to diagnose food allergies or food intolerances / sensitivities" [2]
......
The author should seriously consider removing this from their article.
[0]: https://www.statnews.com/2018/01/23/everlywell-food-sensitiv...
[1]: https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2018/05/28/6141252...
[2]: https://www.aaaai.org/conditions-and-treatments/library/alle...