Disclaimer: This blog post is a lovechild of my emotionality and rationality, which often fight each other. However, on a rare occasion, they happen to be on the same page. Usually, something good comes out of it, so I am writing this with the hope that someone might feel less alone reading it. Even better, you could pick up a piece of my journey, which might help you along with yours.
All of the mentioned books will be linked at the end.
I have been in a very overwhelming place mentally for the past few weeks. The place where getting out of bed seems like a tremendous accomplishment, let alone leaving the house, socialising, and being present. Do you know how many people I have left hanging on social media? I am ashamed to admit it. But every message hides an unknown. I simply do not have the strength and emotional capacity to deal with moments like this. No matter how insignificant the unknown might be.
Based on my unprofessional opinion, all of the above are clear signs of both developing depression and anxiety. I have never seen a therapist about it. Perhaps I should have.
It has happened before, and it is usually triggered by very obvious events at the time. They trigger some unresolved traumas that, with time (and patience), I have built the determination and perseverance to get to the bottom of. That includes recognising them, naming them and taking the time to work my way through each.
This usually happens with me (1) consciously exposing myself to my triggers, (2) examining my reactions, (3) developing a theory on how to cope with them, (4) testing my theory, and (5) repeating the whole process until the moment the trigger is no longer a trigger.
With time, I have found my own way to pull myself out of periods like this. I have learnt how to detach myself from my emotions and observe them from the outside. I am not my emotions; they may come and go, but they do not define me as a person. It was two months ago, during my flight to Lithuania, that I found an entire chapter dedicated to this in Jay Shetty‘s book Think Like a Monk.
Try shifting from I am angry to I feel angry. I feel sad. I feel afraid. A simple change, but a profound one because it puts our emotions in their rightful place. Having this perspective calms down our initial reactions and gives us the space to examine our fear and the situation around it without judgment.
Nonetheless, there is something else that keeps me going when I feel overwhelmed and incapable of dealing with life. Identity-based HABITS. They give me the routine that gets me out of bed, prevents me from being disruptive to other people throughout my day, and actually provides me with the tools and reassurance that I am doing my best to be a better person at my worst times.
With outcome-based habits, the focus is on what you want to achieve. With identity-based habits, the focus is on who you wish to become.― James Clear, Atomic Habits: An Easy & Proven Way to Build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones
Without further ado, here are the 8 habits or routines I have built and try to maintain in order to sustain my mental health. It took me a long time to get to the place I am today when it comes to my consistency with them, but I have learned that doing the best I can is more important than doing them perfectly.
WAKE UP EARLY
Chasing sunrises. This is how my habit was born.
I woke up at dawn, grabbed my dog, jumped in the car, drove to the beach and watched the sunrise. With time, I noticed that my mood throughout the day improved. I was less irritable, my attention span increased, I had the energy to get everything done and more.
We all know that waking up early has a direct relation to our productivity. No wonder so many successful people rise in the early hours. Apple CEO Tim Cook gets up at 3:45 am, Oprah starts her day at 6 am, and Elon Musk at 7 am, to name a few.
However, the increased productivity was only a welcome consequence of my conscious decision to start my day earlier than usual. The truth is… I wanted to be first. I wanted to regain control of how my day began, I wanted to set the tone before anyone else got the chance to ruin it. I had just separated from my partner, and I needed every personal win I could possibly get.
Breakups are painful because, at some point, we consciously or subconsciously start to believe that our partner is responsible for our feelings and emotions, which is an unfair burden to pass onto someone we love. We willingly give up the remote control. Chasing sunrises was my way of getting it back.
Sunrises have always filled me with gratitude. The morning sea has always brought me calmness. Starting my day by joyfully counting my blessings and playing fetch rather than stressing out about work appointments, conversations, or coursework was my way to program my body to operate in that joyful and grateful mode for the rest of the day. It worked.
I don’t chase sunrises that often these days (maybe I should), but I do my best to enjoy my morning cup of coffee in solitude before the world of responsibilities takes over.
GO TO BED EARLY
Waking up early shouldn’t be at the expense of your sleep. If your morning determines the mood of your day, then your preparation for the morning before you go to bed determines your morning.
Have you ever wondered why you get cranky when you are tired? There is a scientific explanation. As W. Christopher Winter, M.D., medical director of the Sleep Medicine Center at Martha Jefferson Hospital and author of The Sleep Solution: Why Your Sleep is Broken and How to Fix It explains, without adequate sleep, our thought processes, memory, and learning are all impaired, which forces us to confront the demands of our day with constrained resources.
Nowadays, we feel the societal pressure to constantly do more. Workaholism is romanticised. Sometimes I wonder at what cost. I have also fallen a victim to this pressure, I think everyone eventually has. More often than not, I feel like I am not doing enough – I don’t study enough, I don’t work hard enough, I don’t read often enough. I apply for jobs, and everyone wants me to have at least 3 years of experience and an endless list of skills that shouldn’t be part of my job description in the first place. Not only to have the skills but to be great at them.
So I stay up late, self-learning CRMs and Adobe Creative Suite. I try to do some coding because this could be a competitive asset. I do some writing on the side. Then some companies prefer Microsoft, others – Google, I have to be great at both. Then I have to learn more about finances because that’s important, and NFTs and cryptocurrencies, I have to stay on top of the innovations, politics, etc.
Do you know what? All of this I can also do early in the morning when my brain will be fresh and rested enough to take on new information.
We tend to wear our ability to get by on little sleep as some sort of badge of honour that validates our work ethic. But what it is is a profound failure of self-respect and of priorities.– Maria Popova, a wonderful Bulgarian-born, American-based writer, best known as the curator of The Marginalian (formerly Brain Pickings)
Let me be clear, I am not saying that we shouldn’t do our best to build on our existing skills and develop new ones. We all should strive to do and be better every day, but we also shouldn’t beat ourselves up for not meeting society’s unrealistic expectations. We cannot be amazing at everything. We cannot have healthy relationships, build a family, travel and work 12 hours a day. The important thing is to prioritise, be productive and do better than yesterday. Productivity has nothing to do with time and everything to do with self-discipline.
Go to bed at 10:30 pm and wake up at 4 am, if you wish. Get your work done while everyone’s still asleep. The work you will get done for the four hours between 10 pm and 2 am with your exhausted brain, you can do for half the time in the morning. Trust me. Try it for a week and you will see the difference.
READING
Reading is great for stress reduction, memory and focus improvement. I have used the excuse of not having time to read way too often, and I eventually got tired of my nonsense and made time.
1 hour per day. That’s the rule. I grab my Kindle (the best gift ever), set up my timer, and just dive into it.
Why the timer? I get distracted easily. Looking at my phone every 10 minutes to check if the hour is over ruins both my reading experience and my mood. Therefore, I set a timer and left my phone on the other side of the room. This way, I don’t have to think about anything else but the text. Even if I am not in the mood for reading, after the first 5- 10 minutes, I get into the mood and I enjoy it every time.
It also fulfils my New Year’s resolution to learn something new every day, so it’s a win-win.
In addition, I am building the habit of note-taking while reading. Although sceptical in the beginning, it turns out I tend to re-read my notes quite often. It is also very helpful when you cannot remember where you have read something while having a conversation with someone, makes the navigation through your resources much easier.
JOURNALING
Writing is what keeps me sane. Writing is the way I think, the way I feel, and the way I make sense of the world around me. I need to write it all out.
I have been journaling since I was a teenager. And I was a terrible one, tirelessly mad at everyone for not understanding me. Journaling helped me to shout everything I wanted to say, put it out there in the world and come to terms that no one’s entitled to understand me in the first place. Misunderstandings arise from my inability to communicate my thoughts and feelings clearly, not from people’s lack of mind-reading skills.
I think it’s far more important to write well than most people realise. Writing doesn’t just communicate ideas; it generates them. If you’re bad at writing and don’t like to do it, you’ll miss out on most of the ideas writing would have generated. – Paul Graham, Writing, Briefly
Slowly but steadily, my writing has translated into the way I communicate today. I am direct and uncomfortably open about my feelings, and I have zero regrets. However, this comes from a lot of self-reflection and active thinking. I have learned not to speak before I am sure I have something to say, as well as to avoid participating in arguments without having a clear understanding of my reasoning. I am no longer afraid of being wrong; that’s how we learn.
Writing made me the person I am today. It allowed me to have countless conversations with myself and people I have been wanting to talk to without any interruptions. It allowed me to be unapologetically emotional when this could otherwise be harmful to the people around me. It taught me how to dissect my emotions and find their initial source and understand them.
Journaling saved me a lot of money on therapy.
There’s only one rule when writing – there are no rules. That’s your safe space. You can write absolutely anything. You could write to someone, which I realise I have been doing for years. You could write to yourself. You could copy the lyrics of a song that you currently relate to. You could write down ideas and brainstorm. Just let your mind go, and you will be surprised to see the places it’ll take you.
Trust the process.
If you don’t know where to start and this terrifies you, there are journals such as The Five Minute Journal that present you with pre-made prompt questions. There are countless FREE journal templates online. It could be a good start to ease your way into journaling, although I am still not a huge fan of the idea that journaling should follow a template. What you write is a reflection of you; make the journal yours.
If you are mentally struggling or you just feel like you have lost your purpose, but journaling is something you are not interested in, I would highly recommend the Self-Authoring Suite. It is a series of online writing programs, developed by a group of clinical and research psychologists, including Jordan Peterson, from the University of Toronto and McGill University, that collectively help you explore your past, present and future. This is, without a doubt, one of the best gifts I have ever received.
EATING HEALTHIER
I am a foodie, which is a huge problem since I also have a destructive relationship with my body. I am still looking for the balance between overcoming my body image trauma, staying healthy and enjoying my burgers from time to time.
Earlier on, I talked about confronting my triggers. Well, food is one of the triggers I chose to simply not expose myself to. It is not something I need to overcome; it is something I need to control, so my decision, smart or not, was to stop buying unhealthy food. If it is in the house, I am on a mission to demolish it. I decided to save my willpower for more important things.
I don’t buy sweets at all. I stay away from processed food, and I close my eyes every time I walk by a gelato place (which is unbelievably hard when you live in Rome). I still get my pizza, pasta, gelato and burgers occasionally, I just try not to expose myself too much too often to my triggers.
Or I simply think about the jeans that can no longer fit me, and this also works. However, it’s a way unhealthier and highly unrecommended tactic as it both highlights and reinforces everything wrong in our society when it comes to body image and how clothes should fit us, not the other way around.
NO SCREENS 30 MINUTES BEFORE BED
This is pretty straightforward. I was the person who fell asleep with their TV on as a teenager; later on, the TV changed to Netflix. I cannot even tell you how much the quality of my sleep has improved since I started to avoid using my phone or laptop before bed. There is so much research proving that screens are harmful, so many resources you could find online, but I will sum up the 3 main reasons here:
- Having your phone close to you keeps your mind psychologically engaged.
- The blue light from the screen suppresses melatonin (a hormone responsible for controlling your sleep-wake cycle), which often leads to insomnia.
- It affects your REM sleep, which plays an important role in dreaming, memory, emotional processing, and healthy brain development.
SAYING NO
I have always been a people pleaser until I decided that perhaps it’s time to please myself. I know it sounds selfish, BUT as a friend of mine once said How can I help anyone else if I don’t help myself first?
This stuck with me. In the beginning, I felt bad for choosing myself over grabbing a drink with a friend, helping a family member to do his groceries because he wants company, and taking up additional responsibilities at work. I felt bad for choosing to stay home and work on my coursework instead of going on a family trip. I felt bad for putting myself on top of my priorities. Of course, I would love to grab a drink, have a chat with a friend and travel, but the guilt of not getting my things done and looking back with regret hurts more in the long run.
Saying NO is a sign that you value your time, you have your priorities straight, and there shouldn’t be a reason for you to apologise for it.
I have practised a lot. It takes time to find the balance. It requires some patience.
Don’t get mad at your family and friends for being frustrated with you, don’t take it personally when someone tells you “you’ve changed”, like it’s a bad thing. You are actively working towards that change, aren’t you? Please understand that as much as you need time to get used to your new normal, your friends and family will need it too. Talk to them, clearly communicate why you are acting the way you do, and give them some time. The people who love you want you to be happy,y and they will always come around.
SAY “I LOVE YOU” MORE OFTEN
If there’s one thing I’ve learnt and had the chance to think about quite a lot recently, is how short life is. Get over yourself and tell the people close to your heart that you love them. As often as possible.
Don’t fear rejection. Rejection is something you can get over, but the regret that you have never tried will linger forever. Speak your heart out. Loving someone isn’t a weakness. Allowing yourself to be vulnerable in your love requires some hell of a strength.
Call your parents. Call your friends. Tell your pets. I love you is contagious. The more you say it, the more you feel it and find it everywhere around you.
Just tell the people you love that you love them. It’s that simple.
I wish I had said it more often to people, I can now only talk to when I look up at the sky.
Thank you for sticking until the end. I hope you have found at least one tool between the lines that could benefit your journey. Please find the books mentioned in the text linked below, along with some other favourites that I think you might find helpful.
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