Navigating the mental madness

What helped me through a mental “illness”

Even though we are firmly standing in an era that seems to have officially recognised mental health as an important consideration in our day to day lives, the language used to explain experiences relating to mental health is not helpful at all. My experience of “mental illness” was termed ‘stress induced psychosis’. I don’t know about you, but all you read is ‘psychosis’, which sounds oddly familiar to ‘psycho’ and there we have it another looney with issues.

I experienced this psychosis about 5 years ago and like what humans normally do when having a first time experience, you look for answers and for how ‘normal’ it might be. The funny (sad) thing is, people are having this experience all the time, but it’s all in the wording baby. You might have been slapped (like I was) with the psychosis label but here is how else I have seen it referred to and best believe it is the same thing:

• Mental breakdown
• Panic attack
• Melt down
• Breaking point
• Lost my sh*t

Really, if you’re not able to think clearly or process what’s happening in front of you in a socially acceptable way, then you are in what I call the mental madness.

I’ve been in the mental madness at least a handful of times. Hey, don’t judge, it takes a couple of go’s to really understand triggers and clear out the clutter in the mind. Yes that involved two admissions to a mental health hospital. A couple of bouts of time off from work. It’s taken some effort to get through the emotional rollercoaster.

Only now, do I feel like I can share that journey of how I navigated the mental madness and how I got out of it essentially for the better. Because I believe mental health is a skill set. I figured the more practised I get at responding to triggers the fitter I am in my mental toughness. And it does work just like that. The mind is like a muscle and thinking of it that way is so much more helpful in responding to life’s ups and downs with tenacity.

So here is my attempt at passing on what I learned to those who might find themselves in the thick of it, asking yourself WHY, HOW, AHHH!

I hope there is something to find here that you can use to get yourself to a better mental space:

1. Moving the body every day

I had to learn to respond to emotions with movement. I found anything else just left me in a pool of helplessness. I’m not even particularly overweight or unfit, I was just lazy with my body. Yet, wanting my mind to be super active and pick up all the slack. It just doesn’t work that way.

Body and mind go together. To put an analogy to it, I was stuffing my brain full of information and since I wasn’t processing it with movement and exercise, it just kept stacking up until my brain was like an over boiling kettle, the steam’s gotta escape somehow.

There are so many fitspo, motivational people out there you have zero excuses. Time, money whatever, there is something you can do. I find overwhelm in this category is the main thing holding people back from starting.

You will laugh when I tell you what I started doing. I had to prove to myself that I wasn’t lazy by behaving in the opposite. So whenever I felt like just sitting and watching TV, I would do squats instead just 20. And if I was crying and feeling sorry for myself I did squats again. This is part of the brain-behaviour rewiring required for navigating out of mental madness. Because you don’t change your mind by using your mind. You change by proving to your mind what you can do. So slowly, the mind is forced to change the script from “I can’t” to “ok maybe I can, but this sucks can we go back to the other thing because this is new and different and unknown” to “I actually like this and I want to share it with everyone” to “this is who I am now what of it”.

If you’re overwhelmed by the options, here is a lead. Choose one Youtube fitness vlogger that offers free content (I like Heather Robertson) and do one video a day. If you forget, that’s ok get back and start again. Just keep doing it until you find it part of your routine that you’re no longer thinking of it as a ‘have to do’ but a ‘I just do it’. From there let you’re curiosity lead the way with your fitness, if you get bored that’s not an indication to stop exercising, it’s an indication to keep going and try a variation or something slightly more difficult.

2. Eating well

This one is such a crazy maze to navigate because there is so much culture and social connection embedded in the food we eat, when and how we eat it. If you really want to see results with your mental health, you have to look at what you’re putting in your mouth day in/day out.

It absolutely effects your mood and whether you are operating on a half tank/full tank or what fuel you’re running off. What that is, is truly up to you to figure out. Every body is different. Sure there are some standard things across the board that would surely benefit most people, things that come to mind are:

• if it’s fast it’s f*kd
• bread makes you bloated
• simple foods are better than super foods
• Packaged goods are no good

3. Letting emotions pass through

The only way I can explain this was after observing how children can be crying one minute and the next minute be laughing and playing again, I figured why can’t I do that? At some point in my childhood, I had decided that showing emotions was bad and I never wanted to do it because I had concluded that only bad things happened. So you can imagine how at the age of 27, experiencing a break up and having all these emotions to have to process. My mind was like no don’t do that, too many intense emotions, I refuse to feel! Perhaps this is irrelevant to you because you were always ok expressing emotions or perhaps not. What I want to say is, it’s OK to feel!

You will be ok if you cry and it won’t last (surprisingly). And you will be ok if you feel angry, and it too, won’t last. So I hope you find a safe way to express the anger and get on with the cooler stuff. Like the feeling of bliss and connection, that’s a favourite emotion of mine! Unfortunately, bliss often comes after the harder stuff is dealt with. So let them pass, welcome them like friends and know they come with being human. It’s all part of the experience.

4. Finding the words

I found this to be a frustrating process because when you have so many emotions, words just cannot even come close to explaining to another person what you’re going through in a way that they could understand in a reasonable time frame. I personally needed to feel safe to talk about myself and my feelings which I mustn’t have been getting from my social circle, so seeing a psychologist absolutely helps with this. And I used to be one of those people who scoffed at the need to see psychologists (I know, only the ignorant!). So if you can’t easily communicate to those around you about what you need and why you are experiencing mental madness then that’s your cue to see a psychologist to help you find the words to express yourself.

Another thing that I found helped me surprisingly quickly was journalling. Consciously choosing to write positive affirmations that were encouraging and reprogramming the negative self talk I had by scribbling these down in a journal truly does help. How far you take this is up to you. I decided it had it’s limits and wasn’t transferable with communicating to others, so I stopped once I became better with my self-talk in the moment.

5. Digitally detoxing

Just a personal choice I made because I started seeing how much my behaviour and mind was being shaped by connecting constantly through tech platforms. I recognised that I just felt empty after my interactions online, it stopped being meaningful and started feeling transactional and I wasn’t willing to participate in it anymore. So I left. Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn (until I needed to get a job later).

This changed things for me in very interesting ways. And I call it a detox because it is like a detoxing experience, there is a come down from it. The main mental shifts are:

• realising that you have to ask questions from people to get to know what they have been up to (no longer scrolling on their profile page or newsfeed to read they just had a baby or got married). I like this though, because it makes you more of an engaging conversationalist.
• accepting that because you’re not constantly advertising that you exist and are still relevant to your 200ish “friends” on social media, you won’t have many people calling you up with invites to events unless you are physically in their space to be invited.
• truly connecting to others the type that gives you the warm fuzzies takes effort and social media will never replace that and shouldn’t

6. Learning to self soothe

Reading about the development stages of babies really helped me in navigating my own mental madness. I made a very simple connection between a babies development and that of my mental madness and it was based on the hypothesis that perhaps I was going through a growth phase but unlike a baby, I have all this language and mental scripts to navigate that babies have the luxury of not having.

The behaviours at each development stage are crying, cranky and clingy and I saw that in myself whenever I was opening myself to new learning experiences. And even though we are encouraged to continuously learn and grow, we are not encouraged to behave as babies behave throughout each growth phase, so I don’t know how we’re expected to be ok with learning then?

Anyway, adults don’t usually have other adults soothing them like we do for babies (although there are businesses that basically fulfil that need for adults, like yoga classes, massages, meditation retreats etc). I realised how much I was relying on others for going through the “3 C’s” and understood if I was to reclaim my sanity and prove to my peers and family I was out of the mental madness, I needed to respond to myself as though I was responding to soothe a child, but the child was my inner self. I did this by listening to healing frequency music on spotify (what I’m doing right now in fact), moving that worked up a sweat (the adult alternative of kicking and screaming) and positive self talk to respond to the inner critic (“just keep going”, “you will be OK”).

7. Educating myself on the psychology of being human

Since I am one as well, I wanted to know as much as I could about what I was experiencing. I came across some fascinating topics that have enriched my life now simply because I was open to the information.

Some research topics/books that changed how I understood the world and how I operate in it are listed below:

• The Art of Learning — Josh Waitzkin
• The Body Keeps the Score — Bessel Van Der Kalk
• Can’t Hurt me — David Goggins
• Letting Go: The pathway to surrender — David Hawkins
• Transcending levels of consciousness — David Hawkins
• The Courage to be Disliked — Ichiro Kishimi & Fumitake Koga
• Jordan Peterson’s many psychology lectures on Youtube
• Alan Watt’s many lectures also on Youtube
• Orgasmic Enlightenment podcast — Kim Anami
• Research topic: Consciousness and para-psychology
• Research topic: Meta-physics and quantum mechanics
• Research topic: Mesmerism and animal magnetism
• Research topic: Linguistic programming
• Research topic: Adlerian psychology

8. Continuous simplification

Complexity creeps in all the time and mentally this stacks up. I’ve managed to maintain a more consistent mental framework by keeping operational life as simple as possible. If I hear myself starting to talk through things in a complicated way, I know I’ve strayed from simple and look to see where I have added complexity. This extends to as many things as possible like:

• money
• home
• clothing
• work
• activities
• schedule
• food
• family
• friends

9. Contributing in some way

I used to think contributing meant I had to do something big for someone to make them feel special to me. But along the way I forgot to sweat the small stuff and I think that’s where the biggest opportunities are missed for contributing.

A huge part of navigating the mental madness is to know you are worth existing, you are ok to be here and a welcome member of the community. Part of that is behaving in a way that contributes to the every day operations of life that makes the work lighter to lift, enjoyable to endure and confident that it can be completed.

Here is the kicker. If you are in the middle of navigating mental madness, the best thing you can do to contribute is to take care of yourself and do what you need (read previous points!) to feel sane again. Over time you will find it takes less and less time to bounce back because you’re a living, growing human who is a learning machine!

Edit: I forgot to mention tools! You’ve gotten this far so I’ll just list them here for you to look into if you so choose :)

• Elite HRV app : helped so much to learn about my bodies stress response and triggers
• Hormone Horoscope : I’m a woman so learning about my natural female cycles helps with navigating the wave of changes