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8daysofhappyEight days of happy, day five!
Day Five: Mind control
My brain and I are not BFF. You can probably tell from the way I mistyped "brain" as "bane" that first time. All my brain really wants to do is study maths and be sad. I don't have a huge problem with the first part of the plan, but sometimes living with the second part is tough.
Here are eight ways I've found to nudge a little coping ability towards it.
-- Dealing with catastrophising: My single favourite technique for anything ever!
You're talking with a friend, and suddenly she remembers something else she's got to do and has to run off. Oh, god, she must hate you.
That's catastrophising. You take an event, and suddenly, without examining why, it confirms your worst suspicions about yourself, your friends or the universe as a whole.
The technique, the technique of my heart, for dealing with this is as follows: In the middle of a piece of paper, write down the thing that happened as neutrally as possible:
My friend had to leave suddenly.
Now write down the steps (normally three or four) that take you from the fact to the conclusion.
My friend had to leave suddenly.
-->
The need to leave might not have been as urgent as she implied.
-->
Maybe she just wanted to get away from me.
-->
Because she hates me.
Now, for every step you have going down, write one going up that's positive:
She's in a really good mood now, because I was so kind to her.
<--
She takes that as a sign of how much I care about her.
<--
She's probably glad I didn't make her feel guilty about that.
<--
My friend had to leave suddenly.
-->
The need to leave might not have been as urgent as she implied.
-->
Maybe she just wanted to get away from me.
-->
Because she hates me.
And the truth is probably not at either extreme, but somewhere between the first step below and the first step above.
In fact, let me share with you the one I did just now, at this very moment of nowness.
The offers of marriage will start to flood in.
<--
They will see how awesomely sensitive, sensible and just plain awesome I am for having these brilliant techniques and sharing them.
<--
These techniques are going to be useful to people.
<--
I am writing a post about managing low moods and unhelpful mental processes.
-->
People are going to think I'm slightly weak and silly for not just powering through low moods.
-->
In fact, they're going to judge me behind my back.
-->
And they won't want to be friends with me any more, because I'm such fail.
I love this technique firstly because it makes me laugh (oftentimes it ends with my advisor buying me a pony!), secondly because it forces me to examine my thought process critically, and thirdly because it's not about arguing with negative thoughts, it's just about creating space in your mind for positive ones, too.
-- Some days are not good days, and you can't quite get out of bed. Other days are damned good days, and you can do anything you want. For all these days, there's Masterca-- uh, I mean improving the moment.
Improving the moment is the technique of asking yourself right here and now at this moment of nowness, what can you do to make this moment you're in, right here and now at this moment of nowness, a little better for you.
If you're having a shitty day and you can't even get out of bed, maybe you can still roll over so you're not resting on your arm like that. Maybe you can fluff the pillow so it's more comfortable to lie on. Maybe you can reach the glass of water on your bedside table.
If you're having a reasonable day and you're on the subway, maybe you can sit up a little straighter. Maybe you can move so you're not quite so near that person with the distinctive odour. Maybe you can practise one of the other techniques here to improve your mood even more.
If you're having a great day and you're getting a lot done, maybe the best thing you can do is not let your mind wander to this technique, but instead just keep doing what you're doing. But maybe your day would be even better if you remembered to drink a little water. Maybe you can use your extra oomph to go buy that thing / pay that bill / return that book you've been meaning to for the lastmonth few days.
Don't worry about the long term. Don't worry about what you should be doing or could be doing to improve your long-term happiness or success. Just for a moment, just focus on the moment you're in. Make that the best moment it can be.
-- Some problems are your problems, and some problems are not your monkey
People's problems are like monkeys clinging to their back.
Some of them are clinging to your back. These are your monkeys. You can give them names if you like -- I won't think any less of you.
Some of them are clinging to other people's backs. And you can help all you like, you can try to support their back or buy them a chair or massage their shoulders when they're sore from all the monkey-carrying, but you can't carry their monkey for them. It's not clinging to your back. It's not your monkey.
And some days you have enough monkeys of your own, and instead of fretting and worrying about other people's problems, you need to be able to step back and say to yourself that however much you care, and however much you can do for the person whose problem it is, it's still not your monkey.
-- Building mastery
This is a great technique for reminding your brain how to make those little happy pathways of self-confidence and self-reward.
Every day, spend a short period of time doing something skilled or semi-skilled with a positive, concrete result at the end of it.
One friend of mine cycles. She's training to race in some pretty serious competitions, and she practices every day. She says it's given her a huge dose of self-confidence when her work isn't going so well, and it's an object lesson in how she can work hard at something and improve: she can, clearly, see how her times are getting faster and she aches less after training.
Another person I know tidies. Yes, I know. But it gives her a real sense of achievement to do this semi-skilled task -- she starts with a messy room or a messy table or a messy desk, and she ends with a concrete, useful result in front of her, that makes her feel as if she has some control of her surroundings and her world.
Me, I can't just do one thing, and I can't do something I'll get competitive about, and I can't have some useful, necessary chore as my thing, because there are going to be days when I don't do this, and I don't want to use not having done this as a thing to make myself feel worse about myself.
So, my main three things are:
- Learning lists of Serbian words! Before You Know It has free lists of words in many, many different languages -- you can download (again, for free) a program that lets you learn and test yourself on these lists of maybe ten colours, or twelve greetings, or seven days of the week. It's a totally useless task for me, but I can measure my progress and I can show off to my Serbian friends (who get slightly misty-eyed every time I make the effort) and if I don't do it for a few days, who cares?
- Baking! Quick, easy, with clear and om nom nommy results. My flatmates love it when I'm in a baking phase -- the other night it was cupcakes.
- Writing! When I can, when I'm not going to feel bad if I can't, this is my favourite of all my things to build mastery in, because it's something where my first draft is always crap, but I know that with time and effort, I can make something that sparkles.
They're all things that can have external feedback and validation from others, but -- crucially -- don't depend on it. I can still feel proud of my baking even if I'm the only one to eat it, after all. (And then I get to freeze some and unfreeze it when I'm in a shitty mood and then life is glorious.)
Right now, my thing is writing these eight days of happy. It's perfectly fine if I fall behind or stop doing them -- nothing depends on it, no one will judge me -- but if I can do them, then I have a concrete result to feel proud of, that will bring me pleasure to reread.
Because yes, sometimes you need to teach your brain that you can do things, and sometimes you need to teach your brain how to reward you for doing them.
-- Ideas journal
I really wish I could do this consistently. I know when I do manage to do it, everything goes a little better, though perhaps correlation is not causation.
The idea behind this is simple: Find a nice notebook that you enjoy writing in, that feels good to hold and has nice pages, and then every day, make a quick note of the things you've learned. If you're taking classes, just write down three or four lines summarising what you covered. If you had a meeting (that was worth going to), just write down the conclusions. If you learned how to deal with some software, if you had a brilliant idea for a story, if you found a new route to the shops, just write down a couple of lines telling yourself this.
When I do keep an ideas journal, I like to pepper it with quotes that have made me laugh/smile/think over the last few days. It's really good to read through, maybe a month later, when I'm looking for "Wait, which one was Shapiro's lemma again?" and find my favourite line from a recent newspaper article.
-- Affirmations
Hi! Have you ever danced in the street just because you could? Have you ever read any fanfiction? Have you ever had an opinion on whether or not Xander should have lied to Buffy?
Then the following will not be the least socially acceptable thing you've ever done.
Sometimes I feel overwhelmed. Like whatever I do won't be enough -- sometimes I feel as if I'll never not be sad and exhausted and a little bit fail; sometimes I feel as if the world will never stop being bigotted and shit; sometimes I feel as if I can never help all the people I need to help.
And the trouble is, I'm really very good at feeling like that. I'm a clever person, and I've had lots of practice -- I flip a switch, and bam! my brain is totally on that. My brain is all over that. My brain knows how to do that.
So one awesome weapon is to teach my brain some other answers. And how do I do that? By standing up and saying out loud the simple phrase, the affirmation, I would rather my brain said. My main one is "I can put one foot in front of the other." I just said it out loud again! (And no one laughed at me, and no one thought I looked silly, and if they make a sitcom of my life, it will be a sitcom about witty, sexy mathematicians saying hilariously sharp things, not about how crazy and neurotic I am.) And the more times I say it out loud, the more times I repeat it inside my head, the more times I type it (I can put one foot in front of the other), the more practice my brain gets at having this as one of the answers in its arsenal.
Before I tried this, I had no faith in it at all. Now, I'm very pleased I did it, because when a dozen negative automatic thoughts swirl up together in my brain, it is nice to have a thirteenth thought crop up that is on my side.
Other people might need different mantras -- it helps if they're not just negations of your negative refrains, but whole new ideas. So if you're worried about people judging you, then instead of saying, "No one is judging me," why not try, "It doesn't matter what others think; I rock"?
Maybe it won't work. Maybe you'll just look silly. But wouldn't it be nice if one of the thoughts floating around in your brain was your friend?
-- It's okay to feel the way you feel, whatever that is
It is totally okay to feel the way you feel. What matters is what you do with that.
It is okay to feel bitterly jealous of a friend's success, as long as how you behave towards that friend is with grace and kindness. It is okay to grieve for someone you barely knew; there's not a limited supply of grief to go round. It's okay to have crappy prejudices and skeevy gender/race/sexuality/ability/whatever issues, as long as you don't act on them, and work towards challenging them and ridding yourself of them.
Repression is a fine and dandy tool, and I am totally for it, but if you can't repress something, then it tends to be better to admit what you're feeling (to yourself -- there's no need to share it, and, indeed, oftentimes it is much better to hide your true feelings in the interests of another human being) than try to pretend you're not just because you don't want to be feeling it.
And don't beat yourself up about it, and don't lose yourself in wishing you didn't feel this way -- try to change it by all means (and if "it" is a prejudice, you might want to try hard) but it's okay to feel the way you feel. You're not the only person to ever want something you can't have, you're not the only person to ever take something personally, you're not the only person to ever have an unworthy thought. You may well disagree with me, but I firmly believe that what makes a person great is how they act on what they feel, not how they feel.
-- Half-smile
You know that bullshit about smiling making you feel better? Where you contort your face into an awful forced grin and not only do you still feel sad, but now you feel sad and your cheeks hurt?
Instead of forcing a grimace, why not instead try aiming for a half-smile? Think somewhere between the Mona Lisa and Katie Holmes -- the sort of private smile that's meant more for you than for anyone else.
Some people find that a half-smile puts them in a good mood (or, at least, a calm mood) for hours after they've done it, but for me, I find it's much more useful for getting myself over a single hurdle. If I can't face getting out of bed or leaving the house or going to see my advisor, I screw on my half-smile and take a deep breath and then sometimes, oftentimes, that clears away the tension in my back and chest and throat enough that I can take the first step towards whatever it is I need to do.
...and this was meant to be a short one. I hope some of this helps some of you some little bit! <3<3<3
Day Five: Mind control
My brain and I are not BFF. You can probably tell from the way I mistyped "brain" as "bane" that first time. All my brain really wants to do is study maths and be sad. I don't have a huge problem with the first part of the plan, but sometimes living with the second part is tough.
Here are eight ways I've found to nudge a little coping ability towards it.
-- Dealing with catastrophising: My single favourite technique for anything ever!
You're talking with a friend, and suddenly she remembers something else she's got to do and has to run off. Oh, god, she must hate you.
That's catastrophising. You take an event, and suddenly, without examining why, it confirms your worst suspicions about yourself, your friends or the universe as a whole.
The technique, the technique of my heart, for dealing with this is as follows: In the middle of a piece of paper, write down the thing that happened as neutrally as possible:
My friend had to leave suddenly.
Now write down the steps (normally three or four) that take you from the fact to the conclusion.
My friend had to leave suddenly.
-->
The need to leave might not have been as urgent as she implied.
-->
Maybe she just wanted to get away from me.
-->
Because she hates me.
Now, for every step you have going down, write one going up that's positive:
She's in a really good mood now, because I was so kind to her.
<--
She takes that as a sign of how much I care about her.
<--
She's probably glad I didn't make her feel guilty about that.
<--
My friend had to leave suddenly.
-->
The need to leave might not have been as urgent as she implied.
-->
Maybe she just wanted to get away from me.
-->
Because she hates me.
And the truth is probably not at either extreme, but somewhere between the first step below and the first step above.
In fact, let me share with you the one I did just now, at this very moment of nowness.
The offers of marriage will start to flood in.
<--
They will see how awesomely sensitive, sensible and just plain awesome I am for having these brilliant techniques and sharing them.
<--
These techniques are going to be useful to people.
<--
I am writing a post about managing low moods and unhelpful mental processes.
-->
People are going to think I'm slightly weak and silly for not just powering through low moods.
-->
In fact, they're going to judge me behind my back.
-->
And they won't want to be friends with me any more, because I'm such fail.
I love this technique firstly because it makes me laugh (oftentimes it ends with my advisor buying me a pony!), secondly because it forces me to examine my thought process critically, and thirdly because it's not about arguing with negative thoughts, it's just about creating space in your mind for positive ones, too.
-- Some days are not good days, and you can't quite get out of bed. Other days are damned good days, and you can do anything you want. For all these days, there's Masterca-- uh, I mean improving the moment.
Improving the moment is the technique of asking yourself right here and now at this moment of nowness, what can you do to make this moment you're in, right here and now at this moment of nowness, a little better for you.
If you're having a shitty day and you can't even get out of bed, maybe you can still roll over so you're not resting on your arm like that. Maybe you can fluff the pillow so it's more comfortable to lie on. Maybe you can reach the glass of water on your bedside table.
If you're having a reasonable day and you're on the subway, maybe you can sit up a little straighter. Maybe you can move so you're not quite so near that person with the distinctive odour. Maybe you can practise one of the other techniques here to improve your mood even more.
If you're having a great day and you're getting a lot done, maybe the best thing you can do is not let your mind wander to this technique, but instead just keep doing what you're doing. But maybe your day would be even better if you remembered to drink a little water. Maybe you can use your extra oomph to go buy that thing / pay that bill / return that book you've been meaning to for the last
Don't worry about the long term. Don't worry about what you should be doing or could be doing to improve your long-term happiness or success. Just for a moment, just focus on the moment you're in. Make that the best moment it can be.
-- Some problems are your problems, and some problems are not your monkey
People's problems are like monkeys clinging to their back.
Some of them are clinging to your back. These are your monkeys. You can give them names if you like -- I won't think any less of you.
Some of them are clinging to other people's backs. And you can help all you like, you can try to support their back or buy them a chair or massage their shoulders when they're sore from all the monkey-carrying, but you can't carry their monkey for them. It's not clinging to your back. It's not your monkey.
And some days you have enough monkeys of your own, and instead of fretting and worrying about other people's problems, you need to be able to step back and say to yourself that however much you care, and however much you can do for the person whose problem it is, it's still not your monkey.
-- Building mastery
This is a great technique for reminding your brain how to make those little happy pathways of self-confidence and self-reward.
Every day, spend a short period of time doing something skilled or semi-skilled with a positive, concrete result at the end of it.
One friend of mine cycles. She's training to race in some pretty serious competitions, and she practices every day. She says it's given her a huge dose of self-confidence when her work isn't going so well, and it's an object lesson in how she can work hard at something and improve: she can, clearly, see how her times are getting faster and she aches less after training.
Another person I know tidies. Yes, I know. But it gives her a real sense of achievement to do this semi-skilled task -- she starts with a messy room or a messy table or a messy desk, and she ends with a concrete, useful result in front of her, that makes her feel as if she has some control of her surroundings and her world.
Me, I can't just do one thing, and I can't do something I'll get competitive about, and I can't have some useful, necessary chore as my thing, because there are going to be days when I don't do this, and I don't want to use not having done this as a thing to make myself feel worse about myself.
So, my main three things are:
- Learning lists of Serbian words! Before You Know It has free lists of words in many, many different languages -- you can download (again, for free) a program that lets you learn and test yourself on these lists of maybe ten colours, or twelve greetings, or seven days of the week. It's a totally useless task for me, but I can measure my progress and I can show off to my Serbian friends (who get slightly misty-eyed every time I make the effort) and if I don't do it for a few days, who cares?
- Baking! Quick, easy, with clear and om nom nommy results. My flatmates love it when I'm in a baking phase -- the other night it was cupcakes.
- Writing! When I can, when I'm not going to feel bad if I can't, this is my favourite of all my things to build mastery in, because it's something where my first draft is always crap, but I know that with time and effort, I can make something that sparkles.
They're all things that can have external feedback and validation from others, but -- crucially -- don't depend on it. I can still feel proud of my baking even if I'm the only one to eat it, after all. (And then I get to freeze some and unfreeze it when I'm in a shitty mood and then life is glorious.)
Right now, my thing is writing these eight days of happy. It's perfectly fine if I fall behind or stop doing them -- nothing depends on it, no one will judge me -- but if I can do them, then I have a concrete result to feel proud of, that will bring me pleasure to reread.
Because yes, sometimes you need to teach your brain that you can do things, and sometimes you need to teach your brain how to reward you for doing them.
-- Ideas journal
I really wish I could do this consistently. I know when I do manage to do it, everything goes a little better, though perhaps correlation is not causation.
The idea behind this is simple: Find a nice notebook that you enjoy writing in, that feels good to hold and has nice pages, and then every day, make a quick note of the things you've learned. If you're taking classes, just write down three or four lines summarising what you covered. If you had a meeting (that was worth going to), just write down the conclusions. If you learned how to deal with some software, if you had a brilliant idea for a story, if you found a new route to the shops, just write down a couple of lines telling yourself this.
When I do keep an ideas journal, I like to pepper it with quotes that have made me laugh/smile/think over the last few days. It's really good to read through, maybe a month later, when I'm looking for "Wait, which one was Shapiro's lemma again?" and find my favourite line from a recent newspaper article.
-- Affirmations
Hi! Have you ever danced in the street just because you could? Have you ever read any fanfiction? Have you ever had an opinion on whether or not Xander should have lied to Buffy?
Then the following will not be the least socially acceptable thing you've ever done.
Sometimes I feel overwhelmed. Like whatever I do won't be enough -- sometimes I feel as if I'll never not be sad and exhausted and a little bit fail; sometimes I feel as if the world will never stop being bigotted and shit; sometimes I feel as if I can never help all the people I need to help.
And the trouble is, I'm really very good at feeling like that. I'm a clever person, and I've had lots of practice -- I flip a switch, and bam! my brain is totally on that. My brain is all over that. My brain knows how to do that.
So one awesome weapon is to teach my brain some other answers. And how do I do that? By standing up and saying out loud the simple phrase, the affirmation, I would rather my brain said. My main one is "I can put one foot in front of the other." I just said it out loud again! (And no one laughed at me, and no one thought I looked silly, and if they make a sitcom of my life, it will be a sitcom about witty, sexy mathematicians saying hilariously sharp things, not about how crazy and neurotic I am.) And the more times I say it out loud, the more times I repeat it inside my head, the more times I type it (I can put one foot in front of the other), the more practice my brain gets at having this as one of the answers in its arsenal.
Before I tried this, I had no faith in it at all. Now, I'm very pleased I did it, because when a dozen negative automatic thoughts swirl up together in my brain, it is nice to have a thirteenth thought crop up that is on my side.
Other people might need different mantras -- it helps if they're not just negations of your negative refrains, but whole new ideas. So if you're worried about people judging you, then instead of saying, "No one is judging me," why not try, "It doesn't matter what others think; I rock"?
Maybe it won't work. Maybe you'll just look silly. But wouldn't it be nice if one of the thoughts floating around in your brain was your friend?
-- It's okay to feel the way you feel, whatever that is
It is totally okay to feel the way you feel. What matters is what you do with that.
It is okay to feel bitterly jealous of a friend's success, as long as how you behave towards that friend is with grace and kindness. It is okay to grieve for someone you barely knew; there's not a limited supply of grief to go round. It's okay to have crappy prejudices and skeevy gender/race/sexuality/ability/whatever issues, as long as you don't act on them, and work towards challenging them and ridding yourself of them.
Repression is a fine and dandy tool, and I am totally for it, but if you can't repress something, then it tends to be better to admit what you're feeling (to yourself -- there's no need to share it, and, indeed, oftentimes it is much better to hide your true feelings in the interests of another human being) than try to pretend you're not just because you don't want to be feeling it.
And don't beat yourself up about it, and don't lose yourself in wishing you didn't feel this way -- try to change it by all means (and if "it" is a prejudice, you might want to try hard) but it's okay to feel the way you feel. You're not the only person to ever want something you can't have, you're not the only person to ever take something personally, you're not the only person to ever have an unworthy thought. You may well disagree with me, but I firmly believe that what makes a person great is how they act on what they feel, not how they feel.
-- Half-smile
You know that bullshit about smiling making you feel better? Where you contort your face into an awful forced grin and not only do you still feel sad, but now you feel sad and your cheeks hurt?
Instead of forcing a grimace, why not instead try aiming for a half-smile? Think somewhere between the Mona Lisa and Katie Holmes -- the sort of private smile that's meant more for you than for anyone else.
Some people find that a half-smile puts them in a good mood (or, at least, a calm mood) for hours after they've done it, but for me, I find it's much more useful for getting myself over a single hurdle. If I can't face getting out of bed or leaving the house or going to see my advisor, I screw on my half-smile and take a deep breath and then sometimes, oftentimes, that clears away the tension in my back and chest and throat enough that I can take the first step towards whatever it is I need to do.
...and this was meant to be a short one. I hope some of this helps some of you some little bit! <3<3<3
