More on Mental Wellness (2/n)

Some months ago, I wrote about the long-overdue steps I’ve been taking, with help from all around me, towards maintaining better mental health. Since then, I’ve been chugging along, and wanted to write an update post with a couple of new practices I’ve been finding very helpful, but writing this post didn’t seem especially urgent, so I let it sit. After all, the responses I received to my initial post were either kind or harmless. No one chided me for talking about mental health, and I was lulled into believing that maybe people were getting used to the idea that mental wellness isn’t something you just “snap” into. But I’m being spurred into action because of a recent twitter exchange in which a senior academic with tens of thousands of followers mocked a graduate student who shared some of her mental health concerns. I realized quickly that this conversation about mental health is very far from over, and you can bet that I’m going to join the ranks of the people voicing support for those of us who struggle with mental wellness, normalizing the idea that we often have no idea what someone’s inner life looks and feels like.

So in that spirit, here are two other practices I’ve adopted recently to help calm me down and center myself. As before,  absolutely NONE of this is prescriptive, and none of this is static. I don’t have any of the answers, just a few things that have helped me. None of this is easy, and I don’t want to pretend it is. But I think it’s worth it, and maybe this will resonate.

Phone-less walks: I’ve discovered that a lot of my inner unrest arises from putting on a “social face” when interacting with the world, and while I recognized some time ago that I put on this face for in-person interactions, I hadn’t figured out how far this extends (duh, in hindsight) to online or phone interactions as well. Once I did, I started going for long walks in which I leave behind my phone and wallet, minimizing the interactions I’m likely to have. I have a 45 minute route and a 1.5 hour route; my sense of direction is too bad to not have a set route, and not having to think about getting lost is nice. I find that I’m often more productive when I come back from these walks, so I don’t feel guilty for taking the time. But some days I come back emotionally exhausted and still, the longer term effects of feeling calm seem more than worth it.

Notebooks: Another major source of unrest for me is this notion that I have to be prepared for difficult situations (logistical, academic, emotional, what have you), and therefore have to replay in my head over and over exactly how I have responded or might respond to such situations so that I don’t forget. But if I write this stuff down as it strikes me, I don’t have to shoulder the mental burden of remembering it all. So I’ve taken to filling little notebooks with these thoughts through the day (especially on the phone-less walks), and have freed up lots of brain-space as a result. It isn’t quite the same as journalling (which I’ve never really taken to), because you don’t have to remember things even until the end of the day. Plus, writing in notebooks has the added advantage of, in academic circles at least, being a perfectly innocuous thing to do, so people don’t ask too many questions.

More on this subject when I have other things to say; hopefully it won’t take someone being an uncompassionate jerk for me to sit down and write again!