What is your understanding of the phrase ‘mental health/wellbeing’?

For me that would be the state where life doesn’t feel like a struggle, where we feel generally able to cope with things that happen, and to treat ourselves relatively kindly. Often ‘mental health’ is seen as in a binary with ‘mental illness’: either we are mentally healthy, or we are mentally ill, and those are seen as relatively fixed states. For me it’s more of a continuum that all of us go up and down over the course of our lives.

What possessed you too create your zine ‘Staying with our Feelings’ and what reactions and feedback did you receive from consumers? (Ps. I love the layout and sketches!)

I’m so glad you liked it! As with most of my work it was inspired by my own struggles, and what I’ve found works for me, and for the people I work with. I was struck that lots of different approaches to mental health include this same idea that it’s useful to stay with our feelings. However, a lot of folks I talk with don’t really know what that means. So I decided to make a simple zine to explain it, and to give some suggestions about some of the different ways of doing it.

The feedback has been really positive! A lot of people say the zine is a lot more accessible to young people, or neurodiverse people, for example, than a book or even a written website. The mix of images and words can make it both more engaging and easier to understand.

Which emotion from your experience and understanding do you feel is becoming most prevalent in modern day society and why?

I would have to go with self-criticism – is that an emotion?! – anyway the whole set of shame type feelings where you feel bad about yourself and like you’re a terrible person, or there’s something wrong with you, or you’re nowhere near as good or worthwhile as everyone else. It’s very linked to the feeling of depression, as well as anxiety that people might ‘find you out’. This is highly prevalent in modern society because consumer culture is based on making us feel bad about things so that we’ll buy products which we’re sold on the basis that they will make us happier, more attractive, more successful, or whatever. Also it’s pretty handy for those in power if we’re all so busy worrying about ourselves that we don’t get politically involved, or act against the cultural messages or structural inequalities that hurt us.

You stated in your Ladybeard article ‘ Depression and Anxiety is a sane response to an insane world’ do you believe these illnesses are a modern day construct and what do you see for the future of our generations in terms of emotion?

I think this is even more clear now than when I wrote that article! With everything that is going on post-Brexit and post-Trump, depression and anxiety could be seen as a pretty sane response. However I would always say that our experiences are ‘biopsychosocial‘. It’s not that social conditions alone ’cause’ mental illness, but rather they weave together in a complex way with our bodies and brains (our biology) and our unique life experiences (our psychology) to result in our own particular patterns when it comes to our mood and how we tend to react to things.

My hope for the future – whether it is realistic or not – is that a key emotional state will be kindness, or compassion, because that’s what we desperately need in order to counter our self-criticism, and the tendency to judge others, or treat them as disposable.

Why do you think emotion and our mental health is such a taboo subject?

We’re taught to feel a lot of shame about mental health difficulties. Also, we’re taught that some emotions and ‘positive’ and others are ‘negative’ and we should really only feel the ‘positive’ ones, otherwise we’re a failure at life. The Pixar movie Inside Out is one of the most profound things I’ve seen about how actually we need all of our emotions in order to have good mental health. Trying to only feel joy, and no sadness, anger or fear, for example, is paradoxically one of the main things that tips us into depression.

I want to understand how we can learn to communicate our feelings more and cope with our mental health better. Therefore, can we use our physical strength to help our mental health. Do you feel there is a correlation between the two, if so, how and why?

Oh absolutely the two are connected. In the West we’ve separated the body and mind for a long time now, but actually they can’t be separated at all. We’re embodied beings. So one of the most helpful things we can do to stay with our feelings is to learn to locate them in our bodily sensations. Similarly, doing things where we feel that great sense of being in our bodies often has a profound impact on our mood. People often feel that when they are moving, listening to music, or being in nature, for example. Again the cultural message that our bodies are something to be ‘perfected’ and ‘beautified’ in order to fit some conventional ideal of what is attractive goes completely against this embodied approach!

From my research I have been focusing on ‘The Emotional Economy’, which discusses how we are feeling more feelings than ever before and trying to find new ways to express ourselves. I feel there is a revolution taking place around normalising mental health outside the medical arena and in the creative space, would you agree?

I think to some extent yes there is much more information and understanding about mental health than there was when I – or my parents – were growing up, for example. But the problem is that we still tend to ‘individualise’ mental health problems – seeing them as something that some people have because of their faulty brains, or faulty thinking – rather than recognising just how tied they are to the wider culture, and to material conditions like poverty, homelessness, and experiencing discrimination, for example.

Furthermore, through what form of creativity (for example art, performance, film) would you say this is most prominent?

Oo hard to say. I’m a big fan of comics, and I think that the large number of mental health web-comics and graphic memoirs has been hugely helpful in capturing diverse experiences of mental health struggles, and normalising them. I worked with Caroline Walters and Joseph de Lappe to make 4 issues of Asylum magazine about this if you’re interested in finding out more.

My big idea is encouraging Generation Y, also known as the IPOD generation (Insecure, Pressurised Over-taxed and Debt-ridden) to go outdoors and do something creative as a means to help express their mental-self more positively. Do you agree and do you see this working?

Absolutely I think both those things are incredibly helpful when it comes mental health – although I’d be wary of advocating them for everyone because different things work for different people, and at different times in their lives.

The IPOD thing is interesting because if those are the key problems (and I think they probably are) then I’d be focused on what we can do to give this generation more security, less pressure, less tax, and less debt. Hence the answer would be political and social reform rather than anything else. So yes get outdoors (on a march) and do something creative (write to your MP, make a placard)

I think Audre Lorde’s famous quote also comes in here ‘Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare.’ Even if we locate the causes of much of our suffering in wider society, it’s still vital to do forms of self-care in order that we have the energy to resist and protest. For me getting outdoors and being creative are certainly two essential forms of self-care.

If you could describe your mind as a biscuit, what would it be and why?

A Florentine coz it’s pretty nutty

If you could describe your mind as a colour palette, what would it look like and why?

Going back to Inside Out I would hope it’d look like a rainbow, indicating that I was okay with being in all of the different emotional states. It’s probably a lifelong process to get there though.

Find out more

My zine on social mindfulness covers these ideas in more detail.

My other blog posts on mental health include:

• Mental health beyond binaries
• Mental health: Beyond the 1 in 4
• Mental health: Beyond a health focus
• Mental health interview 2
• Supporting each other through mental health crises
• Mental health and relationships

The post Mental health interview appeared first on Rewriting The Rules.

I’ve come across different versions of this process in a number of places. It forms the basis of several therapeutic approaches (particularly many existential, humanistic and psychodynamic forms of therapy) and it’s also fundamental to the Buddhist mindful approach which I find so helpful, and to various other kinds of meditation. But I’ve also noticed that many friends and clients have developed something along these lines more spontaneously, without necessarily following a particular approach.

I would summarise the process something like this:

Noticing -> Understanding -> Engaging

The core idea is that before going on to attempt to understand a situation, or to engage with it, it is important to fully notice it. Another way of putting it is that any time you find yourself struggling, you just go back to noticing.

Why is noticing so important? One of my favourite authors, Pema Chödrön, uses the metaphor of a glass of dirty water. This one particularly connects with me because I often start my days watching the Thames, which is, as we know from The Kinks, a ‘dirty old river’! I imagine a glass of Thames water in front of me. It is murky and unclear because it’s all churned up with mud and silt and rubbish. We can’t see anything clearly when it’s like that, so what we have to do is to let it be still for a period of time. That allows the dirt to settle at the bottom of the glass and the water on top to become clear.

Pema suggests that part of why we often don’t want to allow this to happen is the fear that we have of what we might see once it all settles. I imagine that the bottom of the Thames is a pretty scary place with all the junk and slime and probably even skeletons that have accumulated there over the years. What might loom at you out of the murky gloom if you gave it the chance? But the point is that any kind of understanding of our own accumulated mess – and the things we’ve tried to bury in there – is only possible if we allow the water to settle.

Rushing past noticing

Generally when I’m struggling with something I don’t give things time to settle – quite the opposite. My habitual response is generally to rush to either the engaging or the understanding parts of the process.

I think that rushing to engage is probably the most common one for me. I start my day with something bothering me from the previous day, or just a general sense of anxiety, unease or irritation. Instead of giving that any time I get straight into my work. Or perhaps I’m at the end of the day and something that’s happened is troubling me but I just launch into watching TV or socialising. When I do that, often there is a sense of something under the surface which is getting bigger and more frightening the more I try to push it down under all the busy-ness and distractions. When I finally stop work or turn of the TV it can feel much more fearsome than it did at the start, and I often realise that I haven’t really been present to whatever I was working on, or enjoying what I was watching, because it is nagging away in the background.

Rushing to engage also often takes the form of trying to stop the feeling before it gets a hold by reacting immediately. This is what happens when I respond straight away to a difficult email, or I lash out at somebody who has upset me, or I make a snap decision about a tough situation. Often when that happens I’m aware that I haven’t dealt with the situation as well as I might have: I’ve passed the difficult feeling on to someone else in a crappy kind of domino effect, or I’ve exacerbated a problem rather than helping with it. The idea of refraining from acting until I’ve spent some time noticing is helpful to me in these situations.

The other alternative to rushing to engage is rushing to understand. This is something I often do when my emotions are particularly painful: feeling really low, panicky, or angry, for example. I’m very troubled by how tough it feels. It doesn’t seem to make any sense to feel this bad. I’m desperate to understand it because I think that will stop the feeling. What often happens is that I end up going round and round and round analysing it and trying to find an answer. It’s easy then to layer more and more difficult feelings on top of the original feeling. I’m worried about feeling down; and then I’m angry at myself for being worried about feeling down; and then I’m depressed at the fact I’m angry at myself for being worried about feeling down – and on and on and on.

The struggle to understand can easily land me in a place where I decide there must be something wrong with me for having this out-of-proportion reaction, or there must be something wrong with the external circumstances in my life (this job is bad, this relationship is wrong, it’s this other person’s fault). So I can tip into either depression or conflict with another person or situation.

What is noticing?

An alternative to rushing to either engage or to understand is to slow down and stay with the original feeling or situation, and just to focus on noticing it. Each time I feel drawn to trying to understand it, or to get up and do something, I can try to bring myself back to the original experience and just really notice what it is like.

When I have managed to do this there is a real sense of things beginning to clear like the water in the glass. A kind of understanding begins to emerge naturally from the process of noticing, in a very different way than when I’m attempting to force myself to understand what is going on. By the end of the process I can have a much clearer sense of how to engage, often becoming aware that there are many options and that nothing has to happen immediately.

It’s important to emphasise though that it is often extremely hard to stay with difficult emotions and experiences like this. There’s a reason why we rush to distract ourselves or try to force the feeling to go away. This noticing is such a radically different approach that it takes time to cultivate.

Pema suggests that noticing involves regarding difficult feelings as friendly and supportive rather than as fearsome and threatening. That is one of the hardest parts for me. In the last week I’ve tried to approach two of my least favourite emotions in this way: one I call ‘the plummet’ which feels like falling into a deep dark pit of despair and self-loathing with no warning and no time to catch hold of the sides. The other is a kind of gritty grainy feeling of being slightly bored and pissed off and bothered by everything. Neither of those states feels friendly to me. I do not want to look at them closely. I just want to find a way never to experience the plummet ever again, and to shake off the grainyness when it comes on.

But this week I tried to just be with the feelings and notice them, trying to describe their texture, temperature and colour; really experiencing the sensations that arose in my body; widening out to notice how they unfold in time (What happens immediately beforehand? What is the overall situation I’m in when they happen? How do they tend to play out?) I tried to assume that the feelings were sensible, helpful things to have happened, it was just that I didn’t know yet why they were sensible, and I needed to listen more carefully and kindly to them until they did make sense: however long that took.

I found that after some time of staying with them, and curiously noticing them in this way, lots of things started to occur to me that hadn’t before. It was like a process of joining the dots as all sorts of connections started to come to me. There was a feeling of weight lifting and being able to see things much more clearly and calmly for a while.

How could we build this into our lives?

I think there are two major challenges to building such noticing practices into our lives. The emotional challenge is that it is generally the very last thing that we actually feel like doing when we feel bad. The practical challenge is about when and how we actually do it.

Pema suggests that it can be good to start with emotions that are not too difficult rather than launching in with the really tough stuff. You can even start when you’re not actually in that emotional state, but rather when you’re feeling okay. Just remembering the last time you felt a bit bad and trying to notice what it was like. You can just do it for a few minutes at first, and then do the same thing for a positive emotion to balance it out a bit. In this way the process of noticing can be gradually built in in ways that don’t feel too threatening.

Another important thing is giving ourselves time for these processes. Often when a tough thing hits we’re not in a position to go off for an hour and sit with it. We might not even get that opportunity for several days. So what I’ve started to do is to ask other people in my life for time, and to give time to myself. So, for example, if a difficult issue comes up, I ask the other people concerned to let me slow down and think about it for a while, and I also schedule in some time for myself to do that. And if that isn’t enough I ask for more or give myself longer. I’ve got a list of decisions that I want to consider and conversations that I want to have with people and a rough idea of when I’m going to get to them (some this week, some next month, some next year!)

As for the question of when we do these practices, obviously it is tough to build noticing into busy lives, and I know that I’m extremely privileged to have a job which is more flexible than most and which actually involves thinking and writing about this kind of stuff regularly. Different things definitely work for different people, but I find it helpful to have some check-in time for noticing at the start of the day. I take a cup of coffee outside wherever I am and sit for however long I have available. I often find it helpful to read or listen to a helpful book for a while beforehand, often on the journey to wherever I’m going that day, to get me in the right state of mind.

Something that I’m sure would be helpful, but which I struggle to do, is to take a few minutes out for noticing whenever something difficult bubbles up during the day. People sometimes use such moments to go to the bathroom and have a couple of minutes breathing space alone. Similarly the end of the working day can be a good point to take ten minutes before embarking on the evening, and/or it can be good to take some time just before going to sleep. I should emphasise that I do none of these things regularly myself – it is not easy! Also I’ve avoided using the word ‘meditation’ here. That can be offputting because it sounds like a ‘special’ kind of practice and can come with a lot of baggage. Whilst I have found formal meditation to be a good place for noticing, the most helpful noticing I’ve had recently happened while I was sitting on a train looking out of the window and listening to music on my phone. Other people find that they do noticing on long walks, or while they’re cycling or driving, for example.

Noticing doesn’t have to be a completely internal thing. I’ve always found that writing helps me a lot with it. So I take an hour in a café once a week to write in a journal about all the things that are going on, trying to focus on describing them rather than attempting to figure them out. A combination of just sitting and reflecting for a while and then writing can help. Drawing or other forms of expression work better for other folks. And, of course, some people use therapy as a place to do this kind of noticing with another person to guide them through the process (finding the right person, who you have a good rapport with, and who helps you to create such a space, is the key here). Or you can set up times with friends where you’ll each take turns to help the other person to talk through what’s going on for them, with a focus on noticing rather than trying to explain or solve the problem.

Sometimes what you notice when you are noticing is that the thoughts and feelings you’re having just shift and change by themselves; other times the noticing leads to more of a sense of the water settling and seeing things more clearly; sometimes all you notice is just how hard noticing is, and how you spend the whole time drifting off, or trying to analyse it, or wanting to stop. And if those things happen then they, in themselves, become something to notice.

Find out more

There’s more about how to do these practices in my zines on Staying With Feelings and Plural Selves.

The post Dealing with the tough stuff: The value of noticing appeared first on Rewriting The Rules.

At this time of year it is easy to embark on quests for self-improvement: planning how to make the next year perfect, and attempting to ensure the success and happiness which may have eluded us in the past. An alternative approach is to think critically about the pressures that we put on ourselves, and are put under, at the turn of the year.

Perhaps, instead, we could aim at a more mindful approach to 2014. We could commit to gently noticing what the year brings and how we respond to it, rather than insisting on only good things and positive feelings. We could recognise the impermanence of everything that happens – triumphs and tragedies – and the ways in which both can spin our lives in unanticipated directions.

We could take a little time alone each day to sit and breathe, appreciating this unique story that is unfolding through our year.

You can read the full article here, and more on new year resolutions from me here.

The post A very mindful New Year appeared first on Rewriting The Rules.