My name is Mark and I have mental health (because I have a brain), but it took me a long time to realize that. By the time I did, I had a bunch of mental illness labels stuck on me. It didn’t have to be that way. I could have saved enormous amounts of pain, energy, and money, if I’d taken a more proactive, preventive approach to mental health much earlier in life. The focus of the work I do now is on helping people learn skills to overcome mental health challenges and prevent them from happening so they can do what matters to them.
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I’m replacing myself! It’s been a wonderful time being me but robots are cool and they can make mental health resources accessible in ways that humans can’t. I can only have one conversation at a time and even though I answer questions at all hours of the day right now, I do get sleep sometimes and my sleep skills are top-notch.
Continue readingBuild a new relationship with uncertainty throughout your life or your daily practices will just logically and rationally have you struggling and suffering and relapsing back into a depressive anxiety hole. This video explains an approach that I credit with helping me recover and maintaining great mental health for the past eight years:
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When I bring up the idea that judgment is the first compulsion that leads to all of the other emotions and behaviors we struggle with when we’re sinking into mental health challenges, people can often become very protective of their judgment skills. We can always think of ways our ability to judge has helped us. We’ve gotten positive feedback from others. Maybe our careers depend upon our judgment skills. But it’s not that judgment is necessarily bad. It simply has natural consequences. And if we don’t learn how to use that superpower and choose when we use it, then we’re like a superhero walking around looking at everything with laser vision.
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I like to get up early and get food in me as soon as I can because I love writing in the mornings. Cooking breakfast every morning can seriously cut into writing time, so I often make a batch of nutrient-dense power bars to fuel my morning writing and start the day off well. Here is one of my favourite recipes that has a texture like a fudge brownie but marcos that work well with my lifestyle. You can also make them vegan and gluten free if you’re into that. The pea protein and maca powder give them an awesome, wholesome flavour.
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Recently, Matt and I did a couple of videos exploring intrusive thoughts or anxieties and why it’s useful to look at why we’re afraid of the consequences of those thoughts or anxieties coming true. There’s an exercise for doing that, The 5 Whys, which I shared in my book, The Mind Workout, and Matt explains near the end of this video:
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If you’re working with a personal trainer on your physical fitness, it’s not strange if you expect to work with somebody that’s in better shape than you, that practices the skills you want to learn, that’s reached the same goals you want to reach. In the mental health sector, however, involving people with lived experience of recovery from mental illness in providing care is still rare. As a society, we don’t expect mental health professionals to share how they’re implementing the intense exercises they tell patients to do. That’s weird because evidence-based care for mental illness is about you making huge changes every single day. Mental healthcare isn’t all lobotomies and tranquilizers. It’s a big lifestyle change, as complex as pursuing any physical fitness goal. It helps to work with people that know what it’s like to implement, sweat, and sustain those changes.
I’ll offer five ways below you can leverage peer support when you’re working on your mental health, similar to how we tap into peer support when we’re working on our physical fitness. And to do this, I’ll share some insights I learned from working with one of my trainers, John Soco. Let’s row some boats…
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Recently, Daniela posted over on the Everybody has a Brain Tumblr about some anxiety challenges she tackled after getting laid off, then searching for a new job, and then at her new workplace. Her story was such a great example of all the skills we’re always talking about, and it includes vomit! It’s so useful to talk about overcoming these challenges and often that means overcoming very real physical symptoms, like nausea. So I wanted to share Daniela’s post and throw in some comments to connect her examples to some of the recovery skills you’ve probably seen me talking about before. Let’s dive in:
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My book, The Mind Workout, all about the steps anybody can take to get comfortable with the stuff in their heads as they do more of what they care about in life, hit bookstore shelves in the United Kingdom on June 1st. You order it on Amazon here: http://bit.ly/themindworkout If you’re not in the UK, you can get it shipped for an extra fee, but there will be other languages coming out in the months ahead AND this summer I’m working on a different version of the book for North America that will also
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