I’m no soothsayer, and I’m definitely no doctor. But when I see friends and colleagues struggling to get through their day I’ll always tell them to “slow down and breathe.” Seriously, just breathe. I mean, you’re going to do it anyway, so for 60 seconds just be intentional about it and focus on your own breath. How it feels coming in, going out, how it sounds, where it goes in your body, etc. Little things.
It’s very easy to tell someone to do this when you’re standing on the outside of whatever tempest is storming through their brain. Not so easy to remember to do it when the storm is raging through you.
There’s no magic button to press when you feel life getting a bit overwhelming or out-of-hand. There’s not always someone there to notice and to tell you to slow down and breathe. Often times you have to sense it on your own and flag it before things get worse. Mental health absolutely correlates to physical health (and vice versa) and you have to take care of both.
I’ve learned this later in life. I wish I knew it earlier. When I was a kid and early adult no one really cared about how you felt. They cared about what you did. Results mattered. Actions mattered. Feelings didn’t really matter, so we repressed all the negative ones and we got to work on our actions. I now regret having done that for decades because I probably could’ve been a better person in a lot of ways. I definitely could have been a healthier one.
But it’s never too late to start and for the past few years I’ve taken a much healthier approach to protecting my mental state. I clear my head each night — quite literally, I spend at least 15 minutes wiping out everything from my mind and just letting the tumbleweeds blow through. YouTube videos and headphones are my saving grace for this. It’s cleansing and meditative and restful. It probably sounds crazy to some (or most), but it works for me.
I’ve spent most of my adult life focusing on work all day and often at night. It can be stressful but I don’t work in an ER. We’re not talking life of death stuff. But it does add up. It does take a toll. And it started to hit me hard. I was too young to retire, too old to change careers, too passionate about my work, too committed to making an impact, and too stubborn to change the way I went about things.
So i suffered. In silence. To the detriment of myself and those around me.
Today, I’ve got better techniques to help me get through difficult conditions. Life doesn’t get any easier. It actually seems to get more and more complex. But managing the tough moments and getting through the days when the noise in my head is the loudest is a bit easier because I have a way to reduce that noise. For years it rang and rang and rang and rang non-stop.
I guess the moral of the story is to remember to block out the noise once in a while. Maybe even on a regular basis. Daily if you can do it. Just stop. Sit. Breathe. Listen to your body. Listen to your brain. Block out everything else. Just be a singular light of energy in the universe for 15 minutes. Clear your mind of everything. And then go forward again with a fresh start. Maybe even a fresh perspective.