Focus

The Importance Of Triangles In Times Of A Mental Health Crisis

/ bornwithoutmarbles / 9 Comments

When you are going through what is known as a “mental health crisis”, everything feels like such a mess that you cannot even begin to start tidying it all up. Tiny jobs become momentous tasks, trying to survive an hour feels like trying to survive a millennium and it all feels completely unmanageable. Unhelpfully, being in the 21st century, the general busy non stop, non sleep, 24/7 side to modern life does not help matters (on the other hand there is the positive that, helpfully, we are not in the 16th century where, although it was less busy, you had a higher chance of being murdered by your husband if his name was Henry and he happened to wear a crown).
In simpler times your daily activities may have simply comprised of getting some water from your well, milking a few cows, doing a bit of hoeing out in the fields and then perhaps settling down by the fire with a nice bowl of homemade stew, (it is my understanding that in the olden days people ate nothing but stew). Nowadays however, the list of tasks one must perform to get through the days are endless.

Instead of walking out to a field there are specific buses you have to run to catch for work, computer programs that randomly malfunction and delete all the work you have done for the past week (something that never happened when “work” mainly focused on hoeing), specific coffee orders you have to remember for your boss to avoid being fired over a missed shot of espresso in their large cappuccino, bills to pay, TV shows to catch up on, appointments to make, social events to come up with excuses for, washing machines to fix, ironing to do and earphone wires to untangle (SERIOUSLY WHO IS TANGLING ALL OF THE EARPHONE WIRES WHEN I AM NOT LOOKING AND PLEASE CAN YOU STOP IT). It is exhausting and when in crisis, you need to delete it all and focus on one thing.

Triangles.

I am not talking your equilateral triangles, your scalene, or even your isosceles. I sneer at your Bermuda triangles, love triangles, even your 3D Egyptian pyramid triangles, for no triangle is better in a crisis than the great “Maslow’s Triangle” (toast triangles are a close second for being helpful in time of a crisis though, because you can have peanut butter or marmalade on them).

“What is this mysterious Maslow’s Triangle?” I hear you ask? Well I’ll tell you!

Basically there was once this psychologist named Abraham Maslow (I hear he was quite the dude), and he came up with this list of things needed to fulfil humans and reach “self fulfilment” or “self actualisation”, aka “Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs” (that is the official term in all the text books but I am calling it Maslow’s triangle because it looks like a triangle, that is a catchier name and it meant that I could sound smart in that first paragraph by talking about other kinds of triangle which are now irrelevant to this post…calling it this also gave me the opportunity to mention toast triangles which are tasty, so I went with it and now here we are).
These needs are pretty much all Maslow thinks you need to become a whole and happy person and who knows, he may be right, but right now it doesn’t matter if he was right or not because to be honest, survival is what we want and aiming for his idea for self actualisation is a bit of a stretch at this moment in time/any moment in time during a mental health crisis. As I always say, we need to learn to waddle before we can fly.

“What does this mysterious Maslow’s Triangle look like?” I hear you cry! Well I’ll tell you that too (and may I say you are asking a lot of questions today…)
So here it is:

YayMaslow

As you can see, all of these “needs” are prioritised in order of importance with the most important on the bottom and the least important/ones that will make you happy but are not essential for purely physical survival, on the top. It is like a pointy version of Jenga, you have to have enough of the blocks to make up the bottom or else it doesn’t matter what is going on at the top, that pyramid is going to fall and there will be sand EVERYWHERE.

In times of crisis, I think people (by which I mean I), try to keep going with all the busy things of modern life that make up the entire triangle and in doing so get overwhelmed, miss out some of the more important things, and consequently make myself/my health worse. For example my magnifying glass and entire life focus is pretty much entirely zoomed in on the second from the top level, “esteem needs”, and because I hate myself oh so very much and thus have very low supplies of the “esteems”, I forage for these like a bear who is late in preparing for hibernation, without caring about anything else because in my eyes it is not as important. In my head, I need to feel worthy of and deserving of life before I can do all the things people need to do to actually survive…and yeah…it doesn’t work like that, hence why my pyramid has fallen, leaving me in hospital, in crisis, and trying to pick sand out of all the crevices (like I said, it gets EVERYWHERE).

In every situation I will sacrifice the bottom sections as I claw for that esteem level. When I am worrying about something like my blog/don’t feel productive/like I have accomplished or achieved “enough”, I ignore all other levels of needs until that achievement feeling has been somewhat reached (I say somewhat because, as I am sure many people can relate, no matter what I do in anything, it is never enough). Need to write a blog post but don’t have any time? Better cross “sleep” off the to-do list. Haven’t drawn that pesky diagram of the triangle you need to insert into this blog yet? No food or drink until that triangle is drawn! Not posted on Instagram and need an “outdoorsy” photo but it is freezing outside? Get out there and Valencia the hell out of some greenery even if you freeze to death in the process!
That is exactly what I do, what I think a lot of people do, and that is why mental health crises often get worse and spiral, because we are focusing on the wrong things when trying to survive and get through the day. Self actualisation is great and all that and we can work on getting to that eventually but if you are in a crisis, the most important thing to do is get your Maslow’s triangle out (and toast triangles if you are feeling peckish), and focus all your energy on the bottom levels. No “I should be doing this” or “I need to be doing that”, no, you are in crisis, it is time to prioritise, remove the stress and simply focus on basic survival. Only when you have got that covered can you start building all the other things on top and if you don’t, even if you work really hard at the achievement stuff, eventually it is going to crumble and remember what happens when pyramids crumble…SAND EVERYWHERE.

When you are in a mental health crisis you need to cut yourself a nice bit of slack. If it is necessary, take a mental health day off work to go to an appointment or get some rest, because without the rest you won’t be able to stay at work very long anyway. It is necessary to focus on keeping yourself hydrated (BUT NOT TOO HYDRATED REMEMBER THE SODIUM) and get yourself a cup of tea before sorting out all the ironing (which in the long run is not necessary at all…I don’t see ironing on the triangle…), and it is necessary, nay fundamental, to nourish yourself and give yourself a good supply of food at meal times before worrying about all the other things on your to-do list (I REALLY need to work on this one). In times of mental health crises it is OK to strip things back and take a step back from the things at the top of the triangle so that you can look after yourself and build your way back up to that self actualisation tip. Focus my friends, on the bare necessities, the simple bare necessities, forget about your worries and your strife, I mean the BARE necessities aka the bottom layers of Maslow’s triangle (I think a bear even sang a song about that whilst dancing around in a jungle with a half naked child in orange pants but that might have been one of those weird hallucinations I have been having lately…they are wherever I wander…wherever I roam!)

So, why is it important to focus on triangles in times of mental health crisis? Because my dear friends, in times of crisis, you need to allow yourself to simply focus on looking after yourself, keeping yourself physically well and safe so that you are strong enough to survive that crisis and work your way back up to the top of your Maslow’s triangle with the fun, self actualisation stuff going on. Forget the other shapes, hold onto your triangles, and if those triangles happen to be made of toast, eat them with some jam and a nice mug of warm tea.

As always, take care everyone. x

CoolTriangles

The Difficulty Of Concentrating When You Have Mental Health Problems

/ bornwithoutmarbles / 10 Comments

 

Today is a good day for writing a blog. It is raining outside which puts any ideas of outdoor activity out of the window, my Dad is listening to classical music in the lounge which is making me feel rather intelligent (Ok I am in a different room but in my opinion if you can hear a violin playing somewhere it means you are somewhat sophisticated), and my cup of tea is at the perfect drinking temperature. The conditions couldn’t be better and thus I am making the most of them to write this post all about…Oooh I wonder what my parents are having for dinner…I hope they don’t use my special spoon…or touch my courgettes…Sorry what was I saying? Ah yes! A post about the difficulty of concentrating on ANYTHING when you are struggling with mental health problems.

I have struggled with concentrating on things ever since I first got ill, but recently the problem has been getting frustratingly worse.The other day I was watching a film, I was staring right at the screen with no background noise or distractions, yet still after 45 minutes I realised that despite being as attentive as possible, I had no idea what was going on or who any of the characters were. In my opinion the plot was simply far too complicated and convoluted with twists and turns I was unable to follow, so I switched it off in annoyance. If the film had been something with multiple realities like Inception or The Matrix, I would have been a little more forgiving of my brain’s inability to understand but this was not Inception or The Matrix. It was Winnie the Pooh, aka a film that has little more plot to understand than “these animals are living in a wood and that yellow bear in the red t-shirt really likes honey”. It isn’t even as if the characters look anything alike, one is a freaking piglet whilst another is a donkey who is clinically depressed and in need of some serious therapy, yet to me they all blended into one, just as all characters do when I watch anything on TV.

It is the same with books. No matter how simple the book, how “easy to follow” the storyline, you can guarantee that I will not be able to concentrate or focus long enough to appreciate it properly and lately I find myself having to read the same pages over and over again before I can gleam any sense or meaning in them. Seriously it could be one of the Mr Men or Little Miss books and I will have to read a page a good ten times to grasp the facts that Little Miss Naughty is:
1. Purple
2. In need of an ASBO (for readers not in the UK an ASBO stands for “anti social behaviour order” which is what the police give you when you have been, as the main character in the aforementioned book is, “rather naughty”/a general nuisance).

With books and films this inability to concentrate isn’t too bad because at least with a film or a book you can wind back the DVD or flip to the previous page to see what you missed whilst your brain was elsewhere. In real life however, you cannot just rewind the bits you missed because people tend to only say things once no matter how hard you point a remote control at them.
I have been thinking about this a lot recently with the summer exam season coming up because I remember being in school and sitting in lessons desperate to get educated but unable to focus or concentrate long enough to know what lesson I was in. Indeed when I first started struggling with mental health problems my grades went down and it made me feel that I must be stupid, when really it was because it is incredibly hard to focus on the world around you when your brain is on fire.

It even happens to me in therapy sessions where we are talking about what is going on in my brain rather than the teleological argument or the significance of the green light in The Great Gatsby (exam hint – it is really significant). The other day I came out of a full hour session and despite listening closely the entire time, as I left, the only thing I could remember was that my therapist had mentioned that she once nearly drove into a cow. I thought this over and over all the way home and for the life of me I couldn’t figure out how we had got onto that topic or indeed how it had been relevant and what help I was supposed to have gathered from it.
Since then I asked my therapist about the “I nearly drove into a cow” incident and I have learned that it was a story about how she nearly drove into a cow at a certain bend in a road and now always slows down for that bend because she associates that bend with wandering cattle, thus making a point about how the brain interprets things and makes permanent links from one off events e.g. between cows and this bend in the road…I think that was the point anyway…or was it that she really liked cows…REGARDLESS of the point she was very understanding, as always, of my inability to concentrate so I wasn’t embarrassed about admitting that our previous session had been a total blur to me, but in real life situations if you keep asking people to repeat things you tend to look rather rude or like you are not concentrating hard enough.

In actual fact the problem isn’t at all to do with how much effort you are putting in or how attentive you are and is all about the mental illness that is wreaking havoc behind your eyeballs.
For example when I am watching a film, lets say Winnie the Pooh, my eyes are watching the yellow bear in the red t-shirt and my ears are hearing something about honey. The information from the screen goes through my eyes and ears, but then when it gets to the place where the brain is supposed to collect the information and take it to the department of comprehension, none of the little brain people are there to pick up the parcel because they are off doing other things. In one lobe OCD is counting the number of breaths I am taking and insisting that some kind of disaster is about to happen because I am sitting a little too far to the left,. A little further along anorexia is dashing about with a calculator, calculating the number of calories in 200g of courgette for the millionth time even though the answer is always the same, and yelling that I should start doing 1000 star jumps incase I wrongly measured the courgettes earlier and accidentally ate an extra gram. Next there is depression generally crying and making everything a bit soggy, telling me that it will only shut up if I kill myself because the sadness will never end, and then finally BPD is there bellowing that all my friends hate me, want to leave and that I should probably text them all urgently begging for forgiveness, texts that, if not replied to within 30 seconds, mean they have probably all fled the country to get away from me.
For people who maybe don’t understand what all those mental health things can feel like when they are all going off at the same time, listening to a friend over a cup of tea is sort of the equivalent of trying to concentrate on a mouse standing on a stage who is whispering the works of Shakespeare, with the Philharmonic Orchestra standing next to you belting out Vivaldi’s four seasons whilst your head is being pecked at by vultures, expired eggs are being thrust under your nose, there is a Scotch Bonnet chilli pepper on your tongue and a Lush employee is vigorously lathering your body with handfuls of body butter. (Again for people who do not live in the UK, “Lush” is a lovely shop against animal testing, that sells things to use in the bathroom and whose employees are highly trained in moisturising anything that moves whether that thing wants to be moisturised or not).
How is ANYONE expected to concentrate when all of that is going on?

If, since becoming mentally ill, you have suddenly become incapable of concentrating at work or in school, I hope you know that, as I have demonstrated, it is not because you are stupid and is most likely to do with the mental health problems you have raging around inside you, so please give yourself a break. Obviously it is still important to work hard, listen in lessons or to friends and try to concentrate on the things you should be concentrating on, but if you can’t don’t beat yourself up about it and don’t be afraid to take breaks and try doing things on a day where your head is perhaps a little quieter/the philharmonic orchestra in my analogy are missing a few of its trumpets.
You often hear people accuse people they don’t think are listening of being “day dreaming”, but sometimes, when mental health problems really get hold of you, it is more likely you will feel as if you are stuck in a nightmare.

Take care everyone x

CowTrumpet