5. It's all in your head
So let's say that this weekend you decide to get some exercise and go for a bike ride with a few friends. Maybe the trail gets a little more adventurous than you anticipated and your front wheel hits a big tree root that crosses your path. Your bike loses control and you fly through the air. Next thing you know, the emergency room doctors are sending you for x-rays to check out the massive pain you have in your arm. The expectation is that you've broken one of the bones in your arm.
What happens next? You probably know this part if you know someone who's broken a limb. You would probably get some pain medication, they would set your bone to ensure it heals properly and then your arm would get put in a cast to prevent another break before it heals.
It's interesting that when a limb breaks we all instinctively know what process can get us back to normal. Unfortunately when our brain starts functioning in a destructive way we still struggle with what the right course of action is and how it will turn out.
Experience and research have taught us that the mind is extremely powerful in changing our mental state and also in changing our physical state. I've read multiple accounts recently of how certain ways of thinking and conditioning have changed the course of physical healing.
So here's the dilemma if the mind is so powerful do we really need drugs and invasive physical treatments at all? We just need to train our minds more effectively to heal us. Right?
Most people would find this approach problematic when it comes to broken arms but the stigma of mental health implies exactly that. For the first 5 or 6 years after my own mental health crisis I completely resisted getting medication. I was convinced that I just needed to adjust a few thinking patterns and train my thinking to get me back to normal. The problem was that it didn't work for me.
Finally I started to understand the role of medicine and the physical aspects of my mental health. I was not only fighting a pattern of problematic thinking but I was also fighting biological responses and states that were making it almost impossible for me to gain any momentum in my mental training. These two systems seem to fail together and they both need healing together as well.
Now I use a number of medical and physical steps to help me gain momentum as I cognitively change my thinking. Here are a few examples.
- Drugs - there are a number of different prescriptions that can help rebalance the chemical levels in a brain that may be skewed in one direction or another. I take a prescription that controls my adrenal response to any trigger event because my biology is hyper sensative to triggers that flood my body with adrenaline (or noradrenaline?)
- Exercise - When I'm fighting a battle with my emotions my muscles tense up and my brain starts to get foggy. Getting out for a walk will often clear up the fog and release the tension in many of my muscles. Just a 10 minute walk can often get my mind moving in a better direction.
- Have a nap - There is a chemical scrubbing that happens in our brain when we sleep. I'm blessed to have a body that responds very well to short naps. When I have trouble processing decisions or weighing options, a 10 minute nap can often clear up my thinking enough that the options are much clearer and the choices become more obvious.
There are more physical aspects to my mental hygene but these are the ones I turn to most consistently.
This hybrid approach does not minimizes the importance of cognitive mental training. I make a lot of deliberate choices in how I think but I also recognize that there are many headwinds in this training process. Medical and physical steps help me gain momentum so the mental training gets a lot easier.
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