Some advice about brain weasels

Or: what to do when you’ve started the day with negative emotions...

More of my friends are adopting the “brain weasel” nomenclature than I would have, perhaps, anticipated. This makes for quite efficient conversations:

“My brain weasels are loud today...”
“Tell ’em to sod off, the little buggers.”

“Sorry: I have brain weasels today.”
“No worries - let me know if you’d like to meet up later...”

Today someone was able to use the term to let me know that they were having a difficult morning. Then they asked: did I have any advice?  Turns out that... yes. I rattled off a pretty decent list. Revised version below, because I thought it might be useful to others:

Help! I’m in work and the brain weasels are snapping. What can I do?

Thing is, you can’t exactly go back to bed, can you? So here are some work-compatible things to do:

1. Maslow it - drink more water (go and do that right now), eat well, ensure you feel safe/ physically comfortable in your environment.


2. Adrenalin seems to mute them. Maybe go for a brisk trundle at lunchtime. If something more strenuous is an option, maybe consider that...


3. Listen to (powerful, strong, happy, or positively defiant) music. Plug it in, baby!


4. Pick a thing (it can be absolutely tiny) and do it well today. That often shuts them up. If it works, do another one. Rinse, repeat. One step. Then the next. The day is over. You won.


5. Treat them like a belligerent fundamentalist/ troll* - when you answer their snide little accusations, they’ll switch tack. You can choose to ignore them or refute every argument. Both approaches take energy, but ignoring/ refuting also demonstrates control, which giving in and admitting they’re right (they’re not) does not (it also saps energy, but builds no strength).
   
   Think of this like physical health:


1. If you exercise, it’s hard work at first and hurts, but less work long-term, because you have a fitter body to carry you around in.


2. If you either go into to denial or decide that you’re determined to beat an illness, you’re WAY more likely to than if you just meekly give in. Hardiness for the win.

A favourite refutation I came up with recently was when I was trying desperately to find something, brain foggy and starting to hyperventilate, and the weasels said: “Hah! You’ve lost it! You’re rubbish! You don’t know where it is!” and I found myself saying: “Yeah? If you’re so much bloody** better than me, you can tell me where it is then! No? Then shut the hell** up! From now on, you’d better prove you’re actually better than me any time you try this nonsense, or you forfeit all right to bloody** criticise me!”

I won’t deny it - that did feel good...! :)


6. In my experience/ opinion, comfort blankets DO NOT WORK. They will just give the metaphysical rodents more ammunition. So do something challenging you know you do well; don’t resort to sugar/ caffeine/ alcohol/ Facebook/ mobile phone games, etc.


7. Find someone pleasant to talk to who has the time and energy for you. Don’t feel you have to talk about your problems, but do talk about stuff you like as well as stuff you don’t like.


8. Make a plan for the evening that involves healthy behaviour (exercise, good food, early night, helpful social time, etc. - even if all that happens is you go to bed early out of all of those, making a plan and executing it will feel excellent and tell those pernicious, furry idiots off good and proper)

And that’s it, really. Obviously you may not be able to do more than one or two of these in a work day (though 1, 2, 4, and 8 are pretty feasible!), but it’s a start... :D I’m thinking of printing a simple version of this out and putting it somewhere prominent for when I feel like I’m having/ about to have a bad day myself... Any further suggestions?


______________________________
*fundamentalists come in all forms - pick your poison, it’s not all religious

**The language was a lot worse than that - swearing is very energising, if you’re me...

Today is the first day...

... of the rest of the working year.

(I appreciate that some of you may have worked between 24th December and today - sorry about that! I, however, have not. Benefits of working for an academic-related organisation, I guess...)

So! :) How’s it been going for you lot? Me, I’ve been powering through the day on rampant optimism and a renewed determination to prove to myself that I am a worthwhile human being (I have had too little broken sleep - more about this in another post, I suspect). In fact, that’s the core of my “resolution” for this year - basically: feel better about myself.

Obviously there are various different elements to this (i.e. pretty much every aspect of my life! :)), but for each one I do actually know what I need to do, I’ve just not always been doing it. So, in order to inspire myself, I reckon I just need to keep that clear “feel better about myself” goal in front of me every time I find myself wussing out and cutting corners. Because when I work at doing things right, I feel better about myself.
 
Ludicrously simple; diabolically difficult.
 
I’m not a big fan of New Year’s resolutions. I generally start on projects/ changes/ movements that look like them in December, when it’s dark, and miserable, and cold, partly to prove to myself that you don’t need a set date to kick off Doing Stuff Right, just a good mindset. Sometimes I start them in April, or February. Or on a Thursday or something. Because I know that if I keep waiting for some kind of perfect kick-off signal, I’ll keep on finding excuses.
 
I have a narrow line to walk here - let me introduce you to the brain weasels (I’m not going to dignify them with title case): they represent the snarly, snide, tricksy little bits of me that are always looking for reasons to put me down. They say tiny, mean things - their sharp, narrow teeth and sinuous forms are slippery and insistent. They are composed of fear and are like handy little pocket abusers - you may even have left the originals behind, but they’ve sowed tiny, portable, conveniently-sized memes to take with you everywhere. (I’m sure you know the kind of thing they like to say: you’re not good enough, you’re a failure, you’re a disappointment.) They snigger every time you trip or drop things or run late. And I do those things a lot... They represent the opposite of “you are a worthwhile human being”.

They’re wretched little bastards and they need to be stopped. Or, okay, well, transmuted somehow.
 
The ways to beat brain weasels need to be as multitudinous and flexible and cunning and (nearly as) small as they are. Because the more you give in to their assertions about your worth, the more you’ll give up putting effort into doing stuff right, and the more fodder there’ll be for their grindy little teeth. I’ve seen this negative spiral demonstrated very clearly in my physical health, and it’s all too evident in my mental health, if you know where to look.  I want to get a series of positive spirals going - feel better, do better, feel better, do better, feel better, do better, feel better, do better...
 
What’s the narrow line? Well, years of playing host to the weasels has left me with some difficult-to-repurpose mental constructs in which the furry little gits flourish. And one of them is where I find it really, really difficult to take compliments. Because I may know fine well that the weasel runs are ridiculous, and that they make me miserable, but I’m used to them, see? They’re home. They’re where I’m comfortably miserable.  So the more loudly people are nice to me, the less I can take it. I get so overwhelmed with this enthusiastic evidence that at least part of me looks dramatically different to the Worthless Map of Fay (© Weasel Enterprises) that I throw up as many big walls as I can to stave off the information overload. Go too far and I cry and shake and run away. Literally. It’s messy.

Slowly I’ve been working on my anti-weasel techniques. I’m being scientific about it, which means being better at spotting both negative and positive patterns, instead of taking either states for granted or treating them as neutral. I have learned that the following things are particularly good at helping silence/ squish weasels:

1. Walking. Anywhere, at any time. But it needs to be fast/ vigorously. At my own pace, anyway. 
    
2. Dancing. Stomp on their little heads! Drown them with music! Okay, maybe just stun them into submission and muffle their annoying squeaks to the occasional half-hearted “you’re too old to be doing this!” (Yeah, I’m manifestly not, so shut up! :D) 
    
3. Hosting performances. You’d think that the nerve-wrackingness of this and the massive potential for tripping up (Get the names wrong! Stutter! Offend someone accidentally!) along with opportunities for jealousy would be fodder for the invisible shit-stirrers, but somehow: no. I enjoy the performances too much to be jealous, and frankly, when you’re running an event, you have no time for weasels. 
    
4. Spending time with particular friends. You know the type - diverting yet supportive as appropriate. Also: the wider I allow my network to be, the better my chances of spending time with people whose personal styles will fit the mode I need to be in. And the less chance of the weasel who says “you’re just a burden to your friends!”  
    
5. Properly singing something I know well. There’s a pattern emerging. 
    
6. Spreadsheeting. Doing something both systematically and creatively. It’s something I have developed good... wait... excellent, expert skills in, and it’s something I can sit quietly and nerd out over.

The answer appears to be: do things irrefutably well with good people. Keep pushing at (sometimes tiny) increments of What Could Be Even Better so that the evidence for being worthwhile mounts manageably. Get the adrenalin flowing. Allow meaningful connections with other humans. Demonstrably build up the ability to be more awesome.

It’s not about comfort blankets (because the more moping/ eating crappy food/ taking a taxi rather than cycling/ playing dumb computer games I do, the worse I feel) but about strapping in tightly before heading off towards the horizon, laughing uproariously and whooping at the steep bends.

So I will be giving myself tiny compliments. Every day. Not ignoring the bad stuff (because weasels loooove it when you’ve got stuff you’re procrastinating over - oh my yes!), but aiming for the kind of objective approach I’d use with someone who isn’t me. And also coming up with ways to improve things.  In other words, I’ll be running a Lessons Learned on my life. Every day, if I can, no matter how vestigially, sometimes.

And, in the meantime: getting fitter, having more fun, and being more awesome, a bunch of which I’ll be posting on here. :)