Mens sana in corpore sano

(Whut? Latin - from a poem by Juvenal - means “healthy mind in a healthy body”...)

While I’ve been more than willing to subject you all (“all” is such a big word for an average of 35 readers per post, back in this blog’s heyday) to various intimate considerations of my physical health, and while the term comes up as a tag in eight posts (nine including this one), I’ve been more reticent about my mental health.

It seems that, in some ways, I’ve suffered in the past from a dichotomous position on mental health care, similar to my approach to dieting: i.e. it’s a great thing for other people to invest time and effort in, but a mark of shame (specifically: failure) in my own self. {sigh}

Exploring why this might be seems to take us perilously quickly into stereotypical realms of family history. So let’s not. Let’s move onto the position I find myself in now, where I’ve come to view psychotherapy as being pretty much identical to physiotherapy: part of you is misaligned in a way that makes you uncomfortable and takes up energy that you could be spending on much more productive activities; discussing things with an expert in the field and following some of their advice to realign things, trusting your own judgement as well as theirs, seems pretty sensible.

Just as with physiotherapy, finding a good psychotherapist whose approach suits you (and, maybe more specifically, has the ability to take the you that you are now and help you on the way to transforming to the you you want/ need to be) is pretty key. And finding ways to keep going with their advice and guidance between sessions will give you a lot more benefit (and save you a bunch more money) than putting all your dependence on them to “fix” you. Ideally, they will help you develop the tools you need to get to the place you want to be in.

We still, as a society, seem to have a prevalent view that physical and mental health are separate things (denoted by separate names!). I’m pretty sure that this is, long-term, an unhelpful notion. It would be great if we could get onto speaking in terms of “health” and leave it at that, moving onto the specifics (knee pain, asthma, eczema, depression, dissomnia, vertigo, migraine, agoraphobia, broken arm, etc.) if necessary.

The thing is, it’s all part of a system. Your mental health affects your physical health, and your physical health affects your mental health. Whether or not you subscribe to an idea of an incorporeal mind and a physical brain, the mind’s direction would still prompt the brain to make changes in the body based on electrical and chemical shifts. It’s an actual, physical thing that your mind does to your body. The same impulses that mean you can direct your hand to pick up a drink and tip, swallow, set down again, etc., can also make more insidious changes.

We still have Stone Age bodies connecting with rapidly-adapting brains, technology, environments, and social structures. The responses that were designed to get us out of life-threatening, physical danger quickly are being applied to much less urgent, but much longer-term stressors. Stress chemicals hang around in our bodies much longer than they were ever designed to do, to the detriment of our immune systems, hearts, lungs, blood pressure, digestion, adrenal glands, skin, hair, eyesight... pretty much you name it, actually...  In other words, our life-saving response to stress is now killing us (those of us who live in a mechanised society/ have non-physical jobs).

So it’s important to look after your mental health, because it’s you, isn’t it? And if you’re all over looking after your physical health, you need to be looking after your mental health, because it’s all the same thing. In order to get started on (and maintain!) a decent physical health regime, your motivation and discipline need to be right - and this includes not overdoing it and harming yourself with it too.

Look, I’m not one of those people who’s going to tell you that you can cure your own cancer by thinking right, and that colds are happening because you’re mentally lazy, but I am someone who’s read the research that indicates that recovery from any illness or injury is massively affected by mental attitude (for interest: you’re better off either being in strenuous denial or full-on determination to beat it than apathetic acceptance that there’s nothing you can do), and that, since cancer can be fought off by the immune system (we’re apparently all exposed to it multiple times during our lifetime - we only notice when we haven’t fought it off), and stress affects the immune system, good mental health can only help when it comes to preventing/ fighting off cancer.

And, let’s face it, your physical health affects your mental health - long-term pain is a git for wearing you down; illness makes you feel groggy and unlike your usual self; revelling in the fitness and strength of your body can help your sense of mental resilience, etc.

This is all a round-about way of saying that, for the last couple of months, I’ve been seeing a psychotherapist, and will continue to do so until I’m in a position where I feel like I’ve realigned what I’m capable of realigning for the moment. Unlike in previous goes over the years (the first one was great, but the second one was far too insecure, and the third one was an old-school Freudian overly-concerned about whether I was breastfed...), the current therapist appears to be a good fit for my world views, and visiting her appears to have given me the stable base from which I can ask difficult questions of myself in the meantime, and answer them too. There’s something curiously empowering about the thought that, as regularly/ frequently as I need it, there’s a safe space where I can go to express being as angry/ unhappy/ jubilant/ proud/ messed-up as I am without fearing social punishment, and from there move onto working out ways of realigning what’s causing me to be less than I could be, because misaligned stuff needs to be brought into the light before you can start tinkering with it.

Go metaphors.

See, this blog is about my quest to become closer to what I can be. (Remember Maslow and self-actualisation?) And that includes emotional and other mental function. I was born with certain physical issues that make fitness harder (hypermobility, asthma, etc.), and given others by the misguided actions of others (food allergies, generally crappy immune system), and wrought some of them myself (the gimpy RTA-shoulder, for example) and these are things that can be managed, overcome, worked around, etc., with some extra support and persistence, and with imagination and the right research and information. The same goes for my mental/ emotional issues - presumably some of it I was born with, some I achieved, and others I had thrust upon me. If they were different, or more profound, likely I’d need medication, like I do for other long-term conditions that no amount of exercise will change (asthma, for example), but that doesn’t seem to be the case.

My emotional resilience is already improved, and my assertiveness has increased. It’s like watching the way that persisting in physical exercise has seen my stamina, strength, and confidence improve, and for approximately the same reasons. Also in common: the mental/ emotional challenges outside of my comfort zone hurt like blazes the first time or two (see: dancing, cycling, weight machines), but that pain fades into strength if I keep going, especially if I give myself space either side of the early/ quantum-change challenges (and recognise which pain is useful and which potentially damaging... and then stop the latter).

This brand of psychotherapy isn’t forever, but it’s right for where I want to get to now, and that’s the best I can ask for! :) I'm going to continue to feel proud of the work I've done already, and the achievements yet to come - both physically and mentally.

Culture Clash

So I've been doing this for just over a week. I measure fluid intake, portions of fruit & veg, sleep, and exercise activity (everything from walking fast for the bus to free weights). Oh and physio exercises (they count as "light strength exercises" in the exercise tab but they get their own thing because they're important). They're all compared against daily and weekly minimum targets, and yes there are graphs. Dammit.

I'm not measuring fat or sugar intake, though I probably should, on the grounds that I've noticed in the past that, when on a health kick, I feel too full to snack, and eat dried fruit instead. Except this weekend...

One of the things I've struggled with over the past year or so since inheriting the physio exercises, is fitting them into my busy poetry (and other things) schedule. One of the reasons everything slid so much towards the end of 2013 is that I was ferociously heavily-booked for gigs. Cycle goes: work, travel to gig, gig, travel back, eat something random, sleep; wake late, rush breakfast, bus/ taxi to work, work til late as left early yesterday to travel to gig, home (bus), sit around exhausted, eat late, sleep; rinse, repeat. Where to fit the physio exercises (20 minutes of mat work for legs and core, in case you're interested - I assume you are: you're here…) into that? Morning and evening both seem to be out as I keep catching myself by surprise by it being 8 o'clock and "too late to start all that".

Which is basically bollocks. Make a plan, execute the plan; rinse, repeat - excuses are for the weak...

I don't respond well to bullying, so I have to coax myself along. I read my Kindle during everything except crunches; praise myself for doing half the reps; tell myself how much more awesome I'll be when tomorrow I do two more of each set; remind myself how good fit feels; picture both the impressive upswing of multi-coloured graphs and how long I'll be able to walk for. I love walking.

But I sucked at fitting just physio in before; how am I going to fit physio, gym, and other calisthenics in?

I'm guessing that I'll have to timetable it; make it explicitly as important as performance stuff. Even when... Well…

See, part of the problem is stamina. I'm getting older, I'm not very fit, and things wipe me out. Take this weekend. Saturday (yesterday) was a Big Deal of a gig. I jittered like a muppet on speed beforehand, eating and drinking very little, stayed up (very) late afterwards grinning like a loony and belatedly eating cheese, and spent all day today eating biscuits and complaining about being tired. Physio was done Saturday morning; fair enough. Today? NOTHING.

So the lessons here (I reckon) are:

1. Establish a routine. Stick to it. (See 3 and 4.)

2. Don't punish yourself for transgressions; that just leads to more cheap comfort-seeking behaviour.

3. Find better compromises than Do All The Exercise OR Do Nothing.

4. If you need to sleep, tell people to let you sleep. Trust what your body's telling you.

Because I'm buggered if I'm giving up poetry, and I'm buggered if I'm giving up (so soon) on an exercise regime, and I need to go to work between these two…

Thassit for now.