WHEN PEOPLE ASK me to their work to speak about mental health, one of the big points I like to hit is “no mental state is a permanent state”. The idea that while things might be bad now, it’s not always going to be like this.
It’s not always going to be bad, and it’s not always going to be good. And recently, it hasn’t been good. Honestly, it got pretty bad – and I got lost in the wilderness without realising that I had tools to get myself back to mental safety.
You’d think I’d notice it coming with all the familiar warning signs piling up. I was becoming unusually quiet around people and then breaking out in a cracking great cold sore, but I still didn’t notice.
I didn’t want to be unable to cope, so I just kept pushing on, reframing my increasingly uncomfortable reality to fit the narrative that I’m okay despite, in the words of Pulp Fiction’s Marsellus Wallace, being “pretty far from okay”.
One of my favourite books, Deep Survival by Laurence Gonzales, describes something called “bending the map”. It’s a term taken from the world of orienteering, where runners refuse to update their mental map despite overwhelming evidence that they are lost in the woods.
Rather than stop and figure out where they actually are, they stick to their planned course and just keep running, convinced that it’s the surroundings which must be wrong and not them. It’s a kind of unconscious hubris that can be deadly.
Gonzales tells the story of a very experienced hiker who was found barely alive, five kilos lighter than he was three days prior, clinging to a tree and nearly dead from hypothermia because he refused to open his backpack full of survival gear, as admitting he was lost would mean admitting that he needed help.
I’m not awaiting the mountain rescue chopper, but I absolutely relate to that. I didn’t want to accept that I was getting strung out again.
I’ve been going through a career transition, and as often happens, financial uncertainty comes with such a moment. Uncertainty that almost tells the universe “Hey, if you want a free shot, now’s the time”.
If you’ve ever owned a pre-1980 car, you’ll know that the vehicle waits until payday to blow up the alternator. Similarly, our 100-plus-year-old house waited until now to transform our basement into the underground canals of Antwerp.
As the plumber sharply inhaled through his teeth looking at our new subterranean river system and then started describing the size of the digger we would need to redirect the groundwater around our foundations, my brain jumped into self-protection mode and just shut down my ability to understand English.
On top of that, after getting some blood tests done, I got a call from the specialist’s office, bumping my appointment up from a month away to this Thursday without saying why.
As the stresses increased, I didn’t recognise the signs. I got quieter around the house, which worried my wife, Audrey, because she knows somethings up. I, however, just kept ploughing on.
This included pushing my body at the gym, in an effort to gain some respite from the uncomfortable feelings in my body. The last straw was going as hard as I could at mat Pilates. My stepdaugher Georgia is an excellent teacher, and I try to go once a week to balance out the barbells. I don’t care what your 1RM is, mat Pilates is pure brutality.
Pushing forward with no regard for my own health, I was futilely hoping that doubling down on everything would make it all feel better soon. Instead, things just got worse, and then, boom – I got a cold sore. A pet corn flake of my very own, so large that I’ll need to introduce it when I have my next video call, making its home under my right nostril.
I’d been bending the map, not wanting to accept that I am struggling, taking numerous wrong turns, in an attempt to deal with rising levels of stress.
I wasn’t paying attention to my rising anxiety levels and rather than stopping and noticing my brain catastrophising, I allowed those thoughts to get away from me and start to run the show.
There was a time when I had a strict daily regimen that helped me avoid all these things, a practice that included journalling, tracking anxiety levels, and having realistic expectations around what my work schedule and training might look like.
As I got better, I used these structures less and less. It’s all working well, why bother? Like most things, everything was just fine until it wasn’t.
While I wasn’t clinging to a tree on the side of a freezing mountain with a backpack full of warm clothes and gear to make a fire, I was on the way to a perilous mental state. Not only unable to notice I was in trouble, but also not utilising any of the tools that I have to deal with such a situation.
The only move then is to find acceptance and get into action.
So, I marched up to the pharmacy to grab some over-the-counter Famciclovir for the face-herpes. As the only cure for the over-training was rest, I sat myself down to deal with the catastrophising I was experiencing around the suburban submarine base and whatever the doctor had to see me about so quickly.
I find catastrophising a by-product of having a creative job. I make things up for a living. I write books, screenplays, TV scripts, podcasts, live comedy shows, songs – I even draw.
My mental reward system for amplified ideas and unpredictable connections is very trigger-happy, which is good because that’s what I need for work.
Yet my brain can be just as creative with the negative stuff. I have to understand that I can’t have one without the other, so staying on top of the creative catastrophising allows the positively creative side of it to flourish.
That looks like grabbing a pen and paper, and taking whatever it is that I’m catastrophising about (money, for example) and then writing out in detail, the absolute best, best, best-case scenario. The full, over the top, everything goes in our favour, dream version of how things might turn out.
Then I write the absolute, worst-case scenario. The darkest, most grim, most unintended consequence domino effect horror-show scenario, like Dean Koontz and Stephen King were in a pissing contest trying to describe how horrible things are, graphically describing every flow-on effect as ridiculously as I can, as far into the future as I can, going into great detail about how, 25 years from now, there’s no question that something awful will absolutely happen because of this thing now.
The final step is to write the more probable outcome in between the two of those things, in similar detail.
Trying to do this when I’m in an already heightened state is impossible because my brain can refuse to see how things could be any other way, so it’s important to consider this situation with a brain that’s not mine. So, I asked Audrey what she thought was going on. Her take was tangential, yet far more optimistic than any of mine.
This is where things get interesting. There’s something about writing out those three scenarios, by hand – not typed into my phone – but written in my barely-legible, son of two doctors cave scrawling, that makes the working bits of my brain say to the ruminating bits of my brain: “Wait up…hang on fellas, we can see it all written out in front of us. Looks like he finally understands that we’ve been thinking about it over and over and that we can’t stop thinking about it over and over, but it’s clear now that he got the message. Good job amygdala. Pack it up hypothalamus. We’re done here.”
In a few short minutes, without changing my circumstances at all, still with a potentially massive plumbing bill and possibly enormous news coming from the specialist – I feel heaps, heaps better.
So, I’m back on the daily five-star rating to track my anxiety to remind myself that no mental state is a permanent state, and with my full daily routine back in operation, hopefully it will help me from getting lost in the wilderness and refusing to accept it.
Osher Günsberg on why vulnerability and resilience are connected
