Self-Care (part 3: mental)

If you have an old computer like me, you know how important it is to take good care of it, so that it keeps running smoothly. That means regular updates, deleting files you don’t need anymore, and not running too many programs at once. I have found that you can apply the same strategies to your mind. In this post, I’m talking about mental self-care.

Mental self-care

We’ve already talked about physical and emotional self-care, which were pretty easy to define. But mental self-care is a bit more of a challenge. Because what is mental, exactly? Mental is just an adjective that relates to the mind. And the mind, according to the OED, means “senses relating to thought, used to express the action of thinking or the occurrence of a thought, idea, or intuition”. So where emotional health is more about feeling, mental health focuses on thinking. On a daily basis, we receive enormous amounts of data that our brain, or internal computer, needs to process. Caring for your mind concerns the way you process and express your thoughts. It’s knowing when to rest your brain and when to stimulate it, so that it’s not constantly on overdrive or, alternatively, sluggish and unmotivated.

Output

There’s almost nothing worse than having thoughts continually on loop in your head. Especially when it’s negative thoughts. This is called ruminating, literally meaning “to revolve, turn over repeatedly in the mind” (OED). Your thoughts can really keep swirling in your head until you express them, because they have nowhere else to go. These (output) activities help to get them out of your head:

• Writing: seeing your thoughts physically before you changes your perspective on them. You can try free writing, journal prompts, or morning/evening thought dumps.
• Talking: expressing your thoughts out loud can help make them less big. Call a friend, talk to a therapist or speak your thoughts out loud to yourself.
• Walking: walking gets you out of your head and into your body. It helps quiet down your mind, enhances creativity and puts your brain in problem-solving mode.
• Being in awe: experiencing awe is a wonderful way to quiet down your mind. According to science, intentionally seeking the feeling of awe can relieve anxious rumination. You can marvel at nature, art or anything that strikes you as incredible to look at.
• Clearing the clutter: coming back to the old computer metaphor, things run more smoothly if you clear out unnecessary files and programs. Applying the same thing in real life will do wonders for your brain. Throw out any stuff (food, clothes, cosmetics) that you haven’t used in a long time or have never used.

Updates

Your computer needs to be updated every now and then. For the brain, these updates come in the form of learning new stuff. As Natalie Portman once said: I hate studying, but I love learning. Studying is usually done in a specific format. Not to mention, you are tested on your knowledge. But you can learn new things in any form and at any speed you want. Books, podcasts, video-essays and (TED-)talks are great for learning new theoretical knowledge. In art, cooking or gym classes you can learn more practical skills. Find out what types of learning work for you. For example, I learn best by listening to content instead of reading it, and it’s even better when I can apply new knowledge as soon as it registered in my head. You’re never too old to learn new skills. In fact, according to aging expert Lacey Brown, learning new skills could even help prevent certain brain diseases such as Alzheimer’s!

Sleep mode

Much like your computer, your brain needs downtime. This can come in the form of sleep, or instead in an activity that gets you completely out of you head and into your body. Alternatively, you could try to do nothing for a bit. And to be clear, truly doing nothing is not the same as mindlessly scrolling through social media or binging a series. Of course it is basically impossible to turn off your brain when you’re awake, but when you truly do nothing, without any outside inputs, your mind can naturally wander towards the things it needs to process. In that way, you can make your hard drive stop making so much noise as it calms down. One of the best ways to do this is to meditate, where you just observe and accept your thoughts coming and going. It’s like watching a moving screensaver.

Task manager

In this day and age it’s almost impossible to do one thing without distractions. We constantly need to be stimulated and cannot stand to be bored, not even for a minute. Even when we stand in line or go to the toilet, we whip out our phones because god forbid our mind wanders for a bit. This makes your brain completely overloaded. Compare it to your computer again, when you have Word, Teams, Excel, Images and 52 tabs in your web browser open. And where is that music coming from?! It’s too much. It’s time to open your Task Manager, close all but one application and focus on that. This tactic when applied to the brain is called mindfulness. Being mindful is just doing anything (or nothing) with awareness. You can find mindfulness in meditation, low-intensity sports such as walking or cycling, and intuitive art forms such as painting, dancing or making music. Anything that gets you truly into the present moment is a perfect mindfulness practice. One of the benefits of becoming more mindful is that your own thought patterns become clearer, which is pretty handy when you want to eliminate specific negative thought streams (viruses) that return. Yeah, I’m on a roll with this metaphor.

Personal example

I started this blog post months ago, but couldn’t seem to finish it. I think that was because I put ‘publish blog posts’ on my to do list, as in two. I had two tabs open in which I was writing them separately. And trying to work on two blog posts at once is too much! It’s distracting, it’s trying to multitask, which I’m very bad at in general. It also induced stress because when I was working on one I wasn’t working on the other. So I crossed out the s in the word ‘posts’, closed the other tab and focused on finishing this one. It took me a couple of hours. That’s how simple it can be sometimes.

Exercise of the day

Do one thing and give it your complete attention. For example, cook without playing a podcast or music in the background. Or eat your meal without any distractions. Even if you can resist the temptation to take out your phone the next time you’re in line at the grocery store, you should be proud of yourself.