Most mental disorders = learned behaviour × time

I’d love for you to feel that your brain works exactly the way it should.

1Introduction

A lot of people are scared of thoughts. About being with themselves in an empty room, in silence. It’s very tempting to fill your whole life with music, other people, work, social media, religion. I mean, there is nothing wrong with that. As long as you can sit with your own thoughts. That you are not running away from your thoughts and feelings.

I don’t mean this in a judgemental way, nor do I want to pretend that I know everything. But since I have actually overcome a lot of these obstacles, I want to help you a little bit too.

My official list of diagnoses is this:

• Generalised anxiety disorder
• Psychosis
• Depression
• ADHD (mom clearly has it and runs in family)
• Autism (dad clearly has it and runs in family)

I got these over the years. I also was in a mental hospital twice. Safe to say I really lost my mind, I couldn’t take care of myself.

The last 4 years or so, I fought myself back. I still have some issues, but more on the background so to say. I own 2 apartments and I have a good job, for what it’s worth.

2Why mental health is hard to understand

Mental health is something that grows over a very long period of time. In my estimation it’s something like this.

The problem is, when you go to the doctor, it’s basically already too late. You are already too deep in, like a bucket that got filled over time, a drop every day. Neither you nor the doctor can see that, at that moment. It seems as if it just kind of happened in a few months, but it didn’t. It took way longer.

For me, it was this:

I grew up in a family where I learned myself to ssssssh myself. If you want to speak out 30 times a day and you don’t, you don’t speak out 10,950 times a year. That’s 219,000 over twenty years. It’s very hard to put into words the extra tension this gives on a body. Everything becomes electrical, tight up like a knot.

3The output you get is something like this

I know I am not saying revolutionary. That how we grow up actually matters, we know. But it’s important to make it as specific as possible. Because we underestimate that we can help people unlearn things and relearn them. I sometimes hit states that are indescribably beautiful. While a few years ago, I thought that a helicopter was following me and I did not know how to take care of myself.

By the way, I don’t think autism and ADHD are mental disorders, for what it’s worth. Besides that, I don’t take mental health care very seriously. That being said, I really respect the people like doctors that try to help others. It’s just all very complicated. But the knowledge about the brain is very, very limited. Nobody really knows how it works. Which is something you should take into account when you receive a diagnosis, especially when the doctor doesn’t really know you. It’s simply not possible to diagnose somebody that fast.

4The basics of a human body

This may sound like a joke. But I still see, and I was one of them, a lot of people that don’t understand how the basics of the human body work. We know the specific body parts in theory, but not in practice.

You can test this easily for yourself.

What do you do when you have a feeling? What do you do with feelings?

I used to not understand that you have to feel feelings in that specific part in your body. I used to observe feelings, or do it with my head.

But you have to feel with that body part. Anxiety for instance, is often located in your thighs. So you feel with your inner thighs. I have this routine now that I feel individual body parts from time to time. Pain in your stomach, you feel with your stomach.

You can literally spend your whole life running away from feelings in yourself. Without ever wanting to feel those feelings in those places in your body. That works over shorter periods of time. Over longer periods of time, everything turns grey and you get depressed. I used to not feel anything anymore.

5How to utilize consciousness for mental health

So far, so good.

I had to give this little intro, since we have a similar starting point then.

Now it becomes harder. How can you actually use consciousness for your own mental health?

I do it like this:

First you sit for a minute and you write down your inner conversation. Just try to name as many things as possible.

This is mine from last Sunday:

6A few years ago, in my psychosis, my conversation was something like this

I can obviously not really replicate everything, because I was in too deep.

But there are a few very interesting tendencies to notice.

First: a lot of thoughts were half thoughts. Also, there was a lot of repetition. My thoughts felt like everything happened on a small surface, at a blazing speed. I was one complete chaos.

How is that possible?

I think it’s because I had built so much tension over time, that it came out the other end so to say. I had so many suppressed emotions, so many things I didn’t say that could get out, the rest of my thoughts started to accelerate, making it impossible to follow the conversation. So the problem was not in the thoughts itself, they were symptoms of something else.

Also, in the latter, a lot of ‘normal’ thoughts were missing. Thoughts about being hungry or thirsty were so far in the back I hardly even noticed them.

7What is hard with ADHD tendencies

If you are a fast thinker, you go through thoughts faster. So a normal rhythm looks like this:

For somebody with ADHD it’s more this:

It’s simply a faster rhythm. I still haven’t figured out why that’s a problem. It can be annoying in day to day life. But it’s not a disorder. From the perspective of somebody with ADHD, the rest is just very, very slow. You compress more thoughts in the same amount of time.

8What is hard with autism

Autism is more like going through the frames of reality more slowly, but with more attention to detail.

More like this:

You basically spend more energy on 1 thought. Again, I have no clue what is wrong with that. The problem is that from the outside world, you look slow. But the outside world doesn’t understand the level of depth a lot of people with autism function on.

9The biggest threat in mental health is thinking that there is something fundamentally wrong with you

There isn’t. Whether it’s something that’s not a problem in the first place (ADHD, autism) or some learned behaviour, those things are fixable. What is actually dangerous is the idea, the label. That generates more damage than everything else, because it’s something you believe, you are going to live like it. That doesn’t mean you can’t be depressed. But depression is a temporary state of you.