The more f*** you are, the simpler your brain explains it to you

A few years ago I was in a psychosis.

To summarize, after a long buildup, during a holiday I suddenly thought that I was being chased by a helicopter and that the whole world could see my thoughts. I think I smoked one cigarette every five minutes (I don’t even smoke). I also forgot that I had a job, so when my boss came to my apartment I made up an excuse. I was one week (!) late for work. My girlfriend legitimately left me at that moment, and my landlord fined me for making the apartment a mess. Yes, this sounds like a bad sitcom, but everything really happened.

It was a surreal experience.

What the hell happened here, I thought.

When the doctor came to my house, they decided it was better to get picked up by a van. They drove me to a mental institution, for the second time. I was put under surveillance. Nothing really helped. When I left the institution, I had spoken to a lot of very good psychologists, but I knew deep inside I hadn’t fixed anything.

Here I was, a man, 33, with practically nothing going for me. I was living with my mom and was too ‘sick’ to go to work.

Then I thought: it’s enough. Now. I don’t really care what a psychosis is anymore, I don’t care what I have, I am all in. So I got my own apartment and was like, ‘If I go down, I go down. I don’t care anymore.’

I basically decided to figure out later what happened to me, and start with fixing the obvious first. But I did not realise that at that time, because I had no idea what I was doing.

You look like a Calvin Klein model, she said

So what do people who are psychotic do? They don’t take care of themselves properly. Their house is a mess. So I just started with that. I started with cleaning my house every week. I also started to work out daily. And I fixed my diet. I put the bar so unbelievably high that people around me did not recognize me anymore.

Was I fixing the underlying issue? Probably not. But it still helped tremendously. By fixing the surface, I had something going for me.

I think we as a society, when it comes to psychological disease, have a tendency to overcomplicate things. ‘Psychosis’—what does that even mean? Nobody knows. Sure, you can label everybody who lost their mind as psychotic, and a lot will have the feeling of being chased by a helicopter, but we are very bad at fixing the practical issue, which is that the likelihood of you getting into a psychosis is infinitely higher when you can’t take care of yourself properly.

I still have symptoms that are similar, probably because I suppressed certain emotions for a long time. But the peaks of the ‘psychosis’ are off. I still live in two realities at the same time, but let’s be honest, who doesn’t? If you classify a psychosis as living in two worlds at the same time, then all religious people are psychotic too.

A way better description is ‘hurt and not being able to take care of itself’. That’s a normal diagnosis. Not ‘psychosis’. From a smart person’s perspective, virtually everybody is in a state of psychosis.

I was with a girl last week. When I took off my shirt, she said, ‘I never *** a Calvin Klein model.’ I also bought my own apartment, and I have a second one that is finished in two years (€800k total). I am 37 now. So, for people who are in this mud, there always is hope. Be hard on yourself, but also sweet. Learn to fight. Learn to cook. Learn to clean.

Sometimes, I legitimately ask myself: if everybody had some basic understanding of dealing with emotions and taking care of a household, how many people would actually slip into a psychosis?

It’s better to throw yourself into the jungle sometimes and see whether you actually have what it takes to figure it all out.

It’s like having an eating disorder. You can complicate it, but it’s also as simple as this: ‘You don’t eat, you feel bad, you can’t think, so if you keep going, you are going down.’ I don’t mean it as disrespect, but it’s also what it is. The underlying thing is that you deal with emotions the wrong way.

But fix the obvious first. Or do you have an anxiety disorder, or are you just scared? A depression, or sad? Again, I am not belittling it, but sugarcoating it with complicated names makes it worse.

I have seen people going down in psychiatric institutions because they got locked into a treadmill of ‘help’, making things progressively worse. You get institutionalized, domesticated, whatever you want to call it. You identify with being a patient. With your label. Now, you think you are retarded and you can’t get out anymore, which is 100x worse than the original problem.

By the way: most psychiatric disorders are just umbrella terms. I get it, it’s an insurance thing or whatnot. You could say, ‘A psychosis is often triggered by substance abuse,’ but you can also say this: ‘Smoking stuff and gaming 24/7 is probably not a good idea,’ which is the same thing, in normal language.

My theory is this:

The more f*** you are, the easier your brain starts explaining it to you, because that’s your only lifeline.

Living in isolation, bad diet, no job, substance abuse and gaming? Your brain explains that via being chased by a helicopter. Since you are so far off, that’s the only language you speak.

Living in a completely disconnected state? Your body is going to explain that by giving you a lot of bad feelings, which we often call ‘depression’. The depression is not the problem, though. That’s the 'simplified' version already.

Reversed is also true. The more things go well in life, the more emotional depth your thoughts get, and the communication between you and your brain, yourself, whatever you call it, also strengthens and deepens to ‘paradise’ levels. Basically, your thoughts become richer and more complicated, a process that never stops.

Two Sides of the Same Coin

Think of the brain (or consciousness) as a relationship device.

An eating disorder is an unhealthy relationship with emotions, and you try to control that with food intake.

So the problem is in the relationship with things.

Depression is a disease that is caused by having an unhealthy relationship with your past, or with the world and people around you.

The more messed up you are, the simpler your brain communicates this with you.

If you are in a state of isolation, not taking care of yourself, no hope, no future, no work, no home, no cleaning, your brain communicates this as ‘being chased by a helicopter’, which we call psychosis.

So: the more complicated the issue, the simpler the explanation.

The better you get, the more subtle your emotional states are going to be. The more doubt you’ll have. If you are in bad shape, you don’t doubt anything.

Relationships Lost

Let’s say I’m going to count calories. I am going to eat 3,000 calories a day. Now, my relationship with food is one-dimensional and solely based on calories.

I don’t take it day by day to see what my body needs. Or I don’t look at the activity I am going to do and estimate how much fuel I need. Or maybe I don’t even look at the quality of the food.

So be careful with one-dimensional relationships with things, because you are going to lose all the others as well.

If my relationship with my body is only based on how I look, then losing that look will be the end of the world.

So you build a multidimensional relationship.

Consciousness is a levels game, with infinite emotional depth.

The worse state you are in, the simpler your brain explains it. The better you get, the more subtle your thoughts, emotions, and the game will be.

Happy hunting.