If You’re Sometimes Normal, You Can’t Be Crazy

The smartest way to see if you’re losing your mind is to check whether there are parts of the day when you feel “normal.” If that’s the case, you can’t be insane. Because if you were, you wouldn’t be checking. And in that case, you’d actually be lost the entire day.

182,500 Instances of Not Speaking Out

Depression is something at the end of a line

Depression is not a single moment in time. It takes about ten years to build up. So when you become depressed, it’s more like a state you grew into over time.

This is notoriously hard to spot. For example, you suppress:

  • Emotions

  • Sexuality

  • Every time you want to speak up, you don’t

Imagine growing up in a household where people neglect you. What do you teach yourself? To stay silent whenever you want to say something.

Let’s say you want to speak up 50 times a day, and you don’t.
In a year, that’s 365 × 50 = 18,250 instances of not speaking out.
Over ten years, that’s 182,500 instances of holding back—182,500 moments of extra tension in your body.

After ten years, you feel terrible. You go to the doctor and describe your symptoms. But your doctor can’t see that you’ve been holding back what you want to say. That’s not the doctor’s fault. You, on the other hand, don’t realize you’re doing it—you’ve been doing it for so long that you don’t even know other people act differently.

The doctor diagnoses you with depression. The doctor can’t see the 182,500 moments of not speaking out. The doctor can’t see that you’re still doing it.

The problem with modern psychiatry is that it’s not really anyone’s fault when things go wrong, but it’s incredibly hard to spot the underlying causes of something.

No, I make a brain scan. I see that the brain of a depressed person looks fundamentally different from a ‘healthy’ one. I think I’ve found the holy grail: if only I could make this look like a normal, healthy brain.

What I don’t see are the 182,500 moments that came before it. This is what goes wrong in brain analysis all the time. What you’re looking at is just the state of something. Billions and billions of actions have led to that state.

Be careful with suppressing energy states.

At the end, everybody wants a “normal” and safe life.

A general rule of thumb in psychiatry is that there’s an extreme focus on what something is not:

  • not happy

  • not capable of working

  • not able to focus

Shift your focus to what somebody can do. That gives a huge boost in self-confidence that carries over into other areas of life (other branches of the tree, so to speak).

There are a lot of people who have a lot of energy and power in their body that doesn’t necessarily fit directly into a 9-to-5 job, but you can work around that — for example, by working out.

As a general rule of thumb, I do things 95% of the time, and 5% of the time I use to reflect and think about old energy states (things I have done and what I think of those things).

Depression, for instance, requires both reflecting backwards and working forwards — doing. The latter is often overlooked because so much focus is on somebody’s history and the depression itself, and not on what you can actually do that helps.