Mental hygiene

[maru]

I've been off SSRIs for like, a month now. I took them partly to contain anxiety and roll it off; but I also found that they helped me keep focus on work and, apparently, contain my emotional volatility. I had a perpetual calm. I last went off of them in early 2023, for a few months; when something scary finally happened, I was just overcome. I was catatonic for weeks; my blood pressure was through the roof; I could not calm myself down. The only thing that helped centre me, for whatever reason, were sermons. The content was almost immaterial, so long as it was about Christ. If I played some James Burke, some BBC Connections, that didn't seem to do anything. Pure noise. I hadn't been to church for a year or so beforehand; this got me going back.

That said.

I've recently gone off again — I realised, coming back from Japan, that a persistent problem I had was a disconnection from what my body was telling me. Even hunger was hard to detect, let alone fear or happiness. What did I want? What did I aspire to? When did I know I was at peace? I decided to pursue psychadelics, which required me going off.

Some of you know about the results of this excursion. I feel like I really did establish a connection to myself once again, and I resolved to continue staying off SSRIs. But now I feel like I have to develop the skills to work with myself. I feel like I always have all this energy that needs to be thrown somewhere. I feel like I'm doing anxiety judo. Sometimes I just feel exhausted after being at 125% levels of anxiety for a week, for no discernable reason. At the same time, I'm actually able to recognise what I'm processing emotionally as a result of this? For example, in the past week I feel like I finally accepted a possibility for my life in the next few months; I feel like I was able to notice and pinpoint resulting anxieties that made this possibility hard to accept or conceive of. I feel like I'm able to look within myself and solve things instead of wondering for months.

I just need to develop new tools. Thus I ask: do you have rituals to maintain mental hygiene? I've heard that grounding rituals are normal. I've heard meditation in the morning is normal. I've heard taking a morning walk is normal. I've heard that just carrying something familiar with you can help in unfamiliar places. I've heard that having a better sense of what you need to perform well — to establish baseline comfort — is also ground floor stuff.

I know it's abstract, but I feel like when it comes to my psychology, I don't brush my teeth. I just knocked out my teeth and wore dentures instead, or something. There's gotta be analogues here.

[tca]

For a couple years my emotional state seems to be mostly affected by the world I'm surrounded by, there's an ebb and flow in my mental state, and the effects I do have on those inputs aren't immediate (making choices to spend time on different things and places, which takes time, like searching for a job...). This means I do spend a lot of effort on what I would consider mental hygiene practice.

First category of practice for me is my attempt to have a better baseline. Sleep is an obvious one...finally get enough sleep almost every night now. I try to exercise as often as possible (currently once a week only, I need to purge some excuses) because it inexplicably increases my overall stability. I have also written in a journal (digital, in my PKM) every single day for over a year now about a day's happenings, my own actions, how I felt about these things, and any extraneous thoughts I'd been mulling over on that day. I usually jot things down as I'm being productive throughout the day or when I have something I want to work out. I also always write about my general view of the day's feelings as my last thing before bed. I have found that my memory, and I think similarly the coherence of my thoughts over months is a lot better with this practice. Having a digital journal that I can search and read through a lot quicker than a paper journal is also very useful to me, e.g. before a therapy session I review my journal entries between now and the previous session to find topics of discussion, or I can find details about when something of note was said.

Second category of practice is managing more acute-but-ignorable bad states. Like I'm uneasy or can't keep my thoughts super coherent but can choose to just keep going, so it's hard to notice these states sometimes. Once I notice I check in on my physical needs (have I been eating, sleeping, ignoring treatable physical pain?) and try to resolve any problems. I journal about the progression of my thoughts, emotions and physical state/sensations. I try to go outside, the space away from where I was stewing is helpful, and outdoor exercise is often an even better distraction (or I guess formerly going to the gym with a friend served this same purpose, wouldn't think about anything other than rock climbing whilst we were there).

Third category of practice is managing very-bad-spiraling states. Problem with managing these is sometimes I'm so deep in the hole I don't remember that there's things I can do to try to escape, so step one is acknowledging that I'm safe and able to control myself and my surroundings. Try grounding to my physical presence: box breathing, 5-4-3-2-1 senses exercise, stretching or even just holding onto myself and focusing on the sensation. Do all of the above in the second category of practice. Talk to someone who I can trust won't judge me for even my craziest-feeling thoughts, preferably in person.

Despite all these strategies making a noticeable difference in my life, I do wish there was some way I could accelerate the process of healing from trauma and reduced occurrence of my worst states. Things have slowly but steadily improved a lot in the last 5 years, and reading my old journals is actually a helpful reminder of progress being made, but it is all so tiring...