We worry about a lot of stuff. Money, family, jobs, school, university … whatever. Since we do it such a lot, it must be really helpful, right? Let’s take a look.

(Take a while to go through these questions, actually. It’s not just a gimmick I came up with.)

• Does worry help you sleep?
• Does worry help you solve problems?
• Does worry make you feel better about difficult situations?
• Does worry promote well-being in any important area of your life (relationships, finance, job)?
• Does worry help solve problems that you can’t really solve anyway (e.g. the recession)?

So does worrying have any kind of positive impact whatsoever in your life? No it does not! So why on earth do we do it so much? Genuine question! What’s the point?! Worry does nothing. You are not being irresponsible by refusing to worry about something. Worrying about a problem isn’t the same as trying to solve it, so it’s at best useless, and at worst, harmful.

I realised this one night when I was in bed. As ever, my brain sprung into action, winding itself tighter and tighter around a problem area in my life at the moment.

I suddenly realised that now was not the time and place to be trying to come up with solutions, much less make them larger in my head. It was the time for restful sleep! Since my brain was being naughty, I told it off.

Seriously, I literally told my brain off. “Listen up, brain, now is not the time for such rubbish!” And such like. Sometimes you literally have to prise thoughts away from your own mind, like getting a stick from a dog. It’s a sheer act of will.

Practical steps

When you take something away from a baby (scissors, screwdrivers, the cat’s tail) you need to make sure you give it something else or it will miss the thing it was holding before. Your brain is just like that. Stop the worrying with willpower, and then force yourself to think about something else. If you’re trying to sleep, think about the sea, or a summer’s day or whatever New Age-y imagery you want to use to help you sleep. For me, it has to be a pleasant day dream that develops naturally without much effort.

Writing down concerns is also helpful. It lets your worry-brain know that you’re taking its concerns seriously. Listening can be a really powerful tool.

If you’re worried about a job or some problem, I find a physical aid like a brainstorm is really helpful. It gives me something concrete to focus on instead of the formless crap inside my head.

Also, the more good stuff inside your brain, the more likely it is to come out. So fill your head with helpful books, films, TV, conversations, music. Then you’re more likely to produce positive stuff!

Read more

• Anxiety Culture
• How to stop worrying
• How to stop worrying and why

Blackouts are when everything familiar and reliable seems to disappear. You know how it goes … whatever you use to keep yourself stable suddenly seems to be gone. For me, it’s a panicky feeling that usually builds after I’ve been feeling depressed for a while.

One thing that will greatly eradicate these times, and reduce their power effectively, is to simply remember that it hasn’t always been like this. You had good moods once, remember? You had hopes for the future at one time. The world wasn’t always going to hell in a handbasket.

Help yourself remember by writing things down when you’re in a good place. When the world looks great, why does it look great? What about it makes you feel optimistic? Write things down, even if they look obvious to you when you’re in a great mood, because in the middle of a blackout they won’t be obvious and you will have forgotten them.

Simply remembering this in the middle of a blackout will do you a world of good. It helps bring unity to your life, remove some of those “schizophrenia” style mood swings. Depression can be like black clouds that block out the sunlight — just remembering that there are good things in life as well as bad helps to clear those clouds a little more quickly. Or at least it makes them a bit more patchy, which is a step towards them completely clearing. Learning to accept “patchy” instead of demanding completely clear skies is a healthy step too. I’m writing a post about optimism and pessimism that looks at this in more detail, though.

The value of blackouts

Seeing blackouts like periods that you just need to escape means that we have chunks of our life that are worth nothing. It’s like having a painting with large holes in it. But actually, we shouldn’t see life as just lurching from one good moment to the next, treating “blackouts” as unnecessary and unwanted periods. Blackouts are an important part of life. Instead of damaging the good times, they actually help build them. For those that read the Bible, Paul writes in Romans 5 that suffering produces endurance, which in turn produces character, and character produces hope. “Blackouts” are a really valuable thing, you just have to flip your attitude and how you handle them.

So, there are certain parts of the Christian journey that you have to get used to. They are like problems that keep developing so that in order to solve them, you need to keep developing the solution. The trick is to remember that this is called growth, and it’s a process that won’t stop!

One feeling to get used to, if you’re a Christian (or if you’re living a positive, forward moving life) is a feeling of frustration mixed with confusion. Sometimes it will be stronger than other times, but it will always be there in the background. This is not something that limits your life, nor is it a drain. It’s more like a constant reminder that there is always more.

The way to get rid of the feeling is to move into it and find out what it wants. If you let it, it will push you into a bigger person. If you ignore it it’ll take over until you can’t sleep at night, and then you’re moving into “a part of me died” territory. The one thing you can’t do is get rid of it, because it represents your future.

Well, hello!

I’d like to start off my new season of posts with some thoughtful ones on a topic I think about quite a lot. It’s mental health!

Now I know that the tone of this blog might get you to think otherwise (after all there is a link at the top of the page that says “blurry dog hat”). But actually I am quite a thoughtful person. Mental health is obviously really important to people’s lives, but quite often we overlook it. If we’re ill, we go to the doctor, take some medication, do something about it, but if we have poor mental health, we often don’t know what to do, or we can even be completely unaware of it.

Maybe that’s because “mental health” is a scary word. Or maybe it’s because we don’t think of it as “mental health”, for the most part. In this modern world of analysing everything and giving it a world, “mental health” is just another name for “happiness”. And most of us are searching for happiness, are we not?

Happiness is one of those concepts like “success” that everyone recognises, but no-one can quite put into words in a way that describes it once and for all. Since people have been thinking about them for so long, and there are still no answers, we can probably conclude that no-one will ever come up with an exhaustive description of what happiness (or success, or forgiveness, or love, or faith, etc) actually is.

I have found that it is helpful to think of these concepts as people that you get to know. It would be impossible to fully capture who I am in a sentence or two. You might describe my appearance, or location, or go over a potted history of my life, but it’s not likely that you will capture all of who I am.

It’s the same with happiness. Don’t waste time trying to figure out what it will take to make you happy, before you get happy. Just get to know happiness like you would a friend. Learn along the way.

So there’s going to be a series of posts about happiness/mental health, and some of the things I’ve learnt that help keep my mental health ticking over nicely. I hope you find them helpful!