REWIRE

I recently wrote a piece for mentalhealth.org which was a pleasure and an honour, this being my fifth mental health charity that I’ve written for now. It was, however, heavily edited and the ending reads as rather odd and abrupt and doesn’t really make sense. But, what I wrote originally is considerably longer than was requested, so I quite understand their need to make some cuts. Anyway, I place here the unabridged version. 😉

Having lived with bipolar disorder for as long as I can remember I know the frozen abyss of depression well, along with crippling anxiety, obsessive thoughts and finding myself at a place where even the smallest trouble can seem overwhelmingly monumental. Our brains can seem a most cruel master.

But by lived experience of mental illness you know well the difficulties faced, you don’t need to hear of mine. Perhaps you’d feel some affinity, but I dare say my woes would only serve to remind you of your own. So… what can I impart, what can I say is my key to coping, to managing, to living, because just maybe that might be of help. After all, we all want to survive, sure, but more than that, we want to thrive.

Let me say first, I haven’t gotten rid of the bipolar beast with its schizoaffective twist. I haven’t even managed to tame it, but at least I’ve learned, well sometimes, to walk it on a leash. There can be moments or periods where it overwhelms me still, but I made the decision sometime ago that, as present as it is, it was not going to rule my life. It does not rule my life. That which now follows, this is how I have got myself there, or rather, here.

I used to be far too introspective for my own good. I’d worry that I’d said the wrong thing or worry that I would say the wrong thing. I’d worry about one thing happening, or another, and even worry about worrying and have all kinds of unwanted thoughts regarding myself to ricochet around in my head. I’d look at others and worry about what they thought about me, deciding that what they were thinking was anything but pleasant because of course I knew even though I didn’t actually know at all and was simply projecting. Even if I wasn’t, I worried that any opinions mattered. I accepted this status quo, never really challenged it. Until, that is, I came across an article that was a real light bulb moment.

You may well of heard this before, but the fact of the matter is we humans are actually wired to be negative, giving far more focus and attention to the bad over the good. We’ve evolved that way. Way back through the mists of time, to when we lived in caves and there were predators and rivals for food, paying attention to negative threats was essential to our survival. Those who looked out for danger and paid more attention to bad things around them were most likely to survive, and just as we do everything else, this trait would have been passed down to the next generation and that generation to the next and so on. Being negative is our brain trying to keep us safe.

Of course these days we don’t need to be on constant alert, on the lookout for danger in order to survive. But our negativity bias as it is called, still exists, and it affects how we think, how we feel, how we act.

Invariably we will recall any stinging insults received for more readily than kind praise, remember traumatic experiences far better than joyous ones, and think about events, not even yet existing being negative as opposed to positive. All of that influences everything we are and everything that we do, and this can have a serious impact on our mental health. We can end up having dark thoughts that we run over again and again, find our relationships difficult to cope with, find ourselves always the pessimist never the optimist.

Apparently the average person can have anything from 20,000 to 60,000 thoughts a day thereabouts, and it is generally believed that at least 80% of those are negative. So we have to consciously work on having more positive ones. Who’d have thought being positive was harder, but it is. Harder does not equate with not worth it however, because it had dawned on me that I was - worth it that is.

I believe we can rewire our brains for the better. I’m not saying it’s easy, I’m not saying it’s quick, but if something is worthwhile isn’t it worth hard work and a considerable length of time? I certainly think so.

Our minds are open to the power of suggestion in a monumental way. If we tell ourselves something, particularly over and over again, our mind will believe what it’s been told. I believe words are the most powerful magic we possess, and so I began to gather them - words. In the form of quotes, a line from a poem or a song, the thoughts of certain individuals who have walked this planet and thus hold some erudite enlightenment contained therein, be that walk ten years ago, a hundred, a thousand. I wrote them all down in notebooks, stuck notes on the fridge, tattooed them on my eyelids (ok, not that)… I read them and recited them and repeated them in the hope they would become so familiar with me that though they were originally someone else’s thoughts they would gradually become one with my thoughts. I repeated, I remembered… I rewired.

Now change rarely happens overnight. I had to put the work in, day in day out, for months, years actually if I’m being honest, before a fundamental shift within came. And the work didn’t then stop. It never really stops, you have to keep at it, just as a sculptor slowly but diligently carves out their masterpiece.

Which brings me to my conclusion. You reading this, you are a masterpiece. I’m aware you may not feel a masterpiece, but it’s a fact - that’s the miracle of birth. You’re unique and unrepeatable, and there will never be one the same who will ever come this way again. So why accept ticking along as our ancestors did, why not choose to give yourself more of a positivity bias instead. Repeat. Remember. Rewire. You absolutely deserve it.