Run For Your Life

Me time trialling - perhaps
mindfulness could have helped me?!

Hello friends and welcome to ‘my cloud’!  I hope you find this to be a good read, and would love it if you could leave comments and share with others.  I am writing in a post-workout endorphin-enhanced state, which I have just realised is probably my favourite state to write in!  And my realising this, I think, is down to my newfound mindful way of living - having started practicing mindfulness a few months ago, I’m so much more aware of my thoughts and feelings in everyday situations - see my previous post for a bit more on the general benefits of mindfulness.

So, to get to the point of this post: I’ve just been for a run (and by run, I mean short jog!).  Of course, the fact that I went running is not the whole point of this post, but bear with me!  In recent times I’ve been making an effort to be more mindful during everyday activities, especially exercise.  This basically involves being fully aware of what I’m doing while I’m doing it, and noticing with curiosity how I feel physically and mentally whilst exercising. 

We all know that exercise is good for our mental wellbeing, and more and more of us are coming to realise that mindfulness is another powerful tool for maintaining and enhancing our psychological health.  Combine the two, and the result, I think, is magic!  It opens up a whole world of benefits, which I see as coming into two main categories.

The first is that exercise sessions are wonderful opportunities to practice mindfulness.  This in itself is a great thing, as the more we practice, the more benefits we reap.  Not only that, but it can make the experience more enjoyable and meaningful that it otherwise would be.  For instance, on my run today I noticed that the upright posture I was adopting made me feel strong and powerful (see this TED talk for more on body language and feelings of power).  On a recent bike ride I found noticed how soothing the easy feeling and sound of my slick tyres on a smooth road surface was, and the soft vibrations coming through my padded handlebar tape on a slightly rougher road surface.  One also notices a lot more of the natural beauty around you when you running, walking or cycling mindfully, and this in itself is a wonderful mood-booster.  Another way of bringing mindfulness to exercise is to simply notice the feeling of the feet touching the ground or turning the pedals, or of the wind in your face and hair.

Mindfulness can turn pain into power and enhance performance!

The second key advantage of mindful exercise is performance enhancement.  I realise that if you’re a serious athlete, the idea of leisurely taking in the scenery or enjoying a smooth road surface may not be quite up your street!  The good news is that I also think it has enormous potential to enhance performance.  This is because mindfulness is very much about paying attention to how we feel in a non-judgemental way.  So, by adopting a mindful approach during exercise, when pain kicks in you can get through it by simply noticing and allowing the sensations, without attaching negativity to it or wishing it felt different. 

I toyed with the idea of using mindfulness to improve performance a little on my run today, and genuinely think it helped me to go a little faster.  I’ve also tried it whilst going uphill on my bike and doing weights.  I think it’s something that’ll take some practice to get big performance enhancements from, but can really see the potential.  Another idea I have is to build it up slowly (after all, mindfulness is like the gym but for your mind: the more you do it, the easier it gets).  For instance, on my recent mindful bike ride I quite enjoyed the feeling of tension and power when going up a short hill.  With practice, I think this technique of mindfully noticing the sensations in my legs could help me a lot with harder climbs.

One to read for more
on mindful cycling

Of course, my experience so far is with a limited range of activities, but I think it can be applied to anything.  I’m especially interested to apply mindfulness next time I go climbing and see where it gets me!

So, there it is: a whistle-stop tour of my thoughts on the magic of mindful exercise!  I’d welcome comments from anyone who uses mindfulness when exercising, and hope to write more on this later when I’ve tried the technique out a bit more and looked into what research is out there on the topic.  In the meantime, I hope I might have inspired you to give mindful exercise a go and that you can reap the benefits from it.  Run, walk, climb, lift, cycle, row – or whatever your chosen activity – for your life!

Love Story?

A slightly early Happy Valentine’s Day to one and all!  Whether you’re a singleton, part of a happy couple, have been married forever, a serial dater, or suffering from heartbreak, I reach out and wish you joy on the annual day of love!

Valentine’s Day seems to have become a big deal for a lot of people, seemingly more so every year.  Whilst I can see it’s appeal, it also has its downsides, so overall I have mixed feelings about the whole thing.  Here’s my take on the ups and downs of V-Day:

Every year, as the middle of February comes around, I find it a little baffling that so many people talk about how depressing it is to be single on Valentine’s Day.  This is probably in part because I don’t really get the concept to begin with: it’s over-commercialised.  It’s seen as a great night to go out but all the nice places to eat and drink are packed and noisy.  Also, I don’t see why we should subscribe to being romantic on a set day of the year!  Why not express appreciation for loved ones every day of the year?!

That said, I don’t want to come across as having a ‘bah-humbug’ type of attitude to Valentine’s Day.  Of course it’s nice to have an excuse to spoil our loved ones, spend quality time together and get romantic.  But why feel down if you’re not in a romantic relationship?  I for one have only ever been with someone one Valentine’s Day once, in the quarter of a century I’ve spent on the planet, and I can’t say it’s ever bothered me too much!

The one time I did ‘do Valentine’s Day’, I still didn’t really do it properly, so to speak.  There was a romantic meal, but we did this the weekend after the day itself, avoiding the overcrowding that I can only assume occurs on the day itself.  Other than that, the whole thing was a little disappointing: I’d bought some lovely goodies for my at-the-time-boyfriend, despite being a poor student, and in return got a couple of tacky gifts that had probably been bought at a service station on the way to seeing me!  Not so romantic after all!

Anyway, this doesn’t make me bitter or anything, it just makes me think the whole occasion is a bit over-hyped, which I guess a lot of people will agree with.  Also, I’m quite pleased to be able to say I was once given a red rose on V-Day.  I was still at school and must’ve been about 16.  A charming male friend of mine had bought about half a dozen red roses and handed them out to his nearest and dearest female friends.  A lovely touch, and something that’s remained vividly in my memory for all these years!

Fun with friends! :)

This nicely illustrates my main point, which is this: to me, there’s no point in getting down about being single on V-Day (I’m bored of typing Valentine’s!); instead, why not show some extra love and appreciation to others you hold dear?!  Let us singletons turn a would-be-disheartening occasion into a celebration of being single and free to enjoy time with our friends! 

I’m thinking a picnic in the park with my friends this Saturday will do the trick: for couples, this can be quite a romantic activity, but this will be with the added bonus of greater numbers (the more the merrier & all that!) AND made more fun by a spot of Frisbee!  Who’s in?!

Share the love this Valentine's Day, even if you're single!

If it rains, let’s go to the pub instead.  Can’t go wrong, right?!

Anyway, that’s all from me for now.  Whatever you’re doing, I hope you have a delightful time this weekend, with whichever loved one (or ones) you choose.  If you’re the type to feel a little low at this time of year, I challenge you to flip that switch, turn a negative into a positive and celebrate single life!

The Stairway To Heaven, Oh It Starts In Hell

Hello readers, and welcome to the latest instalment of On My Cloud, where I like to ramble on about things I feel strongly about!  I say ramble partly in jest, as I hope that in reality the things I say are considered valuable by others too and strike a chord with at least some readers.  The reason I write this blog at all is that I feel the things I’m writing about are incredibly important and need to be in public awareness, so as always I welcome and encourage comments and sharing with others who may be interested in what I have to say. (Thanks!)

Having experienced a few dry spells with my writing, at the moment I’m a bit inundated with ideas for things to write about, largely due to my current reading around psychiatry and mental health services.  Most notably, I am presently reading a book entitled Cracked: Why Psychiatry is Doing More Harm than Good by James Davies (a fantastic read that I’d recommend to everyone, although it makes my blood boil!).  I don’t need to explain what it’s all about, since the title does a good enough job of giving you the gist. 

 

I was prompted to write this post when reading a chapter that addresses cultural interpretations of emotional suffering and mental distress, just one issue amongst the many revealed by Davies in the book.  This particular topic, though, somehow struck a chord with me in a way that inspired me to write about it first above everything else, perhaps because of the personal significance it has for me as well as the wider social and cultural questions it raises.  As a result, what I think we’re going to end up with is a piece that not only addresses one of the widest and deepest cultural issues I’ve written about yet, but also one that is more personal and self-disclosing than anything I have written previously.  I hope it makes for a good read!

(Having already taken three paragraphs to introduce the topic!) I’d like to start by posing some questions: what does emotional suffering or mental distress mean to you?  What function do you believe it plays, if any?  Or is it just something that gets in the way and needs to be gotten rid of as promptly as possible?  In Cracked…, Davies notes that in Western culture, mental suffering has come to be perceived more and more as something that does not serve a purpose or function, and needs to be removed by any means possible.  Psychiatry has purportedly contributed significantly to this perception, as I will explain briefly now.

To give some context, one of the key objectives of Cracked is to expose the arbitrary and corrupted nature by which mental illness is defined by psychiatry, and the building of a mythical world in which mental distress is caused by some physical or biological phenomenon.  In fact, what you’ll find if you dig deep is that there is actually no scientific backing for this notion.  However, as psychiatry has gained power (largely though the financial rewards associated with pharmaceutical industry links), the notion that mental distress is biologically rooted has taken hold in our culture, therefore rendering mental suffering as a result of abnormality, to be eradicated by psychiatric interventions (which sadly almost inevitably means medication). 

Mental distress: part of being human or bioliogical abnormailty?!

Eradicating suffering and emotional distress sounds great on the surface, so one might argue that it’s wonderful that psychiatry offers a solution to this.  Aside from the fact that there is little-to-no scientific backing for this approach (to be discussed further in later posts!), there is another problem here.  Before we started to view mental distress as a sign of illness and abnormality, we relied much more heavily on psychological and spiritual explanations and ways of coping.  Addressing distress in this way, I believe, is far more productive.  By recognising the causes of distress, often traumatic events or general life stressors, we can also properly deal with the problem rather than blunting it.  Furthermore, we can learn and develop from the experience.  As the aforementioned Mr Davies notes, “from affliction there can be derived some unexpected gain, new perspective or beneficial alteration”.   

The above statement rings true and resonates with me, and I feel uncomfortable with the fact that more and more suffering is being medicalised and passed off as something to be blunted and controlled.  More and more things that were once accepted as a normal part of the human experience are now defined as symptoms of mental illness.  I feel that resilience is one of the most important things in the maintenance of psychological wellbeing, and the medicalisation of distress is not helping us to build a resilient and mentally healthy population.

As already hinted at, I am of the school of thought that distress can be learned from and help a person to develop and overcome life’s challenges, and that this is being stifled unnecessarily and unhelpfully in many cases by the current misguided tendency, through psychiatry, to associate mental distress with biology.  (To illustrate my point: how many times have you heard the phrase ‘chemical imbalance’ in relation to mental health?  If you were to read Cracked, you’d realise this is an unproven and therefore dangerous notion, which is why I am so concerned by the view of suffering that psychiatry instils). 

I’ll illustrate my own personal stance on this topic using a combination of anecdote and music.  As regular readers will already know, I am a huge music fan and like to give each blog post a lyrical title and refer to relevant music within my writing!

To quote a cliché and indeed song title, “what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger”.  And let’s be honest, clichés generally materialise because there is an element of truth in them to begin with.  Most of us have probably had times when we could really relate to this statement, times when we’ve come through adversity feeling stronger than before.  For me, the best example is a relationship break-up I went through a few years ago.  It felt like the worst thing ever at the time, like the pain would be endless and insurmountable.  Of course, this wasn’t the case!  As beautifully articulated by Matt Cardle in his song Porcelain:

All the things in this life that you thought you just couldn’t bear

It’s the pressure inside makes the diamond that’s shining there

All the pain and the heartache can break you and shape you like clay

Now you’ve come through the fire and that makes you porcelain

It took a long time, but once I’d got over it I felt so much better than I had whilst in the relationship.  Not only this, but I realised that I’d learnt a lot and gained new perspective on certain things.  For me, the gaining of perspective is perhaps the most important benefit of coming through adversity and dealing with distress in a productive way. 

Many people who have experienced bereavement will be able to relate to the idea that such events, whilst horrendous, really have the power to make us appreciate life, the world and, most importantly, the people around us, more than we did before.  I myself experienced a significant bereavement during my teenage years: I am one of triplets, and unfortunately one of my two brothers took his own life when we were just 14.  Of course, this is a horrible thing for my family to go through, but it has undoubtedly altered my perspective on life and made me so much more grateful for my loved ones.  Indeed it has probably also, on some subconscious level, influenced my aspirations in life and driven some of my passion for the very things I write about now.

Of course there are negatives as well: for instance, the incredibly sudden and unexpected nature of the incident meant that for a while I experienced high anxiety around thoughts of similar things happening again, and still do to a certain extent.  However, I can now recognise this as a fairly normal, if slightly irrational, reaction to a traumatic experience.  If I were to read the DSM (or Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, which lists

all the conditions psychiatry has decided constitutes a mental disorder), I would probably find that I could diagnose myself with several ‘disorders’ based on this and other features of my personality, experiences and feelings.  Since I have worked through these difficulties and gained something from this, I hope you’ll agree that receiving a diagnosis of a mental disorder would not have been helpful to me, but this is what’s happening to people every day when they end up in mental health services.

What worries me is that more and more normal human experiences are being medicalised by psychiatrists.  This is characterised by the fact that each time the DSM is revised, the number of disorders it lists grows.  This is surely serving to reduce our ability to view distress as a normal part of human experience and enhancing our propensity to view it as a sign of illness that must be treated.  I find this thought quite scary, particularly considering that the diagnostic criteria set out in the DSM are based on nothing more scientific than the perceptions and discussions of a bunch of guys who work for the APA (American Psychiatric Association).  Anyway, I think I’m going off on a bit of a tangent here, so I’ll leave it there for you to ponder if you wish, with the promise of more on this in a later post.

I remember hearing a psychologist called Rachel Perkins speaking at a mental health conference last year.  There is one thing that she said that I remember very well because it resonated with me at the time, and I’m glad I remembered it because it is even more poignant for me now!  She noted that culturally we have come to rely on ‘experts’ (ie healthcare professionals, psychiatrists, etc.) to deal with our distress for us.  Why has this happened?  Shouldn’t we all in fact be the experts in managing our own distress and helping those around us to do the same?  I would agree with Ms Perkins that the answer is yes, we should be turning more often to ourselves and our support networks and less often to medicine to deal with normal human suffering. 

I myself am a big advocate of using support networks to overcome challenging times.  Yes, I’m incredibly fortunate to be blessed with a wonderful family and great friends, where others aren’t so lucky.  But that’s what support groups and such like are for, and all the more reason to invest more money in community-based, non-medical approaches to wellbeing, over medication and hospitalisation.  It’s amazing how beneficial a good chinwag can be, whether this be with a friend, family member, counsellor, support group, teacher,

Coffee and a chat: Something I find very therapeutic!

hairdresser, or a stranger you met on the bus! 

To me, it makes so much more sense to take this positive view of emotional suffering, to work through it and gain something from it, rather than demonising and abnormalising it (abnormalising isn’t actually a word but I’m using it anyway as it sounds good in this context!).  I’m not suggesting this is true for all cases of suffering because of course there are times when people are so severely distressed that a more intensive form of intervention is needed.  My point is that as psychiatry and the social constructs of mental illness grow, so does the perception of distress as abnormal, which I suggest is not a healthy feature of modern society. 

To lighten things up a bit, I’ll give you a few more anecdotes about my own ways of dealing with distress.  In previous posts I’ve talked about lifestyle elements and their impact on wellbeing, but I also use simple thinking processes to work through emotional difficulties. 

Something I actually find very helpful is, when I’m feeling really low or anxious, to consciously tell myself that this is a normal part of the human experience, or an understandable reaction to whatever is going on in my life at the time.  I find that this helps to ground me and perhaps to start problem solving whatever the problem is, which in turn helps me to steer clear of turning to ‘professionals’ for support that I don’t actually need.  I think there’s also something to be said for taking some of that distress and turning it into something positive, for example, channelling anger or hurt over an unfortunate experience into working harder to achieve my goals.  Another thing I find useful is to remember that without the bad times there wouldn’t really be good times either: in the words of Thomas Hardy, “If a way to the better there be, it first exacts a full look at the worst”; or, as Matt Cardle puts it, “The stairway to heaven, oh it starts in hell”.

If the above and other coping strategies don’t quite work as well as I need them to, then I know there are options available for further support, and have indeed made use of input from counsellors and psychologists in the past (I’m not completely adverse to the use of services and hope it doesn’t appear that way from what I’ve said here.  If it does, then be assured that this is only because I feel so passionately that the alternatives need greater attention!)

There is a fine balance to be struck between developing the right services, education and awareness (along with stigma reduction) so that people can access the support they need when they need it, and not becoming overly reliant on such support, which culturally we are in danger of doing.  Unfortunately there is a lot of work still to be done on all these fronts, and getting each one of those things to the level they need to be at is a very tall order (and once which I hope I can make a worthwhile contribution to fulfilling!).

To summarise, there are two main ways of perceiving mental distress and emotional suffering:  the positive view that it is a natural part of the human experience that can ultimately be gained from, and the negative view that it is the result of some kind of abnormality of the brain or biology.  There is some place for both, but as psychiatry has grown the negative view has seeped stealthily into our culture, leaving less and less room for the positive one.  I myself am an advocate of favouring the positive view a little more, and I’ll finish by leaving you with a couple of songs that depict my stance on the topic quite nicely.  Thanks for reading!