The past year has been quite tough for me in terms of my mental and emotional health. Especially the first half of the year, I felt like I was barely scraping by and only steps away from a full-blown burnout. Recently, my best friend showed me this match stick test that's been used for identifying burnout and when I look back, I could identify mostly with the fifth match stick from the image below.
Feeling overwhelmed and lacking energy, but still managing to stand upright and keeping the facade up most of the time. On top of that, my tension headaches became more frequent again and I was living with the latent feeling that if I wasn't careful I was going to lose control of my life in a heartbeat, i.e. going into full burnout. This led to anxieties around sleeping, resting sufficiently and getting enough alone time. All this to make sure I could keep going; mainly for work, but also to be able to maintain my relationships.
Many things in my life seemed to be going really well during that time and how I was feeling may not have been obvious to everyone but my closest friends and family. Of course there were ups and downs during this period and there were many happy moments as well as a few real lows. Happy moment: reading to each other by the pool in the Italian countryside. Low moment: crying in the bathrooms at work.
I first started writing this post about my Netflix fast (tbc in another upload), but now it ended up here. There may not be an inspirational message here (disappointing, I know), just a regular story of someone with internal struggles that are not always apparent to the outside world. I feel like we read a lot about mental health these days, even men (finally!) talk about it.
But what IS the message here? Yesterday I saw on LinkedIn a video where a (female) editor of the Financial Times was saying that our youth should "jolly well toughen up" instead of self-diagnosing themselves using resources from Tik Tok. Esther Perel, her interview partner, responded very wisely that making mental health an individual's problem is seeing past all the societal structures and events that lead to a collective mental health crisis. She mentioned current societal, ecological and humanitarian crises that lead to an increased level of uncertainty and bad mental health.
What she notably did not mention is how our whole economic and social system is set up to increase people's levels of stress. The whole economic system (aka capitalism) is built to exploit people to work 40+ hours per week to make a living which should then be spent on things that are supposed to make us happier or to numb the stress we are experiencing. At work, you need to perform well and compete with others for recognition and promotions. You are a human resource that is used and can be replaced when deemed necessary. In society, you are a separate individual with individual goals for money making, fitness and 'health' (i.e. be thinner), self-development (i.e. become better than everyone), and love (i.e. lead the perfect relationship). Compete, compare and be the best. Others are your opponents or your inspirations to be and do better. I'm sure there is a more eloquent way to say this, but people in power pointing at individuals to toughen up and not acknowledging how society is contributing to this is the same as a company complaining about their employees being on sick leave for burnout while not changing a thing about the high workloads, stressful structures and the intimidating behaviour of bosses.
I guess what I'm trying to say is that in a society where we live so closely together and are interacting constantly with each other either in person or online, no (mental health) issue is individual. We are all able to negatively OR positively affect one another and the structures we live in affect all of us to various degrees depending on your privileges.
For the moment, I can happily say that I'm between the first and second match stick. Part of this is just due to time and the natural cycle of things: a low is followed by a high, which meant I got some of my energy back. I also hit the point early this year where I just felt so done with being sick and tired and was motivated to take actions to become more energetic again. I'm also in the process to make some outward change to my living situation and my hours at work. This makes me feel empowered to change my own environment, even though there are so many factors that play against you in your quest to a genuinely happy and open-hearted (zen) state.
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