Tag Archives: mental health

More Than Fine

This May, my good friend Mike Meaney had the privilege of delivering a convocation address at Georgetown University’s commencement (starting at 1 hour 19 minutes into this video), and I, in my now decade-plus role as his in-house editor, had the pleasure of a providing an assist. Mike makes an art of both real talk and lingering quips, and his take that “a pretty good indicator of what you are truly into is what you are looking up on Wikipedia at midnight when you should be doing something else” has wormed its way into my brain ever since.

Though I am a voracious Wikipedia consumer and think that the open-source pursuit to catalogue human knowledge is a rare, clear triumph of the internet era, I will confess this is not a helpful heuristic for me. This is in part because I am one of those Luddites who takes research on sleep and mental health seriously and turns his phone off at night, and in part just because I am old now and rarely make it to midnight anymore. Pedantry aside, however, Mike’s question pulled me back to the topics that are surefire ways to distract me from more immediate needs: what it means to live in community, what it means to come of age and find connection in a world where norms have shifted rapidly, what it means to find anchors in a fluid world. This question permeates so many lives, and yet there is such a stunning disconnect in contemporary discourse around what it means to do well that few people seem to have the right frames to talk about it.

Three recent Ezra Klein podcasts dip into this soup of topics. The first, with Richard Reeves, interrogates the array of indicators that suggest boys and men are struggling in contemporary society. The question of masculinity in the twenty-first century is the one topic I have been trying and utterly failing to write about in essay form on this blog for ten years, though I have interrogated it relentlessly through fiction. (A companion piece to this essay, whose genesis long predates it, will appear tomorrow.) The other two focus on teenage mental health, albeit with much broader applications to all of us: in one, Jean Twenge systematically swats down any doubts that it is indeed staring at phones (often at night when one should be in bed) that is the lead culprit in a whole host of negative trends, and in the next, clinical psychologist Lisa Damour claws at the nuance of micro-level mental health and the heightened challenges to life in an era of breakneck change in media and how humans socialize, and its resulting effects on the cultural infrastructure and ways of being we all inhabit.

We live in a time of hyper-focus on mental health. In many ways this is a vast improvement over prior eras of swallowed feelings and dismissal of genuine traumas; at its best, this new language has injected necessary nuance and given many people the tools they need to unravel the forces that hold them back. It is also, I think, a natural outcome of a world in which fewer and fewer people work with their hands or tackle the physical world at all, and are instead left to sort through an endless web of relationships and human-generated content in almost every waking moment. But as the court contrarian, I was gratified to hear Damour say that psychologists are “surprisingly agnostic about emotions.” The existence of negative emotion is a natural reaction to certain things in life, and is not in and of itself a crisis; it is instead “data coming across the transom that can be put to good use.”

I wish I could say I am a model of stability who methodically and dispassionately analyzes any negative emotion that floats into my brain. As a kid I had some social anxieties that certainly kept me from living as fully as I very much wanted to, a fact as painfully obvious to my teenage self as it is to the adult pondering how I’d handle my own hypothetical kids. (The fact that they are still hypothetical probably has its roots in these very struggles.) Upon my college graduation I had a crisis of purpose that, while ultimately clarifying, probably involved more wallowing than it needed to; last year, as my work life hit a nadir, I plowed forward with a stubborn and rather manic resolve that did my blood pressure no favors. At no point has my state come anywhere close to resembling a checklist for depression, and even the more diagnosable stints of anxiety always seem rooted in some genuine, real stressors, which Damour tells us are in fact healthy reactions that we can learn to understand and address. Never has any malaise drifted into the sort of vague vibe that makes anxiety clinical.

I diagnose in all of this a certain tunnel-visioned bullheadedness; one that has no doubt held me back in certain ways, but also gifts me with a deep sense of loyalty and commitment and a refusal to quit, all of which present as virtues. Lying beneath much of this is a hyper-sensitivity, at times crippling but also endowing me with perceptiveness and an ability to adapt to a complex world. I have my coping mechanisms down pat, and I know what to do when the low moods come; while my solution may not always address the underlying problems, they stabilize situations with relative ease. I never stay in the dark for long, and I can bury most outward signs of struggle, which is a helpful model when one tends to surround oneself by other type-A achievers who run the risk of feeding off a collective anxiety. I know myself, in success and in failure and in all blurred stages in between, all with a healthy respect for what I do not know, too.

And so I conclude that I am fine. But the more I hear this word issue from my own lips, the more it grates on me. ‘Fine’ is a detail-free baseline, a binary in which the two choices appear to be ‘acceptable’ and ‘bad,’ as if the goal of a life should be to cut out the bad without focusing on what comprises the good. As if emotions that drag us down are the only ones worthy of attention, a lassiez faire life of crisis management followed by one great big shrug about what comes at the end of the dark night of the soul.

I am more and more convinced that the great and perhaps potentially fatal flaw of the evolution of a modern liberal society is the collapse of a view of the human condition. The Richard Reeves interview on the state of men is brilliant in its diagnosis but a bit flaccid in its ultimate recommendations, and while I am on board many of his proposals, this disconnect is emblematic of the deeper issues with modern society: in the face of crises around the very question of what it means to live a good human life, the proposed answers are all technocratic fixes around the margins. Obsessed with harm reduction and scared to even use the language of questions of the human soul, it resorts to life hacks.

And so, in the pursuit of more of them, I acknowledge the moments when I have been more than fine. When my high school self, defined against loss, set forth on an unerring pursuit; when my college-age self transcended a single lens and learned to swim in different seas. When, after graduation, I appreciated that those pursuits alone wouldn’t cut it, and that I could pour out hundreds of thousands of words that would allow me to make something approximating sense of my world. When, in graduate school, I applied those early lessons and sought to build a thick network, both broad and deep, and chased a career that tackles at least one aspect of the malaise I diagnosed. When, as a pandemic set in, I resolved not simply to get by but to thrive, healthier than ever and, if anything, emerge as more of an extrovert, more dependent on sharing thoughts with people than before. When, upon hearing of the unthinkable, I immediately sat down to write because I had a quasi-religious belief in my ability to find the right words that would help others begin to heal.

As we pursue those questions that we read about on Wikipedia at midnight, may we all think about how doing so can make us more than fine. May we surround ourselves with other people who challenge us to be that, if it’s what we desire. And may we willingly engage on questions of what a good life is for and center that in our discussions about well-being, not just the minimization of harm, or the postponement of the good life as some higher-order good to be ignored until the rest is all in order. (It probably won’t ever be, not totally.) The questions in here are the ones we need to ask, and the rest will follow from that.

How to Maintain Your Sanity While Being Overworked

This blog is lapsing into self-improvement listicles, which should perhaps be a red flag, but ‘blog’ was on my schedule for tonight, so blog I shall. Here are eight suggestions for staying sane if, by chance, you ever find yourself taking a full load of graduate-level courses, running two student organizations, and working two jobs at once. It’s a common problem, right?

I’ll skip over the clichéd advice—get enough sleep, eat healthy, get some exercise—because that’s well-covered ground. Here are eight pieces of advice I’ll allow to flow forth from my fountain of infinite wisdom:

1. Master the art of filling a schedule and following it. We all schedule in different ways. Lots of my colleagues are Google Calendar adherents, with their phones spewing out eternal reminders of where they ought to be. Dinosaur that I am, I still use paper; it’s good to be able to scrawl new tasks or the odd reminder in the margins, and there’s something deeply satisfying about crossing things off the list. The medium doesn’t really matter; what matters is that every little task you need to do is documented so that your scattered mind doesn’t forget it. Check off tasks with gusto and move on to the next thing.

2. Clean out the email inbox right away. Nothing looms like unanswered messages and a sense that other people expect things from you. Not only does getting through them all tend to go faster than you’d think, it takes a load off. Not only that, you’ll find that responding promptly is actually a somewhat rare and valuable skill, and it’s one other people notice. They realize you have things together, or at least are good at projecting that illusion. There is nothing wrong with projecting illusions, so long as they are in the realm of sanity. Project it long enough and it might just become reality.

This doesn’t mean you have to check the damn thing every ten minutes. In fact, I’d highly recommend taking a minimum of a few hours away at times, especially on weekends. But when you do dive back in, plow through it relentlessly. Leave nothing for later—unless, of course, you’ve budgeted time for it on your schedule.

3. Never let work be the last thing you do before bed. No matter what deadline I face, no matter how late it is, I do something blissfully unrelated to school or career before the lights go out. It works wonders.

4. Multitask wisely. Don’t lie, you know you do it. You can’t cut yourself off completely. But if you are going to multitask, make sure it makes sense. If you’re watching TV, do work that requires less intellectual capacity, like spreadsheets or statistics or more inane writing tasks. If you’re drunk, write or work on the creative side of things. If you’re supposed to be reading or writing, distract yourself with other reading or writing, and preferably of a high caliber so that you’re reading good writing.

Enlightened procrastination is a valuable skill, and will serve you well in bar trivia. No, you won’t be as efficient, but you’re a human who has to remain sane, not a cog on an assembly line. If you finish a project two hours more slowly but also watched a football game during that time, chances are you’ll remember it much more fondly. Don’t beat yourself up over a slow pace; build in the breaks, accept them, and then get back to it.

5. Surround yourself with people who fuel your energy. I’ve found I’m particularly prone to channeling the mood of people around me, but everyone does this to some degree. Unless you’re ready to disrupt an organization (which can be good, but choose your battles wisely), you’ll adopt its general means of practice, to varying degrees and with varying levels of awareness. So, make sure the people around you are as committed as you are to getting things done; those who bring out the best in you, and drive you to do more. There are limits, of course, but that’s what #6 is for.

6. Know when to stop. There comes a time when no amount of agonizing will do any good. No one innately knows where this is. It’s a feel, and you have to find it for yourself, be able to recognize it, and enforce it with an iron fist. You are done. No, staring at it for another half hour won’t make it better. No, you will not die if you don’t get to that last reading, even if someone calls you out. You’re done, and you’ve done your best. Now go do something non-work related, and then go to bed.

7. Cycle in and out. Spend time with other people; spend time alone. Plan the future; go back to your roots. Think about the big picture, and lose yourself in the details. Again, surround yourself with people who complete you, and complement your skills. Take time for each of them, lest it seem like you’re spending too much time in one world and neglecting important parts of yourself. And yet…

8. Don’t aim for balance. Balance is lame. Work-life balance, social life balance…these terms all make you feel like a juggler who has to be doing ten things at once, and induce panic. That is exhausting, and leaves you further unbalanced. Instead, aim for excellence. Attack each piece with energy when the opportunities present themselves, and you’ll find the anxieties slip away. Stay hungry, even if you know you’ll never quite satisfy that appetite. It’s what keeps you going. Suddenly, you’re not overworked at all. You’re doing what you are driven to do, and feel weirdly good about yourself, even you should have lost your mind by objective standard. Who knows; maybe you have.

There you go, I solved all of your problems for you. Wasn’t that easy? I’ll start my motivational speaking tour as soon as I find time on my schedule.