Between Stress and Boredom

For most of my life I thought that there were two possibilities for how life could be. I thought it could be stressful or it could be boring.

During school or work or activities I was stress out. I had too much to do, I couldn’t do it well enough. There was never a nice mid level of stuff to do, it was always an excess, always tinged with anxiety of whether I was working hard enough or accomplishing well enough.

Sometimes I could turn my brain off. All the way off. I would zone out for hours or days at a time, reading or being with my friends, but more often than not becoming painfully, incessantly, anxiety-provokingly bored. It was so much worse than the stress because I couldn’t even reassure myself that I was working hard and getting things done, earning my keep. It was just me and my mind, never a good combination.

Imagine my surprise to look at my life today and realize that there is a third option. I can relax. I can play. I can balance.

Today, I woke up and wrote for a few hours. I read a book just for fun during lunch, finished some work, and went climbing. I cleaned my house, then visited my favorite coffee shop to read and finish building a Dungeons and Dragons character. Not once today have I been bored. I have plans to see people tonight, healthy social plans all week, and enough work to keep me happily occupied during the week. But not once today did I feel stressed out, behind, overwhelmed, or anxious.

There were some parts of the day in which I didn’t really do much of anything. I read a book, I played with my cat, I played a game. I never thought that it would require practice to play or relax, but over the last few years I have intentionally spent time alone, doing nothing of import, simply because I wanted to, or even just because my therapist told me to try it. I’ve spent time forcing myself not to get up and go get something done, forced myself to question the thoughts that say I’m bad if I don’t accomplish, forced myself to practice different breathing, light candles, rub my cat on my face, or do anything else it takes to soothe the anxious feelings that used to appear when I tried to enjoy myself.

And I practiced playing. I tried video games, I got a cat, I took up Dungeons and Dragons and played more board games, I started writing fiction again, I bought fidget toys, and I started to force myself to read more often (something I have always loved). Some things didn’t stick: I tried mosaicing and collaging and drawing, and each was mildly interesting for a bit, but didn’t hold my interest. I taught myself how to listen to podcasts, something I’d wanted to do for ages. I started listening to music again.

It took time. Sometimes these things were not enjoyable for me. This might sound ridiculous, as they’re all for fun things, but I would often have intrusive thoughts that told me I should be doing something important or useful rather than doing something for fun, and if the activity didn’t require full concentration then I would simply have recurrent, intrusive thoughts about how much I didn’t like myself. When I wasn’t working, there was space for my depression and anxiety to creep in at the edges.

So it took practice to simply do fun things over and over and over until they stopped feeling wrong, confusing, or anxiety provoking.

I learned how to play. I learned how to relax. These aren’t skills that everyone just picks up, and it does a disservice to everyone not to make those skills available to learn. It’s an amazing realization to figure out that those things are not only acceptable to do, but also important and healthy.

What that’s meant for me is that there is space between boredom and stress. I don’t have to be running all the time every day in order to keep my mind occupied. I don’t have to distrust my mind so much that I can’t just be alone with it. There is a way to do things that are engaging, fun, interesting, and challenging without introducing stress into the picture.

Of course it’s harder to put that together in a job, and it takes a lot of time and work and luck to end up in a position where you feel like you’re having fun or working on something you like most of the time, but the fact that there are any times where I can do that is a source of so much hope for me. I hope it can be for other people too, that other people can recognize that there’s nothing wrong with them because they are stressed out or bored all the time. It takes practice. It is possible.

A Little Bit of Fun

I spend a lot of my time writing about Important Things. I care a lot about social justice and mental health and trying to make the world better. I’m all idealistic and such. Today, I think I can make the world better by doing something a bit different: by giving you all something a little bit fun. The last two days I’ve been focusing on goofiness. I added “laugh” to my to do list. I’ve been searching for silly videos, reading ridiculous things on Buzzfeed, and generally refusing to feel any sort of guilt about taking care of myself (or at least trying).

In that spirit, I want to provide you all with some joy for the weekend. Here’s what’s been making me smile.

http://www.tickld.com/x/i-wish-this-man-was-my-father-hes-hilarious

http://news.distractify.com/fun/animals-fun/cats-sleeping-in-really-awkward-positions/?v=1

The Role of Exercise in Eating Disorder Recovery

For people with depression, anxiety, or really any form of mental illness, a common refrain from well-meaning friends and acquaintances is often “well just exercise. That will help you feel better”. It’s true that there is good evidence that regular exercise can improve mental health (although there are many problems with simply prescribing exercise). However trying to incorporate exercise into a recovery and treatment regime becomes infinitely more complex in the context of an eating disorder. Over exercise is often a symptom of eating disorders, and for many people trying to recover it’s also a trigger for other self-destructive behaviors.

Because exercise is an important element both in healthy weight maintenance and improving mental health, but is also a triggering and potentially dangerous activity for someone with a history of overexercise, people in treatment for eating disorders must walk a delicate tight rope when it comes to their exercise regimes. This has been a particular struggle for me, and I’ve been looking for ways to bring exercise into my treatment in a positive fashion.

There are a few techniques that I’ve had some success with, but if anyone has more suggestions, please share in the comments. The first way that I’ve found to improve my relationship with exercise is to stop using the word exercise to refer to movement. This opens the way for all kinds of “exercise” that don’t involve going to the gym and using equipment that loudly announces your calories burned to you every time you look down. I swing dance and I rock climb and sometimes I just throw dance parties in my room and sometimes I try to just go for walks or have squirt gun fights with my friends. The more that I can find things that I enjoy which also happen peripherally to involve movement, the better.

The reason I try to use this technique is because the moment my brain is convinced that I am “exercising”, it becomes convinced that I need to hit certain markers of acceptability: burn a certain number of calories, exercise for a certain period of time, stick to a certain regime. If I don’t use the label “exercise” to describe what I’m doing, but rather focus on “fun activity, preferably with friends”, I get a lot more mileage out of the activity and don’t fall into a negative spiral that tells me I am not acceptably fit. Looking for activities that fit this mold also lets me double dip on my activities: not only do I exercise but I also find some depression fighting positive activities, and potentially social time as well.

Something else that has worked well for me is to accept that sometimes a complete break from exercise is necessary. I find exercise extremely helpful with anxiety and don’t like leaving it entirely behind (especially as I’ve been pretty active my whole life). However when I’m compulsively exercising every day, it can be much harder to try to slowly lower the amount of exercise that I’m doing while still doing some. In many ways it’s easier to simply say that I can’t be responsible about my exercising at this moment in time and I need to take some time off. This has the added benefit of giving me LOTS of extra time to do other positive things with my day.

There are a lot of ways that cutting exercise out of  your life for a time can backfire. How do you deal with all the anxiety you worked off before? How do you accept loss of muscle mass or increase in fat? How and when do you begin to add exercise back in without swinging immediately into over exercise mode again? Especially if you’re doing this while you’re trying to increase your caloric intake, it can take a serious toll on your emotions and your motivation to continue treatment. Unfortunately, this is one of those places I don’t have the answers: I’m struggling to find ways to begin incorporating exercise again without it becoming unhealthy.

One helpful way to deal with feeling guilty about not exercising or feeling extremely compelled to started exercising again is to find some friends who aren’t big on exercise. This doesn’t mean you have to dump your friends who are extremely fit, but there are people out there who aren’t particularly interested in physical fitness and are perfectly happy with their lives. I am a big proponent of distract until you’re in a healthier place, and finding people who will encourage you to do other types of fun and interesting things, model other versions of healthiness and happiness, and generally not bring up exercise as something you have to do is a great way to build a life that doesn’t circulate around exercise.

The final, and perhaps most difficult thing to do if you’re working on overexercise is to make sure that you’re not paying any money for exercise. What I mean by that is if you’re paying for a gym membership or classes or a personal trainer: stop. I’ve found that when I’m shelling out money I feel obligated to “get my money’s worth”. You can always go to the local rec center and swim some laps or go for a run or a bike ride. But those ongoing expenses are a constant pressure to get to the gym and make it worth it and I’ve found that pressure nearly unbearable.

Of course all of these are just suggestions that I have found helpful, and won’t work for everyone. I’d love to hear other suggestions in comments, especially from those who have found an exercise regime that works for them.

Being the Wet Blanket

Feminists are often accused of having no sense of humor, of having a stick up their asses, or of being curmudgeons. And I’m going to be honest: many times I feel like I am the wet blanket. I can’t enjoy many of the movies and TV shows that I used to because I notice how screwed up they are, I feel uncomfortable around many people because of the ways in which they joke or the words that they throw around, and I often have to tell people that they really aren’t as witty and charming as they thought they were, they are in fact just being oppressive assholes. It’s not fun to have to take on this role. It’s not fun to have to “ruin” people’s fun. I often find myself feeling guilty or wondering if I’m oversensitive or too delicate in my sensibilities. But there are some good reasons to continue being the wet blanket, and perhaps these reasons can keep you going through the times you feel like everyone hates you for speaking up.

Perhaps the most important thing to remember in “wet blanket” situations is that you are not in fact ruining anyone’s fun. Their fun has already been ruined by the fact that it’s come at the expense of someone else. If you were to walk up to a bully punching a smaller child and stop them from hurting that child, you wouldn’t feel guilty for ruining their fun: you would know that their fun was inappropriate to begin with. You are doing the same thing when you call someone out for sexism, racism, or other oppressive behaviors. Those behaviors just as actively hurt people as the bully physically beating someone. They hurt people through the violent norms they enforce, through rape culture, through the wage gap, through hate crimes…these are realities that are linked to the jokes and the casual conversations we have.

Many people also accuse feminists of being incapable of having fun, not just of ruining the fun of others. I’d like to propose a thought experiment to explore this claim. Let’s imagine we live in a society in which brutal torture was normal. It was even considered fun. People publicly tortured others to get kicks, and it was often viewed as a show: going out to the torture. Say you were an individual living in this society and you couldn’t bring yourself to enjoy any of this. You go out to the torture and you look at your friends and say “this is wrong! We’re hurting people!” They respond by asking why you can’t have any fun. Looking at a society like this, we would recognize that the person who is unhappy is actually perceiving the situation more accurately and with more empathy than the other individuals involved, and that most likely they could have fun if it were in a non-harmful way.

Now obviously this is hyperbolic. But as I mentioned before, many of the things that people view as fun, joking, or entertainment do in fact contribute directly to the harm of others. Perceiving this connection and being upset by it is not an indication that one has no sense of fun: rather it’s an indication that one has an active sense of empathy and a clear perception of the situation. I would bet that if you asked most feminists whether there things in life they enjoyed they would say yes. They’re just probably not the things you enjoy. I myself for example deeply enjoy My Little Pony, chocolate, swimming, and taiko drumming just to name a few. But I attempt to find things to like that don’t hurt others. Being upset by bad behavior is not an indication that you’re incapable of enjoying things. It’s an indication that there’s something wrong with the things people are asking you to enjoy.

People who are labelled as “wet blankets” are often those who perceive something that others don’t. As an example, we have some people at my work that want to do and try everything. We need our resident wet blanket to say “stop. Let’s think about what will happen if we do this”. In many cases this is about practicality, however it can also be about ethics and empathy. I want to be the person who asks others to stop and consider the implications of their actions because that person is the one who keeps our world running and functional. That person is necessary and improves things in the long term. They don’t necessarily want to stop what you’re doing, but they do want you to think it out first and make improvements to it. I have no problem with you writing that song, but I think it would be a much better song if it didn’t promote rape culture and I’ll tell you that.

But more than anything, when you feel you’re making a big deal out of nothing, remember that your emotions are valid. If you are upset or hurt by something, that is valid. And it is also valid to ask people to stop doing things that hurt or upset you, even if they don’t understand why. Particularly when you  know that others are hurt by something, you can feel confident that your discomfort is not out of line or irrational: it is necessary.

So yes, I will happily take the label of wet blanket if it means that I am making people more aware of their actions and the implications of their actions, if it means that I’m ending “fun” that is harmful and cruel, if it means that I’m standing up for my own needs and the needs of others. If that’s being a wet blanket and ruining your fun, then you’re doing fun the wrong way.