Downfall: “Shadows of Regret”
Written by Andi Bazaar, Scott Wynné Schofield, Yevhn Gertz and Timothée-freimann Schofield | Feb 16, 2024
"5% of the world’s population struggles with depression, a big reason why we learn internal validation in therapy is because while external validation can feel amazing, it also leaves us vulnerable to manipulation and people lowering our self-esteem."
The satisfaction from that outside validation can quickly turn into depression.
5% of the world’s population struggles with depression, let’s try and change that. 3 simple steps to improve your mental health (explained by a mental health clinician):
Before we answer how to get out of a depression, we have to know what depression really is.
Here are the 9 criteria used by psychologists to diagnose someone with clinical depression, you need to be experiencing at least five out of the nine criteria.
- Depressed mood most of the day, nearly every day.
- Markedly diminished interest or pleasure in all, or almost all, activities most of the day, nearly every day.
- Significant weight loss when not dieting or weight gain, or a decrease or increase in appetite nearly every day.
- Insomnia or hypersomnia nearly every day.
- Psychomotor agitation or retardation nearly every day.
- Fatigue or loss of energy nearly every day.
- Feelings of worthlessness or excessive or inappropriate guilt nearly every day.
- Diminished ability to think or concentrate, or indecisiveness, nearly every day.
- Recurrent thoughts of death, recurrent suicidal ideation without a specific plan, or a suicide attempt or a specific plan for committing suicide.
Step 1 — Activation
Depression often involves a negative feedback loop where low mood leads to reduced activity and reduced activity leads to a further decline in mood. The MRI scan shows how little activity is going on in a depressed brain, activate your brain by:
- building a routine
- hysical exercise
- art
- self-care
- simply talking to someone
- writing
(You have to manually restart your brain, there’s no other secret)
Step 2 — Mindfulness
- meditation
- breathing exercises
- being in the present moment
This helps us to become more aware of our thoughts and feelings and develop a healthier relationship with them, it also stimulates important zones in the brain like the amygdala (emotion processor).
Step 3 — Building Good Habits
- daily exercise (walk, run, workout)
- eat a balanced diet
- get enough sleep (6-7 hours)
- spend time in nature
A healthy body is a healthy mind!
How To Actively Listen By Getting A Psychology Degree So You Don't Have To. Here Are 3 key Points
- TRUE EMPATHY
This goes beyond simply hearing the words, you need to connect with the emotional content of the message. If someone's sad, feel the sadness and immerse yourself in it. Same thing if they're happy or afraid, people will always feel when you're on the same wavelength that's how we're programmed.
- REFLECTIVE LISTENING
Talking with someone is a dance, you have to move in synchronicity with your partner. Find pockets in the conversation where you can slide reflections (paraphrasing or summarizing what the speaker just said), this technique helps you understand the message and shows your active engagement and genuine interest.
- ATTENTIVENESS
Be present, such a simple thing to say but very complex to do. Nothing should be going on in your head but the conversation you're having, people are wired to subconsciously feel when someone is focused on what they're saying. Non-verbal cues are very important too: maintaining eye contact, posture, nodding, etc.
How many times have you been told to trust your gut, only to regret not doing so later down the road? Intuition is such a powerful mechanism that we don't fully understand yet.
HERE ARE MY 3 TAKES ON IT AS A MENTAL HEALTH CLINICIAN
- Implicit Knowledge and Experience
Intuition often draws on a person's accumulated knowledge and experiences. Over time, individuals develop a wealth of implicit knowledge that can be accessed rapidly without conscious awareness. The knowledge we store in our conscious is the tip of the iceberg (vs) the knowledge we store in our subconscious.
- Pattern Recognition
Intuition is closely linked to the brain's ability to recognize patterns, the human brain is very good at identifying regularities and making quick links based on past experiences. Our subconscious works 10x more harder than the conscious if not more.
- Emotional intelligence
We often pick up on subtle emotional signals from our environment or from others and these feelings can influence our intuitive judgments. Emotions are so complex to consciously understand but we subconsciously feel everything.
- “Can motivational speakers please stop co-opting conversations about mental health and stop talking about how a (positive mentality) is the solution to everything? You don’t talk science, you don’t have a public health background and you’re only an expert to your experience so please shut up!"
- “They never address systemic issues, stressors, talk about research, provide insight. It’s usually (think positive, keep yourself around positive people, set goals) kind of oversimplified bullshit that is heavily problematic when you talk about mental health."
- “They’ll clinically self diagnose anxiety and depression and talk about they were (rid of their negativity) in 3 steps. Someone ban this before I individually start calling them out for this unethical, horrifying behaviour that’s self-serving to promote their brand image."
- “Your mind is not a vehicle that you control the speed on and it is definitely not characterised by the (amount) of work you can do. You’re a person, not a machine. Please don’t fall for this capitalistic bullshit from people who have no background in mental health work or research."
- “Claims like these are particularly dangerous during a pandemic because they are likely to increase productivity anxiety and guilt, this makes for great content. That’s all!"
This is so important, please realize that someone who is not a professional can do more harm than good. Clinical psychology is a science and people like us and I have spent years studying, doing research, placements and therapy under supervision to do our jobs well.
I want to take a moment to talk about goals, they are an integral part of our life. They give us motivation and leaning whether it is about careers, relationships, finances, etc. We also have goals for our mental health but it can be difficult to motivate ourselves.
- We all have some goals and ambitions, it is really awesome to have them but they can also work against us. When we don’t achieve our goals in the timelines we set, we can easily get discouraged and give up — it also hurts our self-esteem a lot.
- We also grow up in a culture that puts too much importance on our achievements and not on our happiness or even support to achieve our own goals rather than those that our parents or society set for us because these goals may not be the ones we want we may be less motivated.
HOW CAN WE MAKE GOALS WORK FOR US?
We need to take some time and work on them ourselves, we can goals for each categories in our life: (mental and physical health, career, relationship) this is going to represent our broad goals.
After we have those, we need to take each one of them and divide it into as many subgoals as possible. That means yearly, monthly, weekly, daily subgoals that will help achieve the big one even if we never get to the big goal, we have the satisfaction of reaching the small ones.
The second step is to be realistic not in the sense of not having big goals, but the amount of work or energy needed to achieve them. For example, if I choose to workout again after a few years I can’t set a goal to workout everyday for 2 hours.
I am more likely to get injured, get so sore that I can’t go on the next day or lose all the motivation because of how hard it is. I can start at 10 minutes for a few days, then 15 minutes and so on. That’s important because we are able to achieve that and slowly increase.
Another thing (albeit more difficult) is to separate our goals from our self esteem. It is important to celebrate achieving our goals but equally important to take care and show love to ourselves when we fall short of them, that’s because there are many external factors.
We all have goals that we had to remove or postpone because of the pandemic or many other external factors that happen all the time, these are not excuses but legitimate obstacles that can impact us and our mental health.
We need to be patient and be okay with reducing or postponing some goals without internalizing it or feeling like we are failures, we can even write down evidence for and evidence against that it is our fault we didn’t achieve that goal. I hope this helps a little 😊
As today is "Mental Health Week" I thought about writing a small part of things we can implement to improve our wellbeing, there are so many changes that we can make that will lead to many improvements. Let’s dive in!
The main change that we can make is go for treatment, it can be stressful finding a therapist or psychiatrist for medications but chances are we know people who have gone through this who can recommend someone. It is never too late to take that step to get better.
ESTABLISHING BOUNDARIES
Besides treatment, it is probably one of the most important changes we need to make. Take time to write down boundaries that need to be implemented for each person you interact with in your life even the healthiest of relationships need boundaries.
The next step is actually enforce these boundaries, not just once in a while but all the time. Whenever we leave an opening, people can take advantage of them and then get mad if we try to reassert those boundaries again. It is better to keep them constant.
BREAK THE ISOLATION
I know it is hard because we are scared to be judged, we don’t know how others will react, we are scared they may use that information against us but finding people you can trust to break that isolation can be wonderful.
Mental health is very isolating by its nature and can make us feel disconnected with our loved ones, forcing ourselves to break that isolation even if takes a lot of energy can make a huge difference. Knowing there are people who care and want to be there for us is life saving.
MANAGE SOCIAL MEDIA TIME
So many studies have shown that social media consumption contributes a lot to the worsening of our mental health, there are also many triggering topics that can pop up. Let’s try to regulate how long we spend on social media.
SELF-CARE
At least an hour minimum and ideally 2+ hours a day should be dedicated for our self-care and things that relax us, we expect our brains to work for most of the day and deal with personal problems, the least we can do is give it a lot of rest time.
CUTTING TOXIC PEOPLE
This is very important, certain people can be too toxic for us, whenever we meet them or talk to them we feel anxious or depressed or traumatized. Cutting them off or at least, reducing contact as much as possible is very important.
SLEEP
Yes, sleeping for a full night as much as possible. Sleep consolidates memories, allows for cell regeneration and repair, gives us a well needed time off and helps regulate our moods. If you have insomnia, please see a doctor to fix that as soon as possible.
REDUCING SUBSTANCES
Using substances to cope with our anxiety/depression can feel amazing in the short term, in the long-term we are creating an addiction and not actually dealing with the problems which will compound and make it worse.
These steps apart or together can make a big difference in our mental health, just a reminder that there is nothing wrong with experiencing low mental health.
- you are not abnormal and you are not weak.
- you are the same person who just happens to be struggling at the moment.
- you deserve to be happy and to treat your mental health.
Our mental health is part of our overall health and we need to address it to be able to live a balanced and satisfying life, lots of love to you all.
PS — Everyday is world mental health day for me and I couldn’t love it more, this is the most amazing community ever and I am so thankful for all of you. Thank you for giving me the motivation and support to continue this work x
A SPECIAL THANKS TO:
- Andi Bazaar (Writer)
- Mark J. Levstein (Co-Editor)
- Yevhn Gertz (Director of Photography/Co-writer)
- dr Oliver Schofield, MD (Consulting)
- dr Seth Gryffen, MD (Consulting)
- dr Khaan, MD (Consulting)
- Timothée Freimann schofield (Photographed/Co-writer)
- Clayton Euridicé Schofield (Editor/Journalist)
- Scott Wynné Schofield (Publicist/Co-writer)
- Henrie Louis Friedrich (Analyst)
- Jwan Höffler Conwall (Art Interior Design)
- Hugo-licharré Freimann (Ass Director)
- Shot at GQ’s Studios by José Schenkkan and Benjamin Schenkkan Joseph
- In appearance by "Gregory O’Connor Jr" (Model)
- In collaboration with "The Me You Can’t See UK" (TMYCSUK) / @tmycsuk
