Doing Against Doom
It’s Mental Health Awareness Month. For some, that amounts to a small uptick in their awareness of suicide hotlines, and warning signs to watch for in their friends and family. Personally, that misses the mark a fair amount and shortchanges the idea of mental health awareness overall.
Everyone relies on their mental health, and so everyone can benefit from an increased awareness of it.
If I had to break it down in an incomplete list, that might look like an increase in:
- Exposure to mental health vocabulary
- Awareness of accessible mental health resources
- Aptitude for basic skills to practice good mental health
- Rudimentary diagnostics for mental health concerns
I’ve been fortunate enough to be inundated in this world for so much of my life; talking about mental health feels natural and easy. The flip side of that is that I can often feel like a fish out of water among those who can’t or don’t seem to consider mental health in their daily calculus. But part of the practice — for me and anyone — is to start where you are and act where you can. In my case, that means seizing opportunities to pass along information that I’ve received. I’ve been known to ramble, so I’ll aim to keep a lot of this more succinct.
For now, I’ll introduce some potentially new vocabulary that doubles as an active skill to practice against anxiety and indecision.
The locus of control refers to the genuine influence we have as individuals. More directly, that encompasses the choices we can make and actions we can take for ourselves and our surroundings. It has become increasingly important over the last ten years because the technological advents of the last decade and a half have wildly distorted both our actual and perceived locii of control. Smartphones and a mostly global internet means that we can be connected to any issue across the globe.
That’s cool, and obviously quite different than even the age of TV. Access to global panic has never been higher, and if we’ve learned anything through experience over the last all-of-humanity, emotions can be contagious. The anxiety and fear in Kabul shook us in the U.S. as we watched humans fleeing their homes clamor for standing room on a bloated aircraft.
Like it or not, something animal in us often feels a pang in response. There’s a cry for help and our body and mind engages to answer it.
The same can be said for the countless goFundMe campaigns for medical bills, the outcries against an obviously inhuman job hunt process, the news of seemingly endless racism in our country, etc. If you want panic, it’s freely available at your fingertips, any time of the day. Again — neat, but dangerous. Many (if not most) of us have an addictive streak, and fear can be a very tempting state; few things make us feel so alive as an imminent existential threat.
But that’s just the thing, these aren’t imminent existential threats. They’re incredibly important and urgent, but for many of us they are wildly beyond our locus of control. The choices we can make and actions we can take have little or nothing to do with these events. Engaging with them is a choice to serve as a powerless spectator to the inevitable churn of humanity as a global organism.
I am not telling you to disengage entirely — that’s also not helpful. The world is on fire and the onus falls on the royal ‘we’.
Sitting and staring at the fire mindlessly is not helpful.
Consider the following behavioral change:
- Ask yourself ‘what can I do?’ Maybe it’s a repost, or a call to your congressperson. Maybe it’s a donation.
- Act immediately or as soon as possible. Immediacy is another incredible topic I’ll indulge later.
- Disengage with what is outside your locus of control.
- Recenter on something within your locus of control.
These last two points can be very tricky. In my experience, disengaging mentally from distress and anxiety requires practice in constructing firm boundaries with yourself. Evidence seems to help for me, so noting the action you took concretely — a receipt of donation, or a note about the call you made — is useful to revisit when your mind wanders back to the distress.
Recentering on something within your locus of control also requires some proactive effort. Make sure you have things available to do. Keep a to-do list on hand with tasks to complete, take a walk to engage your body and senses, or journal/sketch to slow down your thoughts and focus some of your emotions into a physical form. Feelings of powerlessness at the chaos of the larger world can easily turn into a sense of listlessness, hopelessness, and despair.
You cannot fix everything, and you cannot do most of it alone. Luckily, you aren’t alone.
Do what you can. Start where you are.
