Psychological Hygiene

We brush our teeth twice a day (and some of us even floss) to prevent our teeth from decaying. We wash our hands before eating to avoid getting bacteria on the food. Many people take vitamins and food supplements to stay healthy. Those of us who do sedentary jobs often engage in some form of physical activity in order to preserve our health. We are taught to do these things since early childhood as a way of taking care of ourselves. All of the activities I listed, however, are aimed at preserving our physical health. Very few people in our Western Civilization are taught similar measures aimed at preserving their mental health and psychological well-being.

Pharmaceutic companies benefit greatly from this profound illiteracy that characterizes most of us in what concerns psychological hygiene. Constantly depressed, burned out, anxious people who have no idea why they feel as miserable as they do provide eternal customers ready to swallow handfuls of pills that promise them some relief. Of course, pills always end up requiring more pills to deal with the side-effects of the initial round of pills. And then there is also medication that helps you take medication. And so the vicious circle is created. 

As somebody who views with horror the American culture of popping pills whenever you feel sad, shy, sleepless, nervous, listless, agitated or anything else in between, I take care of my psychological well-being through psychological hygiene measures. Of course, different things will work for different people but I'll just give some examples of what I do to take care of my mental health.

We are now in the last week of the academic year, which is always a very difficult moment. There are endless meetings, tons of paperwork, dozens of emails and visits from students, final exams that need to be prepared, and a lot of grading to do. I have so much stuff to grade that I can't even bring it all home because it's too heavy for me to lift. So I just bring it home in smaller batches. Obviously, this is a moment when one runs a big risk of feeling stressed out, exhausted, miserable and suffering from a burnout. Since I know how dangerous this last week of classes can be to one's psychological well-being, I have planned very carefully my psychological hygiene measures for this week.

Every day this week, I stop working or doing anything work-related by 5 pm. Then, I take a nap. After that, I do things that help me unwind. On Monday, I read an entire mystery novel in one evening. On Tuesday, I spent 4 fours playing Civilization V, which always takes my mind completely off any problems, issues, or work-related concerns. Today, I will reward myself for doing a massive amount of grading by watching several hours of Top Chef reruns and cooking something complicated. Tomorrow, I'm planning to spend several hours chatting on the phone while walking around the neighborhood. Friday will be especially brutal because of all the meetings I will have to attend. Forced sociability always exhausts me like nothing else. So I envision some serious Internet surfing while listening to Latin American rap on Friday evening.

I know from experience that after I do all this, I will wake up on Saturday feeling fresh, happy and ready to leave this academic year behind.

I also have experience of staving off depression successfully. I was told at some point that I had to abandon all the work I had done on my doctoral dissertation and change the topic completely after spending over a year of working on it. (That was a year since my prospectus had been officially approved.) I had most of the research done and had written a chapter and a half. Having to change not only the topic but even the time period I was working on felt like a complete disaster. And, of course, my boyfriend choose that very moment to dump me. And a huge, completely unexpected bill surfaced on that same day. And a very close friend told me that I deserved all this anyways.

Of course, I felt like plunging into the depths of complete and utter misery. However, a new dissertation topic that had to be selected, and I knew I had to start working on it immediately if I was going to graduate when I had originally planned. There is this writer who writes completely trashy and goofy mystery novels in Russian. They are of the kind where you forget the names of the main characters and the plot two minutes after you finish reading. So I took to my bed for three days and  just started reading these novels. I read twenty-two of them over the course of those three days. I did absolutely nothing else. I didn't even shower or wash my face. The novels were so completely silly that they took my mind off everything else. Three days later, I got  up feeling completely rested and ready to start working on my second doctoral dissertation.

Feel free to share your own psychological hygiene methods.

What Does It Mean to Ask for Help?

Learning to ask people for help when I needed it was one of the most difficult psychological hurdles I had to overcome. I used to pride myself on being a strong, all-powerful, self-sufficient individual who was ready to offer help to others but never needed any assistance from anybody. Once, when I was regaling my sister with a self-congratulatory rant on how I saw my self-sufficiency as my best and defining quality, she got fed up with it and told me the following:

"Look," she said, "what you have is not self-sufficiency but an extreme case of hubris. You like to see yourself as superior to others who always need your help but from whom you neither need nor accept anything. You have no idea how humiliating this attitude is to people who are close to you. In normal human relationships, everybody helps each other out when need arises. You, however, love showing people how little you need them while they, poor, helpless fools, are nothing without you. Could you just stop doing this already because you are getting annoying?"

It took me a while to realize that she was completely right. Never asking for help not only allowed me to feel superior to everybody, it also gave me the perfect opportunity to indulge my drama queen streak. (There was a period in my life where I proudly used to say that I practice depression as a form of art. One day, I will write a post on depression, as well.) By not requesting timely assistance I would routinely get myself into even bigger trouble and could then engage in happy contemplation of my profound misery.

To give an example, in the summer of 2008 I was in a really bad financial shape. My Canadian and my American banks ate up my paltry savings through a series of mistakes that they recognized but refused to rectify. I was going to start working at a great, well-paying job in August, so I knew money was coming. I still, however, needed to get through June and July. At that point, I was staying with my boyfriend (who is now my husband) in Indiana. A moment came when I was left with no money whatsoever. Things were so bad that I couldn't even buy a soda during the sweltering Midwestern summer. If you don't know what it means to have exactly one dollar and fifty-seven cents to your name in the entire world, let me tell you that the feeling is not enjoyable.

To say that I worried about money is to say nothing. I was eating my heart out because of how broke I was. I couldn't sleep, I had panic attacks, I was constantly sick. At no point of that drama, however, did it occur to me to inform anybody of what was happening. I have no shortage of wonderful people in my life who would have been happy to assist me. All I needed to tide me over was a couple hundred bucks, and there were many people who would have happily loaned me the money. But solving my problem so easily would have been no fun at all. It was much more pleasant to subject everybody to my endless suffering whose causes they were not allowed to know. 

The boyfriend kept asking me why I was so miserable but I proudly refused to answer. When I finally revealed the causes of the drama, he just said "Oy", and headed to an ATM.

"No!" I proclaimed with an attitude of a bad tragic actress from low-budget movies. "Who do you think I am? Do you think I am a person who accepts money from men? I am not that kind of a person!"

"No," he said. "You are the kind of a person who will accept this small loan and pay it back when you start getting paid at your new job." 

That was my first step towards realizing that sometimes you need to stop feeling sorry for yourself and accept a helping hand.

Today, I discovered that I had unwittingly messed up and was facing some not very serious but annoying complications. My inner drama queen was about to plunge headlong into the depths of depression. Pleasing thoughts about how life has no meaning and the world is an inhospitable, nasty place started coursing through my mind. The warm, comfortable feeling of being a misunderstood, lonely genius whom the universe couldn't appreciate because of its vast limitations enveloped me. Still, I resisted, picked up the phone and dialed the number of somebody who is always there for me.

"Hey," I said. "So I messed up here. Could you help me out?"

What Does It Mean to Help People?

It is my firm belief that the only acts of help that count as such are the ones that the person who is being helped has requested. Every unsolicited act of assistance is, in reality, a manipulation strategy. There are different bonuses that fake helpmeets try to garner through their unsolicited assistance. Here is a little list of what manipulative helpers usually strive to accomplish:

1. The most innocuous and easy to deal with breed of helpmeets are people who have read too many self-help books of the How To Win Friends and Influence People kind. They have bought into the myth that you need to demonstrate to people how doing what you want them to do will ultimately benefit them. These well-meaning folks have no idea how condescending their Dale Carnegie-inspired fake concern for others actually is. To give an example, I've been recently contacted by a colleague who said, "Look, I want to do you a huge favor. Let's do what I propose, and it will benefit you a lot." As a grown-up, intelligent individual who is more than capable of looking out for her own needs, I did not appreciate this manner of framing the request and refused it. Had the person honestly told me, "Look, I need a huge favor from you. It would be great if you could do this for me, but I'll totally understand it if you refuse. In return, I'd be willing to do X, Y, or Z for you, in case you ever need it", I would have been a lot more receptive to the request.

2. The second category of fake helpers are the ones I call sacrificial lambs. These people make it their life's goal to burn at the stake of other people's needs. All day and every day they bustle around trying to benefit humanity which neither asked nor wanted their solicitous care. Such people would be genuinely surprised if you told them that what they are is users. They use their unsolicited help to others to avoid taking care of their own problems. I knew a guy like that in grad school. He would spend inordinate amounts of time reading chapters of everybody's dissertations, helping people to create conference presentations, and editing their articles. In the meanwhile, his own dissertation had been stuck on page 15 for two years in a row, he didn't have a single publication, and didn't go to any conferences. 

I used to be such a person myself a while ago. I dedicated my life to listening to people's love troubles, offering them a shoulder to cry on, and dispensing useful relationship advice. In reality, though, I couldn't care less about these folks. I just needed them to explain to myself why I had no time or energy left to take care of my own crappy personal life.

3. The next subclass of fake helpmeets are guilt-trippers. These folks thrive on doing things for you and then telling you triumphantly how their health has suffered and their work has been sadly neglected while they have been busting their asses trying to do things for you. Your guilt and feeling of indebtedness that can never be exorcised because they accept nothing but you eternal guilt as a reward are all they seek. Such people are very likely to exaggerate the extent of their help to you and regale others with stories of how much they had done for the horrible, ungrateful you for years to come. 

Once, I was shopping with an acquaintance and discovered that I had left my wallet at home and couldn't pay for the pair of shoes that I wanted. I was perfectly happy with leaving and coming back for the shoes on the next day. The acquaintance, however, insisted that I let her pay for the shoes. I accepted the loan and repaid it on the next day in full. Imagine my horror when, years from then, I heard another acquaintance tell me how this person had been telling everybody in sight about how I used to borrow money from her on a regular basis. The amount of loans that I supposedly requested from her had grown almost tenfold.

4. The last and the deadliest category of helpers are those who are sincerely and passionately convinced that they know how to improve your life. These people are scary because they are fanatically convinced that their intentions are good and pure. They decide that your partner doesn't treat you right and set out to destroy this relationship that they find to be all wrong. They try to prevent you from spending time with people they believe are not good for you. I knew a guy who used to get into his wife's email account and delete messages that invited her to participate in university committees because he believed she was overworked and needed to rest more. Another acquaintance mixed anti-depressants into her partner's food because she had decided he was depressed and in need of medication.

And, of course, they are also the same people who want to impose their knowledge of what's best on poor, miserable, silly and helpless inhabitants of other countries. If need be, they are willing to impose their vision of what's right through the use of deadly force. There is no arguing with such folks because their conviction that they are in possession of some higher form of knowledge that can benefit humanity at large is clad in armor that has not a single chink in it.

Explaining Emotions

Here is a very silly tweet that I received today:

The best way to destroy the bridge between the visible and invisible is by explaining your emotions

The tweet annoyed me because there is nothing that bugs me more than people who can't explain what they feel and why. Having bouts of "inexplicable" sadness, happiness, joy or depression is the best way to manipulate others. Of course, there is always a reason why we feel things. There are people who are so emotionally immature that they truly can't explain to themselves or to others why they are experiencing a certain emotion. This profound immaturity is bound to manifest itself in many other respects, so I would avoid such emotionally stunted individuals at all cost. 

Then there are those who love manipulating others by exposing them to a barrage of emotions they pretend not to be able to explain. "I just feel sad and I don't know why," is the best way to keep those who have the misfortune of knowing such an individual wondering if they might have caused this sadness. 

So my advice to those who don't know why they feel what they feel: until you find an explanation, keep your emotions to yourself. 

P.S. This silly tweet is a quote from Paulo Coelho who sold many books by being extremely pompous.

What's So Good About Extroverts?

Through Mike's blog, I discovered this great article on the tyranny of the extroverts. Employers' preference for these annoying, chirpy creatures who couldn't stay silent for two minutes to save their lives has now extended even into the realm of engineering:

The top three priorities of the American Society for Engineering Education are (1) team skills, (2) communication skills, and (3) leadership. The National Science Foundation agrees; engineers need, "communication and interpersonal skills, better teamwork skills, [etc.]"

This is a very screwy world where very talented people in intellectual professions have to be discriminated against because they prefer to have lunch alone and dislike group activities. It doesn't seem to matter to anybody that those who need to be surrounded by people all the time might simply be trying to fill the silence in their heads left by a total absence of thoughts. Those who like to be alone, on the other hand, might need their alone time to think. Possibly even in order to come up with work-related innovations.

All of this fashionable blabber about teamwork fails to recognize that thinking, by its very nature, is always a solitary enterprise. You can talk all you want about collective brainstorming sessions, round-tables, and other useless inventions of the corporate world. The truth, however, remains that thinking is not done collectively:

I shouldn't have to say this, but there is a place in the world for introverts. Show me the ten most innovative minds of the 20th Century and I will show you ten introverts. From Einstein to Wittgenstein, not one of them could carry a conversation if you put handles on it. I wouldn't want to eat dinner with any of them, but I'm grateful they lived and died before the psychopharmaceutical industry had the chance to fix them.

 Introverts of the world unite and end the tyranny of the extroverts! I know that it's hard for us to do since we are not into group activities. Still, I'm sure we are smart enough to find a way.

Dreaming Versus Sleeping

When I tell people about my dreams, they always respond that I'm extremely lucky and they envy me. Because my dreams are vivid, colorful, complex, and very real. There are, for example, "adventure dreams" with very convoluted plots and stunning special effects. If you have seen the movie Inception, you have an idea what my adventure dreams look like.

There are also "experience dreams" where I experience things I never do in real life. Do you know what it feels to have an airplane fall on your head? I kind of do because this is one of my most frequent dreams. I also have been struck by a lightning (it really hurts, too), shot, and thrown out of a window. I have traveled in outer space and climbed a volcano.

Then there are "artistic dreams." I would hear a symphony orchestra music or an opera in the dream. And I'd really hear them. The sound quality is always great.

I also have "colorful dreams." Sometimes in such dreams, I would see amazing, complex fireworks that would cover the night sky. Or I'd see everything around me appear in a breathtakingly beautiful, sparkly color that doesn't exist in nature.

There are food dreams, as well. Tonight, for example, I stuffed myself with crab soufflés while I slept. The funny thing is that I always really feel the taste of what I'm eating. I don't like desserts but in my dreams I end up in pastry shops or chocolate factories more often than not. Maybe the reason why I'm indifferent to desserts in real life is that I eat too many of them while I sleep.

Having such an active dream life is quite a burden. Sometimes, you just want to rest instead of participating in car chases, bank robberies and chocolate tastings. I'd like to have at least a couple of nights a week when I have no dreams at all. I don't remember a single dream-free night, though. 

Does anybody have any idea why this happens to me at all? 

Psychoanalysis in the US

I was very glad to see today's article in the New York Times on the rise of psychoanalysis in the US.In "Freud’s Adirondack Vacation," Leon Hoffman tells of Freud's visit to the US, the people he met, and the influence he exercised over the mental health profession in this country. In the past few decades, Freud's name has become something of an insult in American psychology. The pharmaceutical lobby is one of the strongest in the US. It is, of course, deeply opposed to a method that deals with mental issues sans medication. As everybody knows, Freud's "talking cure" arose specifically in response to the proliferation of barbaric methods of treating mental patients practised by psychiatrists in the XIXth century.

Today, our understanding of mental health revolves around the mindless popping of prescription pills at worst and the senseless quasi-scientific blabber offered by Dr. Phil. The latter, of course, often leads to the former. Folowing the cue of pharmaceutical companies, Dr. Phil's first pronouncement on most psychological problems is that the problem might be caused by an imbalance of something in the brain, which requires taking prescription medication.

In a country where it has become normal and acceptable to diagnose 2-year-olds with schizophrenia and bipolar disorder (medication!), where schools label students as "hyperactive" (more medication!), where people often get prescribed 2 anti-depressants at once plus medication to deal with the side effects of the 2 anti-depressants, where psychotropic meds get peddled right from the TV screen, it would be a great idea to remember Dr. Freud and his American follower Dr. Putnam.

It's obvious that people have a vague desire for something different than prescription medication in the field of psychology. Dr. Phil's talk show originally gave some hope of presenting the "talking cure" in a more positive light. As we all know, the show soon degenerated into recommendation of prescription meds and a collection of unprofessional platitudes aimed at placating the bored suburban housewives who make up the bulk of Dr. Phil's audience.

Gradually, people begin to believe that medication and Dr. Phil's idiotic proclamations are all that psychology has to offer. As a  result, the popular trust for the fieldd at large becomes eroded even further.

Restoring Vision

When I was 23, my vision started to fail. Not surprising, according to my ophthalmologist, since I was reading for 10+ hours every day. It kept getting worse, and every year I would get a stronger prescription for my glasses. I couldn't read without them and seeing anything at a distance was becoming more and more difficult. Eventually, I decided to do something about it and it worked. A couple of years ago I threw away my glasses and haven't missed them since. Now I want to share my method. I want to preface this by saying that I am not a doctor and don't claim to know anything about medicine or ophthalmology. But this worked for me, so maybe someone else will find it useful. In any case, I don't think that this method can possibly harm any one (except people who are allergic to blueberries, but they will know at once that this is not for them).

I believe that verything is influenced by the physical and the psychological factors at once. So in my struggle foor a better vision I addressed both.

Psychological: I believe that psychologically loss of vision indicates that there are things in our lives we refuse to see. At the point in my life when I started to lose vision, there were parts of my reality that I didn't want to recognize or see for what they are. I analyzed them, wrote them down, and did all I could to acknowledge the unpleasant reality.

Physical: At the same time, I ate blueberries. I had read in an article someplace that blueberries are good for your vision. So I ate industrial-sized portions every day. It was summer, and blueberries were very cheap.

I don't know whether it was the method or my belief in the method but it worked. My vision is now back to perfect.

Asexuality

A recent post at Feministing illustrates the point I was trying to make about tolerance that sometimes turns into a parody of itself.

The post responds to a message from somebody who feels asexual and finds anybody's touch "absolutely repulsive. The thought of sex makes me gag a bit." The response that the author of the message gets to her post takes the idea of political correctnes to the extreme that is even a little scary. The main idea of the response is "Asexual people of the world, unite!" Don't worry about beinng asexual, it says. You can always get together with other asexual people, date them, and form yet another neat identity group.

This attitude does not come exclusively out of the desire to show the world how tolerant and accepting one is. It is also the result of a deeply Puritanical view of sex, which refuses to see human sexuality on terms of a physiological process. If anybody found the idea of eating or sleeping (also physiological processes) "absolutely repulsive", we wouldn't be as likely to dismiss this problem with a lot of well-meaning but ultimately empty words. Nobody would (at least for now, I think) suggest to form an identity group around this problem.

Another problem that the response to this post brings to light, is the deep-seated fear that many Americans feel towards psychology as a field of knowledge. While several people suggested that the author of the post look for hormonal causes of her asexuality, nobody mentioned that it might be helpful for her to search for psychological causes.