theunitofcaring:

I think one of the most valuable Mental Illness Skills™ is teaching your brain not overgeneralize. I have a lot of bad days, and usually when I look back on them they were bad for a situational reason. I skipped breakfast or didn’t sleep well the previous night or have a crazy pile of stuff to get done or didn’t take my meds or broke my phone and can’t listen to music. 

But it never feels in the moment like that’s why I’m having a bad day. Without fail, it feels like my life is permanently and forever in a miserable equilibrium of exhaustion and stress, and all the good days are the anomalies, and nothing will ever get better until the human race accidentally annihilates ourselves.

And – it’s good sometimes to treat your emotions like they’re telling you something. Sometimes, you feel awful because you’re in an unsustainable situation, and your brain is trying to tell you ‘hey, we can’t do this, we’ve got to change something’, and it’s much better to listen than to get mad at yourself. But – sometimes you feel awful because you didn’t eat breakfast. In my experience that’s honestly more common. And you can drive yourself into a hell of a spiral if you treat your experiences as pointing to existential truths about your life and your future, when they’re produced by having stayed up late last night.

My checklist for myself is: “Is life fundamentally devoid of meaning? Okay:

– did I eat breakfast?

– did I have a cup of coffee?

– did I get eight hours of sleep last night?

– did I take my meds?

– did I snuggle a small child?

– did I have a quiet commute listening to soaring music about space travel?

And:

– did something awful recently happen in real life that I’m still grieving and processing?

– did I spend more than an hour in the last day fretting about/trying to assist friends who are homeless or trapped in abusive homes?”

It’s always one of those, for me. Your list might look different. But I really think it’s good to have one.

(My brain offers the interpretation “look at that long list! the fact that all those things have to go right to have a good day is proof we are DOOMED TO SUFFER”. But I manage all of these things for myself on nearly every day, and that’s a perfectly good path to a good life, and my brain would agree if I’d …taken my meds and eaten breakfast today, oops.)