Category Archives: mental illness

academic life/work, anxiety, Buddhist life, failure, mental illness

Befriending Overwhelm

I spend a good part of my time at the intersection of Depression, Anxiety, and Grief. When overwhelm hits, which it often does, and a wave of panic rises up in my chest, I take a deep breath.

I find my Buddhist practice very helpful when I feel that panic. Panic makes me feel like I should be hurrying—doing something, anything, and fast! But Buddhists aren’t known for hurrying. When my impulse is to move fast, I consciously slow down. With each deep breath, my panic subsides a bit until it is manageable. Sometimes I have to go through the process of taking a deep breath and letting my panic subside multiple times in a day or even an hour. It’s ok, I tell myself, take your time.

I was at a conference last week that put me into overwhelm. I was surrounded by brilliant, energetic, competent people and I felt dull, slow, and outdated in their company. Each session I attended left me feeling more overwhelmed by the feeling that I could never perform my job the way they perform theirs.

For me, overwhelm is often quite sneaky and I don’t always recognize it for what it is. I often notice that I feel a heaviness I can’t quite identify for hours or even days before I realize, “Oh, I’m feeling overwhelmed!” Once I label the feeling, I say hello to it. Really—I say out loud, “Hello, Overwhelm, my old friend.” That may seem ridiculous, but greeting it as a friend helps me not react to it with fear.

Then I sit down with it as I would with a friend having a tough time. If possible, I do this over coffee or tea, just as I would with a friend. “What’s going on?” I ask it. Here’s how my conversation with Overwhelm went last week at the conference:

Me: What’s going on?

Overwhelm: Everyone here is doing such amazing things! I’m so far behind—how can I do cool things with antiracism and undergraduate research and STEM support and all the other things I need to do?????? And I’m behind on publishing and . . . It’s a hopeless situation.

Me, speaking to Overwhelm as I would to any friend: Hmmm. I wonder if being at an academic conference is kind of like scrolling through Facebook. Presenters are showing their best work, just as most people on Facebook are showing their best moments. Just as the happy family photos don’t tell the whole story of a person’s daily life, a brilliant conference presentation doesn’t tell the whole story of an academic’s work.

Overwhelm: Huh . . .

By that point, Overwhelm started to lose its energy.

Of course, that wasn’t the end of it. The next day I went to a session where I heard about an amazing and elaborate program that I would love to replicate. Afterwards, I was overwhelmed with thoughts that quickly led me to a downward spiral: I will never be able to replicate the program, but I should try, but I can’t ever do it like she did, I will fail, I suck . . . and I’m behind on email and . . .  So I took a deep breath. And another one. I’ve learned I must regulate my breathing before I can regulate my thoughts. Another deep breath.

“Hello again, Overwhelm,” I said in between deep breaths.

Once I was breathing in a non-panicked way, my thoughts were already a little more manageable. I wrote them all down in a list. All the thoughts went on the list: I’m behind on email, I have a report due in November, if I don’t stain the back fence before it gets cold it will rot away this winter, I will never be able to replicate the program I heard about, I suck . . .  Giving each thought its own line on the list gives it some space. It can exist. It is an ok thought. When all the thoughts were on the list, I gave one breath to each thought, taking the length of one complete breath, an inhale and an exhale, to acknowledge the thought and linger on it. Sometimes that lead to more thoughts, which went on the list.

Sometimes all the thoughts want is a little space to be acknowledged and then I can let them go. The thought that whatever I come up with will never be as great as what this other woman came up with was one I could easily let go of once I gave it a breath. No, what I do won’t be as great as what she did. I’m not in competition with this other person, who is at a different institution in a different state. OK. Good bye, thought.

Other thoughts are useful and become items on my to do list or bucket list. The report due in November and staining the back fence went on my to do list.

Thoughts like “I suck” just want space. I give that thought a breath and then cross it off my list. I know it’s not true in any meaningful way. I used to have to fact check those thoughts—do I suck? I’d ask. And then I’d write down the evidence for and against that verdict. There was always more evidence against the verdict. Now I don’t have to do the actual fact-checking, I just have to remind myself that I’ve held this trial many times before and always the verdict has been, no, you don’t really suck.

Buddhism tells me that any time I want to hang on to a thought, hold it in a tight grip, I should instead open my hand and give it space, let it float away if it wants to. It usually wants to float away. Thoughts that float away sometimes come back, but if I again loosen my grip on them, they float away again. Sometimes they float back and I let them float away several times a day for years and years. It’s ok. I can keep letting them float away. Once I learned how to let them float away, I began to trust that they will float away if/when they return.

Letting the thoughts float away doesn’t “cure” me of my grief, depression, or anxiety. All it does is make the overwhelm go away. And I’ll take that.

Accessibility + Dis/ability, anxiety, grieving, mental illness

How to Be Gentle with Yourself

Twice in the last week I’ve told someone I hope they can be gentle* with themselves. They are both dealing with tough situations beyond their control—one’s mother is slowly dying and they are experiencing the heartbreak of anticipatory grief; the other has significant health challenges and just had a second bout with COVID.

It’s easy for me to identify situations where others should be gentle with themselves. It’s a bit more challenging to figure out when I need to be gentle with myself, but it’s something I’ve been working on and getting better at.

I’ve been struggling with a round of depression and anxiety for about a month now, sleeping much more than usual, feeling constantly fatigued and drained. There are days where I get nothing done beyond walking and feeding the dogs and myself and working out (I learned long ago that working out is a basic daily need for me and I almost never skip it, although I do sometimes allow myself to work out for just a few minutes—see #1 below).

For the first week that I felt crappy, I told myself I was wasting my life. I told myself I couldn’t have dessert or a glass of wine with dinner unless I accomplished certain items on my to do list. I told a friend I was being a loser. I asked myself repeatedly, “What the fuck is wrong with you?!” I rolled my eyes at myself in the mirror with the derisive, dismissive, contemptuous air of a teenager.

None of this made my depression and anxiety easier to cope with. It did not motivate me to stop sleeping so much or to fly into action, completing tasks on my to do list. It just made a difficult situation worse.

I wish I could tell you that when I stopped being mean to myself, my depression and anxiety magically disappeared. Alas, that is not the case. But when I stopped being mean to myself, I was dealing only with depression and anxiety rather than depression and anxiety and the cruel torment of a bully. Taking away the bullying made the depression and anxiety relatively easier to bare.

Want to be gentler to yourself? Here’s what I do:

  1. Don’t let perfection be the enemy of good. Working out for 5 minutes is better than not working out at all. I’ve been chipping away at writing projects in 15-minute increments, and while I’d like to be putting in more time, I’m not able to right now.

2. When I catch myself saying something to myself that I would never say to another person, like, “What the fuck is wrong with you?!” I take a step back and apologize. I remind myself that I am a kind person and that I am kind to everyone. Even myself.

3. Refrain from bad-mouthing myself to others. My form of self-deprecating humor can get a little out of hand sometimes and I’m trying to reign it in. When I am about to tell a friend I’m a lazy ass, I remind myself I am depressed.

4. Continue allowing myself dessert, wine, and other treats rather than making them contingent of achievements. Everyone deserves pleasure in their life.

5. Remind myself that depression and anxiety are illnesses, and just as I would cut myself slack about sleeping a lot if I had the flu, allow myself to act like a sick person.

6. Accept what is possible under the current conditions. Although I’ve gotten by with 7.5-8 hours of sleep a night for many years, lately I seem to want more like 10 hours of sleep. It’s very inconvenient. I can’t possibly get done what I normally get done with two hours a day less to do things. This is where guideline #1 really comes in handy. And it turns out that a lot of things I normally do in a day don’t need to happen or don’t need to happen every day. What does need to happen every day is me taking care of myself.

7. Hold space for myself to be depressed or anxious. That means no fixing.

Being depressed and anxious still sucks, but at least now I know I have my own back. I don’t look in the mirror with self-loathing—instead, I look with compassion, as I would for anyone else on the planet.

*I no longer tell people to be strong. I think being gentle is both more difficult and more effective.

Buddhist life, grieving, mental illness

Welcoming Depression Back into My Life

A couple weeks ago I realized my grief was veering into depression. Depression has been a constant in my life since I was about 8, but at that time, the world thought 8 year-olds couldn’t have depression, so I was just considered moody and bitchy. I was finally diagnosed in my teens and got on anti-depressants, which I took until my early 20s, when I was able to taper off of them and mange my depression with meditation, exercise, and lots of intentional choices about food and alcohol.

I was always aware that I was off medication “for now” and knew that I might need to go back on it at some point. Last year, when I was diagnosed with Generalized Anxiety Disorder and panic attacks, I started taking a low dose of Escitalopram, which can help with both anxiety and depression.

Over the last few months, many of the things I’ve attributed to grief had started to happen less frequently. I was still feeling intense grief but not every minute of every day, and sometimes I could go entire days without feeling intense grief. My appetite returned. My sleep was mostly regular. The sneaker waves of grief came less often. I didn’t feel compelled to visit my late husband’s bench every day.

But last month, I started wanting to sleep all the time again. I slept through my alarm in the morning. I craved sugar. I didn’t want to work out, which is one of my favorite things to do.  

A couple weeks ago, I noticed that instead of feeling my normal grief mindset of “life is hard today but it will pass,” I was thinking “life is hard.” I didn’t have my usual sense of temporariness. I felt a kind of doom I’ve come to understand as anxiety, but it wasn’t anxiety. Anxiety shows up in my stomach and chest, but this doom was showing up everywhere. It was all encompassing, like a weight holding me down. It felt physical, as if a heavy blanket had been thrown over me and I had to drag it around with me all day. I couldn’t shake the heavy blanket or get out from under it.  

It happened slowly enough that I didn’t quite recognize that anything was different. Then I started reading Depression: A Public Feeling by Ann Cvetkovich, which is part memoir about her own experience of living with depression. Some of her descriptions of how depression felt resonated intensely with me. She uses words like “pervasive” and “relentless” and describes being unable to work on a project she had been passionate about and “the impossibility of physical relaxation.”

My first thought was, “It sounds like grief,” and then I realized grief hadn’t felt at all like that in a long time. I went back through my journal and saw the proof there that I had not always felt like I was dragging a heavy blanket around.

I’m now taking an increased dose of Escitalopram. The increase pretty much made me sleep for two days straight, but now I can stay awake all day and I’m starting to feel more like myself.

Just as I tried to make friends with my anxiety (we are closer now but not quite friends), I am trying to take a non-combative approach to my depression. It is part of me and if I love myself, I must love the depression in some way.

Two ideas have been helpful to me in this regard:

When I started grad school in 1993, nobody knew me or my past as a person with depression, so I didn’t mention it to anyone. I wasn’t consciously trying to hide it, but I also wasn’t bringing it to anyone’s attention. A few months ago, I added “I live with low vision” to my online bio, and soon after that I added anxiety to the list. A week or so ago, I added depression to the list.

Acknowledging publicly that anxiety and depression are part of my identity feels risky. Mental illness is still stigmatized and often seen as opposed to critical thinking, which is prized in academia. But I know from casual conversations that many of my students and colleagues live with mental illness. (I have tenure and am a full professor, so if I feel nervous about the disclosure, imagine how folks with less job security feel.)

Acknowledging depression in my bio is one way I am being compassionate towards myself and owning my depression.