Voicing Opinions

The Eastern concept of mindfulness is pretty straight forward, so needn’t be seen in an esoteric light. It simply requires you to be wary of yourself and how you relate to the world. In a nutshell, it asks that you pause before ‘doing’ so as to give yourself time to reflect and observe, and sometimes change tack.

I find it fun trying to be mindful, but it is not all pluses. You do learn to frequently nip temper in the bud by re-framing it in that moment of pause, diluting its potency. And a life with less unnecessary anger is generally a happier, more sociable one.

But there is also a slightly negative side. You start to see a disconnect between your conscious mind – the reflective state in the pause – and the subconscious mind plus body communicating its needs and desires. And because you start to notice, without judgement, your sub-conscious intents before you might act on them, you get to see some nasty ways you have. Ways that have served your ancestors well, such as the urge to take umbrage when someone corrects you, but which often do not serve you well. Gradually, you start seeing the ego manifest – often childishly defending your position in the light of contrary information.

Without the pause to reflect, you are often propelled into action, and become embroiled with something that only hindsight might then see you regret.

The point about mindfulness is not to entertain some fancy Eastern high-falutin concept, but to make your life smoother and happier. It is useful for the simple matter that subconscious and bodily communications fail to come with value labels. We may have an urge to do something for reasons that our conscious mind would deem invalid. We may get irritable because the body is not well rested and keeps complaining to us, urging, for some strange reason, to get grumpy, as if that would correct the bodily problems. Ignoring the urge to irritability works – the urge does pass and you relax, accepting the bodily complain as something to be contended with rather than complained about.

But on this matter of mindfulness, it occurred to me only this afternoon in conversation with a student that such conversations are not two way. I, or at least the conscious part of me, was enjoying the chat, but it was caught between the words from the companion, and the messages from my subconscious and my body. The thrust of such multiple dialogues is a very tangible one, as I often get caught listening to someone speak at length while, at the same time, my mind is desperate to interrupt with my viewpoint on the matter. Without mindfulness, we might suppress or concede to this desperation, but develop no real consistent improvement. Being wary of it, we can strike a balance between the two. Maybe – I am still learning this art as my subconscious is very insistent.

And there is another facet of mindfulness – that such urgent subconscious requests are not direct caused by our conscious mind. They come from me, but not from the part of me engaged in the conversation. So I cannot blame my conscious mind – what I see as ‘me’ – for such genetically determined habits. So I fuss less about this as a ‘weakness’. That is relaxing. But it does not stop me taking responsibility for modifying this habit – to try to work around its anti-social nature.

I am an over-reactive type of human. I did not choose to be – this is simply my genetic inheritance. So I cannot blame myself – nor can others blame me for that.

However, genetics is not a mandate, but a kind of framework. And both environment and your own choice of behaviour can override many aspects of genetic predisposition. So the over-reactive type cannot fully abdicate responsibility for their overreactions.

The excellent book ‘Quiet” by Susan Cain discusses introversion, a personality type that is often the result of an over-reactive nature. It might appear to be a paradox that the noisy baby lying by the side of the quiet baby is likely to become the introvert, and the quiet baby the extrovert. But if the noise is the result of an emotional reaction to sensory overload, then it makes sense that a baby might grow up to seek refuge in the quiet of a book. Conversely, that the quiet baby, calm in the face of the same stimulation as the noisy baby might grow up to sensation seeking to get his kicks.

Resulting habits – such as the desire to read and live in your mind – may be consequences of sensory overload avoidance rather than consequences of a genetic inclination to an academic lifestyle.

The over-reactive nature is essentially a result of an over-reactive amygdala – the emotional centre of the brain, in effect. It is found in the more primitive part of the brain, receiving sensory signals before the conscious mind does. This permits the potentially life-saving fast fight or flight response before we are even aware of what has happened.

But an overly-sensitive amygdala can make for a harder time as the emotional response to life is essentially amplified. Unless they have a good upbringing, over-reactive types are more likely to get stressed and/or suffer depression. They are also more likely to be empathic – to feel what others feel – as long, that is, they are not exhausted from overload!

However, Cain revealed something very interesting about over-reactive types in her book – that a nurturing, loving upbringing will make a reactive-type more healthy than a low-reactive type. Less likely to get depressed for example. A sensitive nature, accepted and nurtured by parents will allow a reactive-type to flourish. Conversely, a harsh upbringing will mean a much harder life for an over-reactive type than their tougher skinned brethren.

It all makes sense of course, in hindsight – a sensitive microphone can excel in capturing delicate sounds (nuances) but will distort (overreact) with loud sounds. A robust microphone is a good, all purpose device, but will miss out on subtle (and often exquisite) sounds.

I mentioned that I was an over-reactive type because I wanted to relate some personal discoveries on the matter.

At one period in my life, I had bouts of acute anxiety that are termed panic-attacks. You literally feel like you are about to die, or at least have a heart attack. It is, in essence, an extreme emotional reaction to a potential threat, real or perceived (it can even simply be a situation that looks like one that was a danger in the past). The brilliant “Self help for nerves” by Claire Weekes allowed me to manage my way out of this caustic anxiety spiral.

The essence of her method is counter-intuitive to a large degree. You must not try to push away or ignore the intensely horrible feelings of a panic attack (such as pounding heart and light headedness). You must use the Eastern Philosophical concept of acceptance to just see it as it really is without judgement. Trying to push it away or worrying about what is happening will inflame and hence aggravate the attack. Accepting it will allow it to slowly fade away.

It would seem that the mindfulness is a key part to retraining your amygdala. By observing without judgement, you are quietly telling the amygdala that this is not a big problem – you provide a calming effect as well as a cue that the situation in the future is not one that is to be so concerned about. But you must be patient.

Most Christmas days, I have to endure the mother of all bad headaches, caused by a catch-22 situation where my subconscious thinks back to previous years where it got overloaded and tenses up in preparation for a possible repeat. This year, I was able to ignore the tension headache that awoke me at 4am and eventually go back to sleep in a relaxed state. It has taken years to develop this capacity to relax on demand, and it does not always work, but this time I ventured from my normally solitary life-style to a day with my sister and her family.

But relaxed or not, I felt deeply, deeply uncomfortable sat there watching all the presents being unwrapped. It was a reaction, in part, to losing the quiet of my own company. But it was way over the top. I knew this, but that knowledge cannot directly get through to the inflamed amygdala to calm it down. It screamed at me to run away or to tell people to be quieter or behave differently. I felt so uncomfortable that my mind desperately wanted the discomfort to end. What is deeply frustrating to over-reactive types about this situation is that their mind that is creating the discomforting feelings in the first place.

This was not a panic attack, but I decided to apply the same techniques. I observed what was happening in the room – people actually having fun and getting excited – and observed my deep agitation – and did what Weekes advises – just let time pass.

It was a very interesting experience. I suspect I helped accelerate the process because I knew that the discomfort would indeed fade, and that I reflected on the disparity between feeling and the innocence of the scene causing the feeling. It was like being patient with an impatient child nagging at you – sooner or later then would give up, as long as you did not react.

I reckon it was about an hour before the discomfort faded away. Remember that this discomfort is not one of my choosing – I was literally sitting there receiving the feelings, at odds to how my conscious mind wanted to proceed.

But I believe that similar situations where I suffer acute discomfort can benefit from this mindfulness approach. Except, maybe the headache I get when in conversation with certain people – people who do not seem to sense how I feel. ‘Unempathic’ is probably the best way to describe such people. I cannot observe in a detached manner as I am part of what is being observed – the dialogue. I will have to work a way around that type of problem.

On the plus side, my highly reactive nature lets me enjoy many simple things in life with an exquisite intensity that I suspect that extroverts can only experience in highly charged situations, much less common parts of daily life. So if I can defuse and reframe my negative reactions to life and revel in the positive things, then life will be sweet!

It is tremendous that the nature of Jimmy Saville’s misdemeanours should open the door to many more exposures of child abuse that lay suppressed through fear until now. But there is, however, widespread misunderstanding when predators like Saville are labelled as paedophiles.

What is happening is that the term paedophile is being conflated with the term child-molester. So much so that some readers may still see these as one and the same thing.

But to describe paedophiles as child molesters by default is akin to describing heterosexuals as rapists by default. The forceful imposition of your sexual preference is a separate matter from that preference. A heterosexual who rapes is one who expresses his sexual preference forcefully on another. So it is that a child molester forcefully expresses his sexual attraction to children on a child.

The difficulty is that there is no normal, socially acceptable way for a paedophile to express his sexual preference for children. A healthy heterosexual man may express his attraction to a woman by courting her, walking with her, maybe holding hands. But these are inappropriate for a paedophile, even if this represents the entire extent of the expression that the paedophile wants to exercise of his instinctive attraction to children.

The assumption, reinforced repeatedly by the media, is that paedophiles are all child molesters, incapable of holding back on their lustful, debased urges. This assumption defines paedophiles as necessarily callous, selfish and brutal towards children.

But it is misguided.

Just as a person with homosexual tendencies may stay forever in the closet, hiding his or her sexual preference, paedophiles can also submerge their sexual preference, ashamed that they are socially abnormal in this regard. Or their preference for children may manifest in infatuation, with the target of their adoration as sacred as the target of heterosexual infatuation to the point that abusing the target would be totally at odds to their feelings.

The point I repeat is that a sexual preference does not mandate it’s expression, and that the preference in reality is rarely forced, by heterosexual, homosexual or paedophile.

For the media and the general public, the concept of sexual attraction for children is a blinding label in matters like Jimmy Saville. In a very real sense, that attraction is actually a minor matter. It is the callous expression of that attraction that is the devil in his case and that of many others. They act like psychopaths, devoid of conscience, often carrying out their carnal acts with total disregard for the effect both then and later on the child, and the family of that child.

To focus on sexual preference is looking in the wrong direction. The focus should be on the psychopathic nature of their behaviour, where the term child-molester is a better label. Focusing on the source of desire rather than its expression is akin to describing an armed robber who kills a shop-keeper in pursuit of the till contents as a lover-of-money. He may be, but he is certainly much more a dangerous man who disregards the value of lives around him enough to kill in his expression of his love of money.

Decades of headache, foggy thinking, and extreme tiredness are tough to endure. Call it mental illness, or whatever, the effect is the same – many days I have spent in a state of struggle to get by. It has been 12 years since I was able to work full time – the 6 before that were tortuous enough to have stopped.

Yet interspersed are days like today. I had slept about 10 hours and did not so much awaken in a refreshed state as one that was liberated from the shackles of fogginess. I could think clearly and proceeded to do some timely computer programming – at great speed, much as when I was young. I am 55 now, but love programming when I can think so lucidly and fast.

By mid evening, when I would normally be ‘surviving’ before going to bed, tired from debilitating head effects I felt fresh, so went for a walk in the mild but dark evening air. And I realised that I was not just free from fogginess, but risen well above that quagmire state. My vision was crystal clear. But everything seemed as if I were seeing it for the first. I know precisely what it is like to walk in a ‘normal’ state of mind, where the familiar around you stay just that, and wash past you. But now a corner of masonry would catch my eye and look like a work of art. A flash of neon would be bold and stark and beautiful. But I was not spaced out – just sensing things with a fresh intensity that was at the opposite end of the spectrum from my normal place of residency.

A little breeze would brush my face and it felt as if the sense of its touch was running in slow motion. I wanted to stop at everything I saw and marvel, much as you would at the equivalent 3d graphics in a PC screen.

The difficult aspect to this was that my senses demanded that I pay homage to their intensity, and this was a little wearing. So I was happy when I started to tire after about 20 minutes, the effect fading a little.

This state was so diametrically opposed to my normal one that it was like suddenly awaking from a nightmare to find you were the Prime Minister.

It may be that today was a short lived manic episode – the insatiably driven state I was in would fit that bill, as I hungered for my programming task to keep feeding me.

And you, the reader, may feel that I am offbeat, eccentric and maybe delusional. Maybe this is true. But if you had experienced such an altered state, you too may have been driven to tell others about it. A kind of hyper-alive state where everyone else looks as if they are in a daze of normality, and where my normal state is floundering in a bath of mud.

But I have to repeat that my vision was crystal clear. A 55 year old should not really be able to see things as lucidly as a teenager, which is how it felt. So it was immensely enjoyable, but at the same time, a bit spooky.

Such admonishments are frequently directed at people suffering with ‘taboo’ mental health problems, especially chronic depression.

But those who are fortunate not to suffer necessarily tend to see the suffering of others as they would suffer themselves. If they were in a downbeat, slightly depressed mood, they could readily ease their way out of the trap, and therefore think that chronic sufferers can do likewise, albeit with a proportionally greater effort to shift a deeper state.

But this proportional assumption is a key misunderstanding, for lack of proportion is one of the signatures of entrenched mental health. The other is displacement in time – a bout of suffering can appear that is disconnected from any current cause.

So, to repeat, a chronic depression sufferer will have symptoms that are an amplification of any causal event on the day. And they can have a general depressed state that bears no relation to their current thinking – it is background feeling of deep discontent that has a long term momentum, and is virtually immune to requests by others to ‘just snap out of it’.

But if you have not experienced either of these enslaving factors of mental ill-health, you will likely fail to understand or empathise with a chronic sufferer. This is part of the taboo perpetuation of mental health issues I feel.

My personality is largely characterised by my excitable, emotional, sensitive, reactive nature. This is my inheritance – whether I am happy or not with this cocktail, it is there in the background, flavouring my experience of life for good and bad.

In a sense, my experience of life is amplified compared to the average man. The coupling of this with the vulnerable, sensitive, empathic aspect of my personality was always a recipe for mental health problems I feel. Not a mandate, but a formula ready to ignite given the right life events.

When young and free from mental health issues, my life was mostly normal and enjoyable. I would periodically be overwhelmed by things, but was able to cry and survive and move on rather than accumulate hurt.

As example of the kind of problem I experience now after decades of submerging into a sea of mental health problems, most of the ideas for this entry came between 6am and 7am this morning. A steady stream of ideas and connections. My reaction to these was strong – I sensed that there was some insight here – but the point is that I really should have been sleeping. My reactivity – the amplification of feeling about these ideas – relegated sleep into a distant second place. So I now write this in a distinctly tired state.

Impulsivity of ADHD

As another example, the impulsivity that comes with the ADHD that I have seems to be a natural and almost unavoidable consequence of my reactive nature – in conversation I will experience things intensely and will feel a sense of urgency to give my reply. This blocks out my ability to listen further – the urge to respond being so strong. So I fail to listen enough to details since I am reacting too much to the emotional element in the conversation. So, over the years, my short term memory atrophies through underuse – I simply do not pay attention to the details as they are too low in emotional impact to register enough. This short term memory problem then exacerbates the impulsivity – I feel the urge to interrupt as I will simply forget the thing I want to say if I do not say it quickly enough. If I do not get to say it, my over-reactivity to that failure makes me feel bad – and hence creates a greater urge to interrupt and speak next time. This is an example of negative feedback. (This is a theory that came to me in the stream of thoughts this morning – this thought took about 10 seconds to flesh out).

We all experience times of difficulty in life, and the healthy person does so in a proportional way – their reaction is appropriate and not amplified. If your nature, like mine, amplifies experiences, then they become that much harder to manage – you are hot-stepping from one important event to another. This was fine when I was younger, as I was able to live through the experiences and let their effect manifest and dissipate nicely. But if you experience a cascade of overloads, your ability to cope can be overwhelmed, and your mind tags the experiences as ones to avoid. The mere anticipation of a repeat of such an experience creates a physical reaction in the mind and/or body as a defence mechanism. So the likely overreaction if the experience does indeed repeat is mixed in with the anticipatory feelings, and thereby becomes amplified further.

And here we have a feedback mechanism – a previous experience is fed back into the new experience, creating a vicious cycle.

Feedback loops

This concept of feedback loops seems to me a common thread to many mental illnesses.

The mental illness state can be nourished by further feedback paths, for example :

• You experience incapacity that is new to you, so you dwell on the matter in the hope of understanding and resolving it. This tends to feed back negatively.
• The incapacity withdraws you from certain situations in life, so your life experience dwindles and the illness becomes a bigger matter proportionally.
• Your friends and family feel uncomfortable with you, and this feeds back negatively.
• If the condition becomes severe enough, you become increasingly isolated, which gives you much greater time to dwell on your condition, and hence amplify it.
• The mind and body are tightly interlinked, so the body’s manifestation of the illness feeds back to the mind – the symptoms are generated by the mind and separately experienced – if you sense doom in this experience, the mind will create more symptoms.

The symptoms of an overload – this mental illness – can disassociate from the cause and continue unabated via one or more feedback loops. Chronic anxiety and chronic depression are examples of this. The ongoing prevalence of symptoms creates feelings of hopelessness that in turn generates further negative feedback.

Wave-like nature

When you have a toothache, in most cases, the pain will not be constant. It will fade in and out. So it is with mental illness – the mind generate the symptoms in an ebb and flow manner. This flux in a panic attack, for example, is relatively fast. You can be going about your daily life before a scene will trigger an attack that rapidly overwhelms you. The experience is so enormous that it cries out its own importance so we think the worse and it enflames even further.

But if we do not participate in its affairs, it will fade after a few minute. But it will then return – at reduced intensity – in a series of subsequent waves.

Tackling the feedback loops

They key to releasing the effect of panic attacks is to stay calm and thereby avoid the worry feedback that sustains the attacks.

It occurred to me that other mental health conditions could also have a wave like nature. So I looked at my own current mental health issue – headaches, excessive tiredness and foggy head. To awake with a foggy head, headache and extreme tiredness of mind (not body, strangely), that generally lasts all day is tough to take. So an anticipatory mechanism builds up, which almost certainly makes repeat occurrences more rather than less likely.

I have noticed, however, that the blanket day-long nature is not actually the case. It can fade – so slowly that I barely notice.

Why not, I decided, to treat this condition as I have successfully done with panic attacks (which were criminally bad, but are now extremely rare for me). Rather than feel encumbered by my ‘day-long’ plight, try to recognise when my symptoms faded in and out, and let them flow without judgement rather than feed back and amplify.

But the key, I feel, is also to tackle the real root of this and many mental health conditions – the anticipatory fear feedback mechanism. So for the past few days, I have been engaged in these twin activities. Last night I went to a board games meetup. Such occasions at the tired part of the day, with many strangers, and intense game rules to learn, for me generally trigger a tension headache. This is indeed what happened last night. And here I will digress a little.

If someone last night asked my why I was tensing up, he would in effect be asking the wrong question. I was in a relaxed state of mind – or rather, I was consciously cultivating a relaxed, unreactive mind state – as was my plan. I was mindful of any sign of fear, (mostly anticipatory, I noticed, since the people were friendly), and defusing it. But I was nevertheless tensing up (albeit much less than normal, thanks to my fear defusion). But I was not in fact tensing up – I was not making myself tense – it was happening to me.

And this is key to many who misunderstand mental illness. They tell a depressed person to snap out of their depression even though on that day the sufferer most certainly did not create the depressed state – it was imposed upon them by their subconscious in a feedback loop. Saying this to a depressed person is like telling a person to stop beating themselves up when someone else is punching them – they are addressing the wrong cause.

The net effect of my exercise last night was, alas, a headache that lasted into the small hours of the night. But maybe not as bad as I might have expected. But by disengaging with the sense of fear that my headache was trying to instil, I relaxed into the company around me in a way that I rarely do when I have tensed up before. I let the headache continue without buying into its false, historic message.

And I started experiencing the relaxed wandering mind that I now remember was how I behaved normally when younger. The key to the fear, it felt, was that I had learnt to dread people saying or doing things I would react adversely to. (So we go back to the original reactivity issue). This time, I stopped dreading that, and just experienced my reaction – the natural way to behave. And as a result, I started feeling the urge to do what I used to do as a way of dissipating the resulting ill-feeling when younger – I started challenging things. I had stopped doing this for years in order to please people – to tolerate discomfort to maintain harmony. We were playing a complex game and I was tensing up trying to understand the rules. So I broke the ice to say I thought the game was too involved (after all, I had asked the organiser for an easy game to pick up). Straight away, the young lady to the next of me then aired the same concern and I relaxed further. By challenging the underlying habits, I am hoping that I am now setting up a positive feedback loop!

The key, I believe, to much of my mental health is decades of amplification and feedback of the strain from the desire to please other people, which in turn was a response to an often rebellious, childish or inappropriate natural response by myself to uncomfortable social situations.

So my next step is to allow my natural reaction to manifest in difficult situations rather than to suppress is. To express the reaction may be a step too far for now. I will take the Buddhist approach first – to be mindful without judgement.

In conclusion

The conclusion here is a sad one in my eyes. It is like the proverbial flapping of a butterfly wing eventually effecting the global weather patterns – the suppression of my initial relatively innocuous tendency to say and do socially inappropriate or silly things snowballed into decades of extremely disproportionate symptoms, amplified and fed-back into a self-sustaining miasma.

The turning point was my marriage. I had grown used to tolerating the annoying ways of my wife-to-be as they were small compared to her virtues – I rightly reasoned that no marriage was perfect. But the anticipation of the continued suppression of them made confinement with the same person for the rest of my life a forecast that freaked my mind out. This happened just too late, a few days before the wedding, so I did not pull out – I did not have enough time to reflect on events to cancel the marriage. And the habit to suppress became entrenched – I had set a precedent in a marriage I really wanted to make work. The suppression snowballed to eventually generate the headaches and other problems I have now. I believe.

It has parallels to the often life-long effect of the callous words of a parent who repeatedly tells his daughter that she will never amount to anything. Something plausible and innocuous enough not to cause undue alarm as a child at the start becomes embedded internally and negatively dictates a restraining outlook on her whole life, the source unknown to the conscious mind. The belief manifested – she acted out her beliefs that she was useless – and this failure enacted fed back to reinforce the belief.

The mind, it seems, in conjunction with the body’s part in the expression of the mind’s thoughts, can spiral out of balance very quickly via the feedback mechanism.

(2,000 words written and checked in 2 hours – not bad going!).

© Neil Moffatt 2012

It is easy to criticise the youth of today – it has been done throughout the centuries. And such criticism is often proffered from older people, who tend to have a more balanced view on life, but who forget that young people do not have their years of experience.

But it seems to me today that there is an underlying problem with younger people that was not so prevalent when I was young, but which is counter-productive for them. I refer to a perceived growing loss of responsibility.

A very simple example is the common disinclination to take home cans and food rubbish from ad-hoc barbecues held in parks. After a hot sunny day, the nearby park is strewn with litter. The guilty parties presumably see everyone else leaving stuff behind so do the same. They fail to both think and act responsibly.

If someone lends a book to someone else, it is rare for the book to be returned. I know as I have over a dozen lent out. The recipients fail to act responsibly and see the giver’s perspective.

People promise to send me emails, but rarely actually do so.

People fail to meet up and then fail to see the need to apologise, or lie to cover their tracks.

The sad thing is that these people are actually missing out on a benefit for themselves. By adopting a sense of responsibility, their self esteem flourishes. If they promise to do something, and know that, come hell or high water that they will do it, then they will be happy to make that promise. They acquire greater integrity and this can lead to greater happiness.

A side effect of this sense of responsibility is that you will not promise to do something if you know you will not do it. So others know where they stand with you. And they feel happier being able to trust you.

Many, I would guess, would fail to adopt this concept because it requires discipline – something else that seems perennially lacking in the young (at least in the UK – certainly much less so in the East). Discipline is viewed in a negative light, as if it is only ever going to put a dampener on life. A hedonistic life is not the only way to happiness (and is generally a bad way in fact). You can see why, for example, if you helped an old lady across the road – it creates an enduring sense of pleasure or self esteem that indulgences do not offer.

Walking in the heavy rain this morning, I realised that I was in a slightly depressed state. So I started wondering how I managed to get there, and decided that what I had read to date on depression may have confused cause and effect a little.

We often confuse the runny nose, sore throat and achiness of a cold, or high temperature of influenza, as symptoms of the effect of these viral attacks. Yet they are mostly symptoms of the body’s fight against the invasion (a sneeze, by contrast, is often the result of a mechanism that a virus has evolved to propagate itself). The high temperature that flu generates is a vital defence mechanism to kill the flu virus.

In the same, way, I believe that the depressed feelings I was noticing are not the salient feature of depression, but a symptom of the body’s defensive action to deal with a problem.

I was well aware of the cause of my depressed mood, as I had been reflecting on the previous 24 hours of stressful events as I walked along. My mind had adopted a depressed state in order to try to understand how they happened and how to avoid them in the future. This state is not itself directly the cause of a depressed mood – the mood can often, but does not always, follow.

In our normal daily life, we operate in a relatively delusional manner – we tend to see ourselves in a positive light and to see the world via rose-tinted glasses. But when we encounter difficulties, we can enter a period of reflection – this depressed state – that weakens the delusional aspect. We start to see the world as it is in order to expose as much as information as we can to try to understand and learn what happened. At the same time, our bodily state is physically depressed – we have lower motivations to engage with the world. We do so in order to focus on resolving the problems.

This detached, more realistic view of events, and of the natures and involvement of people in the events, is the seed for the depressed mood. If it is sustained enough before conclusions are drawn, then we can become depressed in mood.

This is how I felt as I walked along, having had many hours to ponder on the facts – the depressed state did not immediately engender a depressed mood.

If the thinking remains unresolved, or the mood comes to dominate and persist beyond the resolution of the problems, then the depression can become chronic and take on a life of its own.

But the mood, I believe, is a non-mandated consequence of the true flavour of the depressed state.

Most of us presume that we are the boss of the brain – the CEO with the big picture and the ultimate decision maker. To a degree that is true, but not to the extent we imagine – the sense of control we have over our thoughts and destiny is largely illusory.

By way of example, I’ll describe some of my own personal observations. Some of these you may not relate to – my foibles may be alien to you, but you will have your own foibles that illustrate similar dis-coordination in the brain.

I am in the hyper-vigilant category of humans, fast to respond to danger. Or more crucially for my argument, fast to respond to perceiveddanger. Note that I never chose to be like this, but I may owe my existence in part to one of my ancestors whose vigilance saved him from a grizzly death. But my vigilance is too sensitive – it often takes precedence over other, more important matters, such as sleep. Which is why I can be awoken at 5am by the tiny, miniscule, almost impossible to hear sound of birdsong through double glazed windows.

These birds are no danger to me, but I have no access to the circuitry that misjudges them as a threat. I cannot raise the threshold of sensitivity to such sounds, nor inform my brain that birdsong is never ever a threat. One part of my brain disrupts sleep in an anarchic fashion – there is no coordinated scheme in place.

After falling back to sleep, I am likely to prematurely awaken at around 6am or 7am. If, as I have done so many times, I get up at that time, I will find myself struggling with tiredness and a foggy head all day. The early awakening is normally a result of reduced melatonin secretion from the pineal gland. As we get older it produces less – it is not so much that we need less sleep as we age, but that the brain makes it harder for us to stay asleep.

I tend to lie there are simply relax. What can happen, however, is that another part of my brain may observe awakeness starting and might assume it is time to get up rather than go back to sleep, so it will secrete cortisol in order to get my brain into gear. So my (semi-)conscious mind wants to go back to sleep, and my subconscious mind wants to get up. I know that I am not alone in that situation. But this dichotomous situation is one that gets compounded by the effect of the cortisol – we start to think and then the cortisol makes us react to what we think about, thereby making relaxation and hence sleep even more elusive.

Once again, one part of our brain has one agenda, and another, separate, polar-opposite agenda. The brain is not coordinated.

If you are in any doubt that your brain might also fail to act in a homogenous, harmonious, coordinated fashion, just look back at your first attempts to date someone, and how you became tongue-tied entirely against your wishes. Or if you became nervous playing tennis against a rival – exactly when you needed to be calm and focused, the requirements for optimal performance.

I sometimes sit and watch TV and find that my mind is restless. I cannot actually do what I want to do – I would really like to sit through the programme, but my subconscious decides that it is not interesting enough and stirs me into doing something else. On a less trivial matter, you may want to complete your tax return, but part of your brain really does not want to do that – it resists so much that you procrastinate for months leaving it to the last minute and getting very stressed in the process with the matter hanging over your head nagging you all that time.

It seems, to me, that the brain could benefit from further evolution to supply better coordination to reduce this self-defeating anarchy.

One of the vital, but less trumpeted foundations of good health is our sense of autonomy – that we have some control over our life and destiny.

Not only are many trapped in mechanical, prescribed job roles, but our consumption of products and services has been so entrenched and manipulated that we tend to abdicate the rule of our lives to others. We seek the authority of a doctor to fix us, and we buy a new product when its predecessor stops working rather than fix it ourselves Or make our own. We have lost the sense of our own autonomy.

As unequivocally elucidated by Levine^1., education has been hijacked to indoctrinate and straight-jacket us rather than enable and expand our sense of autonomy and potential.

On a much larger scale, as Kohr^2. eloquently explained way back in 1957, countries and industries have grown to become large and powerful at the cost of the quality of the health of the people – an individual may have some traction against a local council on a local matter but will have almost none against centralised government even though both are paid for and ‘elected’ by the people to serve the people.

There are, however, examples of respect for, and retention of, autonomy that serve as pointers to how much better life could be for more of us.

Workers on the production line in Semco, a manufacturing company in Brazil are empowered to make their own decisions. They redesign equipment, processes, choose their own work hours, and grow to love and cherish their work. They are owners of their jobs, not puppets. The company was slated for an early demise for breaking the rules like this, but remain prosperous and profitable with very low attrition rates and a long waiting list for prospective employees^3..

Switzerland comprises a set of mostly independent cantons or regions, with little in the way of centralised power. This takes them closer to the healthy way humans lived for thousands of years – small, self-sufficient, autonomous communities.

The European Union is in a fractious state right now, with Greece on the verge of leaving, but it may benefit in the long term from separation. To leave behind a life dictated by bureaucrats in distant countries. This is similar to employees of a large corporation, beholding to owners – the shareholders – who are physically remote and have little or no knowledge of these people, interested only in the financial welfare of the company as a whole. Cooperatives like John Lewis here in the UK show that anonymity of ownership is not the only way.

So when you choose, if you can, where you work or live, bear in mind the matter of autonomy. I left mainstream employment for health reasons in 2001 to work from home, and only regret the loss of companionship. I relish the autonomy of self-employment. I remember years back as an IBM employee how they announced one day that we were all going to be ‘empowered’. They had evidently read about the benefits in morale, innovation and efficiencies. But as soon as we started dong things we decided were sensible, we are told, that no, we could not do those things. IBM wanted the benefit of empowerment but failed to change to enable it. They did not really want what they saw as the ‘anarchy’ of autonomy, and the idea faded away. It is no surprise in such a large, hierarchical organisation, where the central processor – the CEO and cohorts – were far removed from the employees at the work face. Delegating – enabling autonomy – requires a breakup of such hierarchies. This is precisely what happened in Semco. true, it is a much smaller organisation, but the principle is the same.

1. “Commonsense Rebellion” 2001, Bruce E. Levine
2. “The Breakdown of Nations” 1957, Leopold Kohr
3. “Maverick” 2001, Richard Semler