Mental Health — Insight

My children attend swimming classes at a local leisure centre, where they work through a scheme of levels. Each stage has its own coloured swimming cap, which pleasingly makes up a rainbow once you’ve worked through them all. You start at stage 1 (red cap) and move up through orange, yellow, green, blue and finish at stage 6 — the ultimate goal and pinnacle of achievement — purple cap. Within each stage there is a criteria to fulfil and there are extra badges to earn along the way. During each lesson the children are marked on various competencies and on a handy online dashboard parents and carers can see how their child is progressing in each discipline (not assessed/needs improvement/fair and good), with a total percentage towards completion. It’s visually striking and motivating in tangible ways. How clever. There’s an overall percentage to keep you motivated and the beautiful visual of collecting a rainbow — something for everyone. And it works. I expect some of us are more predisposed to wanting to collect a whole set and complete something given the dangling carrot of prizes along the way. The games industry hangs off this human trait and takes advantage of our inbuilt need to collect. So I’m curious as to where this comes from, because it starts early.

There’s been interesting thought and discussion about the roots of collecting. An article by Christian Jarrett, ‘Why do we collect things? Love anxiety or desire’, looks at emotional drivers such as nostalgia and existential anxieties, which we soothe with collections of things. Sigmund Freud posed the notion of feeling more in control and achieving a sense of order through owning specific objects. And by actually owning them and calling them ours, we value them more (this is known as the Endowment Effect). The act of collating objects in this way helps us to create and affirm our sense identity.

Comedian Mae Martin has a great standup piece about humans collecting lived experiences like little snow globes that we furnish our brains with and keep stored, ready to show off as proof of our existence and who we are. Doesn’t that neatly visualise how delicate our sense of identity and worth can be? All these possibilities point to the fragility of humankind and an inbuilt need to be in control of something and to have something to show for ourselves.

Research has been carried out looking into the power of gamification in the real world to motivate achievement and completion of tasks. A study in Science Direct concluded that elements such as appearing on a leaderboard and being awarded badges increase perception of the meaningfulness of a task and also heighten an individual’s sense of mastery of a skill.

Returning to the swimming, my daughter is so desperate to move up to the next coloured cap as soon as she can that she’s not even thinking about the swimming or improving her style, she just wants the next cap, whether it’s appropriate or not. That’s led us to have conversations about being in the moment. With her gaze firmly fixed on the next milestone, she’s missing out on the enjoyment of the current lesson. What purpose would it serve moving onto green cap if she’s not ready for it? Surely that will make for a harder transition and a tough time struggling in a lesson that’s beyond her capabilities — a little fish in a big pond. Do we become so focussed on looking for the next step, the next promotion, the next activity, the next thing to convince ourselves we’re moving and growing and developing, that we miss what’s happening in the moment? There’s a lot to be said for slowing down and taking stock. Although modern western society might try to tell you otherwise.

There’s been a subtle trend emerging on social media of ‘glamourising the grind’. The work hard/play hard ethos, which has its merits up to a point, but also threatens to burn us out while we try to do it all. The photo of the morning coffee at the desk at 7am shared to let the world know that you’re putting in the hours. Plus you did a run at sunrise and you’ll be clocking off late in the evening. I wonder what message that really sends? Are you okay? Are you looking after yourself? Or are you ruled by your schedule without a moment to connect with yourself and find out what you truly need? Have you taken on too much? If needs must, then maybe it’s a quiet cry for help.

So, what is stopping us from slowing down and is this something we need to be addressing with younger generations, to stop them from falling into this fast paced trap of achievement and accumulation?

‘Leaning Into Slowing Down’ highlights how a strong feeling of ‘should’ is a blocker to slowing down. An internal voice or external influence leading us to believe that we ‘should’ be doing more and achieving more. Slowing down and going against the cultural grain takes courage. It means saying “no” to more things and being disciplined in guarding your time. I once heard somebody say it’s worth remembering that by saying “yes”, you’re also saying “no” to hundreds of opportunities. That hit me powerfully, because I’d always considered “yes” to be the only positive path, but in truth a “no” can open up other avenues. Maybe declining an invitation to go out means that you can have the rest you need to feel energised for a new opportunity tomorrow. That’s worth a moment’s pause.

For those who believe in perfect timing, maybe there’s a reason why that promotion isn’t coming through just yet, or that train is late, or you’re not moving up to green cap. Maybe it’s fine to just be in this moment for now and see what emerges. It’s okay that it hasn’t all happened yesterday.

A friend told me about a theory called “the shoelace effect”, which stuck happily in my mind.

“An apparently trivial incident, item or decision turns out to have massive repercussions”.

So, there might be a reason why you had to stop and do up your shoelace, you might not know what it was, but in that moment your path altered.

Nurturing a child is a journey that feels weighty with responsibility. Having children of my own has made me acutely aware of the vast choice of hobbies and pursuits on offer to young people growing up in the South East of England (my reference point at least). Most of these extra curricular activities come at a cost, which is the first hurdle to overcome, whilst also helping to force streamlining and prioritisation. There simply is not time or money to do it all! And I’m currently clinging to a fantasy that we will be able to keep Saturdays club free in favour of an idyllic morning of leisurely coffee drinking and book reading while the children amuse themselves peacefully. When, in fact, every morning starts with a pre-6am chorus of screaming and tears because nobody can play nicely for more than 5 minutes. But hey ho, even this is progress from the baby days, and I dream on.

I’m irked by the feeling that I want my children to have the opportunity to try out various activities so they can discover which they want to embrace. But then, as I recall, I was enrolled in ballet and Brownies, just like every other 6 year old girl I knew in the 80s, and that was that. I didn’t know whether I was missing out on anything else. And as a consequence I wonder what activities or hobbies I just never came into contact with that could have been the perfect thing for me. Was I born to be a synchronised swimmer? A unicyclist? A champion darts player? …I may never know.

And now as a modern day parent I feel the pressure (from where, I’m not sure…myself, social media, all the free trials!) to try to give my children as broad a taste as possible, of the diversity of dance, sport, play, life skills, arts and creativity.

Perhaps this paralysing fear comes from me not knowing that I ever stumbled across the one THING I was born to do, that beautiful skill that I love doing and am actually great at, that can earn me a happy living (the daydreaming continues). I’ve happened across things along the way. Careers have grown, some forced, some more organically, but nothing has landed as a true alignment with who I am, or what I’m capable of. If I’m honest, I’d love someone to come along and say “I see you have these skills and these qualities, and you know what? This is just the job for you!” Tada!

I struggle to see myself and work out my worth. What others have reported as their view of me, always strikes me as surprising. Maybe I’m a master at masking and pretending to be okay when I feel like I’m failing. Or maybe my expectation to achieve perfection straight away is what’s holding me back. Maybe both these are true.

I’m all too aware that my career path to this point was suggested by others, and may not have been the right fit. I loved sewing as a child — making bags, cushions, clothes. So somebody wellmeaning said casually, “You could be an interior designer”. My love for art was well known, I would lose myself in drawings and painting quite happily for hours. But I held onto this piece of ‘advice’ and started telling people I was going to be an interior designer. I’d been told that ‘Art’ was not a career, but it was the subject I adored most at school and the only part of the school day that didn’t fill me with dread and worry. So it was that I went on to study Interior Architecture at University….and then did precisely nothing with that achievement.

So was it foolish to try to turn a loved and sacred passion into a job? The pastimes and hobbies of my childhood are ones that slipped away almost as soon as I became a teenager, focusing on the seriousness of school work and qualifications over the things I just loved doing for pleasure. On reflection this was a turning point where life became about academic advancement and future planning rather than my mental and physical health in the moment. The activities I most enjoyed and gleefully filled my free childhood time with were cycling, swimming, dancing and music (amongst others), but without even realising it a part of my brain had deemed this unimportant and distracting from the essential work and deadlines of responsible adulthood. This was easily carried into parenthood, where the idea of an idle moment spent doing anything other than chipping away at the ‘To Do’ list was inconceivable.

And it’s not been good for my wellbeing. It came as a surprise to me (and really shouldn’t have) to recognise that the ways I now get enormous pleasure from life is through revisiting those activities I loved as a child — dancing, cycling, swimming, music (and just playing!).

All the wonderful hobbies that are so encouraged during childhood remain vital. Somehow the focus shifts but the need doesn’t. Those playful active fun forms of recreation are arguably needed more than ever for mental and physical health throughout adulthood. Those rare and beautiful flow activities where I find myself mindfully in the moment without having to urge myself into a meditative state are so special. The fine balance of experiencing ‘flow’ in activities was outlined in the 1960s by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (Psychology Today) who described it as “A state in which people are so involved in an activity that nothing else seems to matter”. What a special place to find yourself! It’s also a place where there is enough of a challenge and a trajectory to follow, which when absorbed in distorts the sense of time and dissolves self-consciousness. A rare state to be in, from my experience, in adult life where the responsibility to perform, conform and achieve slams me firmly into overthinking and over feeling! Having stumbled back into the joy of dancing in my adult years, I’ve found that to be true flow activity, with the structure of set moves and rules to try to follow all threading through a beat, generally punctuated with laughter and fun. Now that is how I want to move my body! It’s little wonder that research demonstrates how dancing has a significantly positive impact on our minds and bodies (BBC Radio 4 — Just One Thing with Michael Mosley ‘Why Dancing is the Best Way to Enhance Your Brain and Fitness’ ). The need to be engaging our brains (to think about a sequence of moves for example), whilst physically executing the steps is a fantastic brain training exercise, along with getting the blood pumping and muscles in action.

Anything that transports me away from my thoughts and purely into creating or moving feel as though they feed my soul and I subsequently find it so much easier to engage in. The beauty of finding a flow activity is that it’s a nurturing growth state to be in, unlike becoming unintentionally absorbed in scrolling my phone and sidetracked by social media, which can so cleverly steal my attention and rob me of my time. The TEDx Talk ‘The Battle for Your Time: Exposing the Costs of Social Media’ by Dino Ambrosi starkly presents the alarming reality of how precious our time is and how easily it can be unwittingly wasted being sedentary, consuming content that has the potential to lower our mood and erode our self esteem. So, for me, the combination of movement, focus and music is a captivating recipe that takes me beyond myself in a positive way.

I’ve realised that my commitment to a hobby or activity might not be as simple as just swimming lengths in a pool though — I’ve started dipping my toe into open water swimming, or as my husband likes to call it “swimming”. The environment counts! The freedom, openness and connection to nature brings a different experience. I liken it to running on a treadmill versus running outdoors. Being immersed in changing scenery, weather and elements helps my mind go elsewhere. Maybe more to survival?! “Keep swimming so you don’t have a chance to think about what’s lurking below the surface!” But truthfully it’s a less fretful mindset than swimming lanes at the leisure centre, which I quickly tire of. Perhaps as an adult I need to claw back more of the childhood mentality of focussing on the joy of an activity I love rather than getting bogged down in the sensible practicalities. In the same way that children learn through play, our ageing brains and bodies benefit from a playful approach at all stages of life (National Institute for Play).

Frustratingly my tendency has been to take things VERY SERIOUSLY, particularly when it comes to work — my performance and work ethic. No doubt cultivated from a young age and strengthened from being the oldest child — a girl at that — to a younger brother. Scattergun approach to stereotyping here, I hold my hands up. But I started concerning myself with rules, being good and working my hardest at every opportunity from a tender age. Nature, nurture, it’s all in the mix and it’s how I unquestioningly lived life until I was presented with the refreshing and eye opening realisation that other people can approach exactly the same task with wildly different viewpoints and behaviours. How about that? I teamed up with my brother on a website building project (a skill that he is comfortably au fait with and deeply wonderful at) and was struck by how he peppered the work with playfulness, joking and more to the point, actively messing around and doing things incorrectly for a laugh! The horror. In truth, I truly enjoyed working that way with him and felt appeased by the laughter and lightness. But I categorically never would have opted to work that way independently. “Work must be taken seriously and no time must be wasted. You will be miserable until the task is complete and that is your fate.” That’s the route I had always chosen to walk, without considering that perhaps there were other outlooks to take.

I’ve seen this outlook play an invaluable part in parenting, especially to diffuse a potentially charged or emotional moment. Humour can ease a stalemate when a child refuses to put on their socks and a quick thinking adult decides to forget where their feet are and attempt to force a sock onto their head. Such genius to meet a reluctant toddler head on with playful foolish humour. Admittedly that’s an approach that takes a serious amount of brain engagement for me — instead of doggedly sticking to the “socks on” script!

It makes sense of course. We all come in our own little skins, filled up and infused with our unique experiences and selves. So my way is most certainly not the highway, and it turns out that it shouldn’t be either! How delightful to walk through your days viewing your life as a comedy where each encounter and occurrence is fodder for a fantastically entertaining story later down the line.

So I shall endeavour to swim in the rain, dance on the stage and sing sing sing! I’ll put in the effort to weave joyful movements back into my life, while I continue ferrying my own children around to Squirrels, Rainbows, Acro, swimming… and maybe I’ll discover some new pursuits along the way too.