I experience a variety of mental health downward spirals.
I tend to get unduly sad; this fact about myself makes me sad. I get unduly anxious, which makes me feel anxious. And when I start to feel slightly anxious, I immediately get “meta-anxious”: Am I about to get really anxious? Then I do, of course. Hypervigilance of whether I’m safe and in control makes me feel unsafe and not in control. That encourages still greater vigilance. I get depressed by the fact that I am depressive.
Most dangerous of all the spirals, it seems like a life worth living is, by definition, a life such that I want to be alive. So, on those days when I don’t care whether I’m alive, or full-on want to die, those dark feelings confirm that my life isn’t worth living. That makes me want to die.
There’s no click-bait “The one simple secret to getting out of mental health spirals!” But there are two steps forward which I’m working on.
No surprise: part of what causes the spiral is a focus on the negative. I look over the precipice, I feel more afraid of falling. One partial remedy is to not set up as my goal a negative, viz., simply wanting to not be… unduly sad, unduly anxious, etc. Having such goals is itself a barrier to overcoming the negatives. Nor is “achieving mental health” a helpful thing to aim for. For, what is that anyway? In fact, it is implicitly a negative goal, since it really means: free of undue sadness, undue anxiety, undue need for control, etc. Besides, what exactly is it to work towards “mental health”?
The other step forward is the flip side: having, as a positive goal, promoting my values and experiencing the things which give me joy. (A sub-step here, which I’m also working on, is explicitly identifying what those values are in my own case; more on that in another post.) I can’t manage the the joy/values things all the time, but I should be capable of taking advantage when the opportunities come around for delight.
Aiming for that can (maybe) rejig the spiral from downwards to upwards.