How to Stay Sane

To begin self-observing, ask yourself these questions:
What am I feeling now?
What am I thinking now?
What am I doing at this moment?
How am I breathing?
These simple questions are important because when we have answered them, we are in a better position to proceed to the next question:
What do I want for myself in this new moment?3

Each of us comes from a mother and a father, or from a sperm bank, and each of us was brought up by our parents or by people standing in for them. Many of us have siblings, uncles, aunts and cousins. All of these people have an impact on who we are, as do their ancestors. Those ancestors, too, had problems and triumphs, and any learning or habits these experiences gave them they tended to pass down.

As I have said previously, sometimes a new behaviour feels false or unreal but is merely unfamiliar. In my experience what ‘feels’ true might not actually be the truth, or good for us; it might merely be familiar. And, conversely, what feels ‘false’ might not be; it might just be new.

There are many dynamics that are passed down by previous generations or established by childhood adaptations to an environment that the individual no longer inhabits. An example is our attitude to money: we may be striving for money at the expense of our relationships, or believe we have less or more than we actually do. Money is often a metaphor for how secure we feel in our relationships. For example: if we cannot face up to our fear of losing love, we displace that fear by reiterating reasons to be mean with our money.

Then there are our attitudes to place. If we are always moving, never satisfied with this town or that house, this country or that continent, and come up with brilliant reasons as to why we need to move again, the solution is probably to be found in our own psyche, rather than in the geography of a particular place or the ways of its inhabitants.

Optimism does not mean continual happiness, glazed eyes and a fixed grin. When I talk about the desirability of optimism I do not mean that we should delude ourselves about reality. But practising optimism does mean focusing more on the positive fall-out of an event than on the negative. It does not mean denying that you feel sad that, say, a relationship has not worked out, but rather acknowledging that you are now in a position to have a more successful relationship in the future. I am not advocating the kind of optimism that means you blow all your savings on a horse running at a hundred to one; I am talking about being optimistic enough to sow some seeds in the hope that some of them will germinate and grow into flowers.

The trouble is, if we do not have a mind that is used to hearing good news, we do not have the neural pathways to process such news. If we are in this situation we are probably unaware of it, because it is not as though we hear good news and do not trust it. Rather, it is as though we cannot hear good news as good news at all.

Creating a consistent self-narrative that makes sense and feels true to ourselves is a challenge at any stage in life. Our stories give shape to our inchoate, disparate, fleeting impressions of everyday life. They bring together the past and the future into the present to provide us with structures for working toward our goals. They give us a sense of identity and, most importantly, serve to integrate the feelings of our right brain with the language of our left.

The great thing about a story is that it is flexible. We can change a story from one that does not help us to one that does. If the script we have lived by in the past does not work for us anymore we do not need to accept it as our script of the future.

This use of storytelling helps us to gain some distance from ourselves and gives us perspective. We can also use stories to help us escape into our imaginations when there is no escape in reality.

Children often create imaginary worlds where they can succeed and triumph. Though they may be limited in their choices in real life, they can use imagination and storytelling to soothe themselves during real-life experiences that might otherwise be intolerable. It is not only children who can do this.