The Mental Health First-Aid That You'll Hopefully Never Need

It’s Psychology Sunday here at 10almonds, as good mental health is an important foundation for the rest of health and productivity. In today’s issue:

• Working memory (and how to improve it)

• Depression

  • The PHQ9 Test

  • How to help someone suffering from depression

  • How to help yourself suffering from depression

• A quick pick-me-up!

• The science of self-learning (and how to employ it)

👀 WATCH AND LEARN

🧠 Always forgetting? It may be a working memory problem

Psychiatrist Dr. Tracey Marks has advice for any of us whose brains just don’t seem to want to hold onto things:

Click Here If The Embedded Video Doesn’t Load Automatically!

• 0:00 Working memory (what it should be doing)

• 1:17 Low working memory (what’s going wrong)

• 3:35 Visualizing (one way to address it)

• 4:57 Cognitive Offloading (another way to address it)

😎 MAIN FEATURE

❤️‍🩹 Take Your Mental Health As Seriously As General Health!

Sometimes, health and productivity means excelling—sometimes, it means avoiding illness and unproductivity. Both are essential, and today we’re going to tackle some ground-up stuff. If you don’t need it right now, great; we suggest to read it for when and if you do. But how likely is it that you will?

• One in four of us are affected by serious mental health issues in any given year.

• One in five of us have suicidal thoughts at some point in our lifetime.

• One in six of us are affected to at least some extent by the most commonly-reported mental health issues, anxiety and depression, in any given week.

…and that’s just what’s reported, of course. These stats are from a UK-based source but can be considered indicative generally. Jokes aside, the UK is not a special case and is not measurably worse for people’s mental health than, say, the US or Canada 😉

While this is not an inherently cheery topic, we think it’s an important one.

Depression, which we’re going to focus on today, is very very much a killer to both health and productivity, after all.

One of the most commonly-used measures of depression is known by the snappy name of “PHQ9”. It stands for “Patient Health Questionnaire Nine”, and you can take it anonymously online for free (without signing up for anything; it’s right there on the page already):

Take The PHQ9 Test Here! (under 2 minutes, immediate results)

There’s a chance you took that test and your score was, well, depressing. There’s also a chance you’re doing just peachy, or maybe somewhere in between. PHQ9 scores can fluctuate over time (because they focus on the past two weeks, and also rely on self-reports in the moment), so you might want to bookmark it to test again periodically. It can be interesting to track over time.

In the event that you’re struggling (or: in case one day you find yourself struggling, or want to be able to support a loved one who is struggling), some top tips that are useful:

Accept that it’s a medical condition like any other

Which means some important things:

• You/they are not lazy or otherwise being a bad person by being depressed

• You/they will probably get better at some point, especially if help is available

• You/they cannot, however, “just snap out of it”; illness doesn’t work that way

• Medication might help (it also might not)

Do what you can, how you can, when you can

Everyone knows the advice to exercise as a remedy for depression, and indeed, exercise helps many. Unfortunately, it’s not always that easy.

Did you ever see the 80s kids’ movie “The Neverending Story”? There’s a scene in which the young hero Atreyu must traverse the “Swamp of Sadness”, and while he has a magical talisman that protects him, his beloved horse Artax is not so lucky; he slows down, and eventually stops still, sinking slowly into the swamp. Atreyu pulls at him and begs him to keep going, but—despite being many times bigger and stronger than Atreyu, the horse just sinks into the swamp, literally drowning in despair.

See the scene: The Neverending Story movie clip - Artax and the Swamp of Sadness (1984)

Wow, they really don’t make kids’ movies like they used to, do they?

But, depression is very much like that, and advice “exercise to feel less depressed!” falls short of actually being helpful, when one is too depressed to do it.

If you’re in the position of supporting someone who’s depressed, the best tool in your toolbox will be not “here’s why you should do this” (they don’t care; not because they’re an uncaring person by nature, but because they are physiologically impeded from caring about themself at this time), but rather:

“please do this with me”

The reason this has a better chance of working is because the depressed person will in all likelihood be unable to care enough to raise and/or maintain an objection, and while they can’t remember why they should care about themself, they’re more likely to remember that they should care about you, and so will go with your want/need more easily than with their own. It’s not a magic bullet, but it’s worth a shot.

What if I’m the depressed person, though?

Honestly, the same, if there’s someone around you that you do care about; do what you can to look after you, for them, if that means you can find some extra motivation.

But I’m all alone… what now?

Firstly, you don’t have to be alone. There are free services that you can access, for example:

• US: https://nami.org/help 

• Canada: https://www.wellnesstogether.ca/en-CA 

• UK: https://www.samaritans.org/ 

…which varyingly offer advice, free phone services, webchats, and the like.

But also, there are ways you can look after yourself a little bit; do the things you’d advise someone else to do, even if you’re sure they won’t work:

• Take a little walk around the block

• Put the lights on when you’re not sleeping

• For that matter, get out of bed when you’re not sleeping. Literally lie on the floor if necessary, but change your location.

• Change your bedding, or at least your clothes

• If changing the bedding is too much, change just the pillowcase

• If changing your clothes is too much, change just one item of clothing

• Drink some water; it won’t magically cure you, but you’ll be in slightly better order

• On the topic of water, splash some on your face, if showering/bathing is too much right now

• Do something creative (that’s not self-harm). You may scoff at the notion of “art therapy” helping, but this is a way to get at least some of the lights on in areas of your brain that are a little dark right now. Worst case scenario is it’ll be a distraction from your problems, so give it a try.

• Find a connection to community—whatever that means to you—even if you don’t feel you can join it right now. Discover that there are people out there who would welcome you if you were able to go join them. Maybe one day you will!

• Hiding from the world? That’s probably not healthy, but while you’re hiding, take the time to read those books (write those books, if you’re so inclined), learn that new language, take up chess, take up baking, whatever. If you can find something that means anything to you, go with that for now, ride that wave. Motivation’s hard to come by during depression and you might let many things slide; you might as well get something out of this period if you can.

If you’re not depressed right now but you know you’re predisposed to such / can slip that way?

Write yourself instructions now. Copy the above list if you like.

Most of all: have a “things to do when I don’t feel like doing anything” list.

If you only take one piece of advice from today’s newsletter, let that one be it!

📖 ONE-MINUTE BOOK REVIEW

The Science of Self-Learning - by Peter Hollins

Teaching oneself new things is often the most difficult kind of bootstrapping, especially when one is unsure of such critical things as:

• Where to begin? How, for that matter, do we find where to begin?

• What can/should a learning journey look like?

• What challenges should we expect, and how will we overcome them?

Hollins answers all of these questions and more. The greatest value of this book is perhaps in its clear presentation of concrete step-by-step instructions. Hollins gives illustrated examples too, but most importantly, he gives models that can be applied to any given type of learning.

The book also covers the most difficult problems most people face when trying to learn something by themselves, including:

• Keeping oneself on-task (maintaining discipline)

• Measuring progress (self-testing beyond memorization)

• Keeping a fair pace of progress (avoiding plateaus)

• How to know when one's knowledge is sufficient or not (avoiding Dunning-Kruger Club)

All in all, if you're looking to learn a new subject or skill, this could be a first step that saves you a lot of time later!

Get your copy of the Science of Self-Learning on Amazon today!

Wishing you a happy healthy mind and body,

The 10almonds Team