Infodemic Relief - Self Help
Happy Tuesday!
Have you got the coronavirus blues? Are you feeling a lack of control because the coronavirus infodemic? Never fear, Mr. Wonderful is here!
If you find yourself considering looking towards self-help books to manage your fears and panic then hopefully this is useful in putting self-help in a context that gives you a path forward.
Yesterday I was helpful with an essay on choosing skepticism. Skepticism helps reduce the effects of panic and fear using emotional distancing in much the same way social distancing helps with limiting the spread of biological viruses.
Today I'd like to help with reducing the spread of panic and fear by recounting my journey of self help. Ready?
What is self-help? Self-help commonly gets dismissed as 100% garbage. Self-help gets a bad rap because like all capitalists endeavors there exists exploitation. Some exploiters are selling snake oil remedies. Some self-help exploiters are just selling books. Sadly, self-help books and science-fiction books suffer the same fate where so called experts dismiss the entire genre as garbage and throw out the baby with the bath water.
I can assure you that self help books are very effective from my own life's journey. People who poo-poo them are every bit as stupid as Donald Trump. Why? Reading is and always has been an active process. The active process is separating the wheat from the chaff. In my line of work being a software engineer we call this a noise-to-bandwidth ratio. Donald Trump calls out fake news because he is stupid. Why is he stupid, a moron, and imbecile and a complete dullard. Why? Because there is no such thing as the opposite, "real news". All news has noise just like all signal has noise. All news requires active reading to separate out the noise from signal. News has always been that way. Anyone decrying "fake news" is exposing their lack of understanding of active reading, there is no pure signal. A lack of active reading is the same as reason so-called experts dismiss all of self-help and all of science-fiction as noise. These experts are just stupid idiots.
Cry my beloved country, cry? How is it we have a world leader with no understanding of active reading? Fake news has always existed like with the National Enquirer. So why did fake news make the headlines? Fake news got its moniker from an opportunist in San Diego who figured out a way to game Facebook's keyword algorithms. He generated fake outrageous articles for profit. When he was finally caught he was asked why he mostly targeted a conservative audience. His response was that he didn't initially. He discovered he wasn't making any money with fake liberal news and so concentrated on fake conservative news. Why? Because liberals are active readers. Liberals are also skeptics. The liberal audience is far more fragmented than the conservative audience. This is why Air America failed on AM hate radio that is dominated by conservative talkers. Conservative AM radio is just a formula of liberal bashing, conspiracy theories, wedge issues, and anti-communism. In other words noise is the product. A skeptic never buys into conspiracy theories.
If active reading were the norm in the United States then "fake news" would not be relevant. Fake news is just the noise in the signal. This noise has always been there and always will be. There is no need to call out fake news as an active reader. Propaganda has always existed. Duh. Your job as a reader is to be an active reader. When someone like Trump feels like a victim of fake news he is simply exposing the fact he has no understanding of active reading, he's ignorant. But his ignorance is in "good" company with all the "experts" who dismiss all self-help and science-fiction as noise. It is a time honored tradition to use a position of power to dismiss others.
Active reading is required for self-help books. The noise-to-bandwidth ratio is high. One needs the ability to separate the wheat from the chaff. The first step towards beneficial self-help then is to be an active reader and that requires a large degree of skepticism. This is why I started yesterday with an essay on managing panic and fear using skepticism. Skepticism is an active practice that requires reading multiple sources and then again multiple opposing sources. Skepticism is active emotional distancing from information that then affords information updates and corrections.
One must be an active reader with self-help books in much the same way one must be an active reader with healthcare. Homeopathy is a multi-billion dollar industry that preys on people's panic and fear. Speaking of homeopathy then I should get back to answering my original question.
What is self-help? Is it exercise education? Are diet books self-help?
For this essay we are going to limit self-help to mental healthcare. The history of the stigma surrounding self-help is that it arose out a new age movement that was selling snake-oil in crystal power and other nonsense as spiritual healing. This spiritual healing was viewed as something the medical industry ignored. The con artists of self-help were selling fake remedies cheaper than drugs and therapy. Here, buy some crystals, hang them in your window and feel the healing power.
That is the stigma of self-help, but it is not the entire story.
The medical industry exposed a new fact using data collected during the 1960s. That new fact was that far more people suffer from mental conditions than the medical industry could ever hope to accommodate. Especially when one considers that a psychologist requires a medical degree. Psychoanalysis then is a very expensive conversation and a very limited resource. The 1970s then saw the beginning of attempts to try and remedy the shortage. New kinds of therapist were licensed that did not require medical degrees. Councilors were trained with new counseling programs such as grief counselors. This effort still goes on today with such new ideas such as therapy dogs in airports.
Doctors also started writing self-help books for the general public to help with a mental healthcare demand the medical system could never meet. These are the kinds of self-help books I am referring too. Before Sam Harris started his recent campaign to promote meditation as a medically sound practice the doctors in the 1970s started doing research in meditation, fasting, and other eastern traditions to see if there was any truth in their prescriptions. Turns out there was. It is common practice today for therapists today to recommend meditation, visualization, and other eastern practices because they have proven to be effective. On the other hand, pharmaceutical eastern medicine such as Chinese Medicine has turned out to be bunk.
My self-help journey can be stated as reading self-help books written by doctors who have experimented with things like meditation and found them helpful. There is still a lot of noise even in this class of books. Many homeopathy products on the market, especially vitamins, have doctors willing to pimp themselves out for profit. The doctor written books have a very high noise-to-bandwidth ratio. Choose wisely.
For example, one of the most popular self-help books in the 1900s was a relationship book, "Women are from Venus, Men are from Mars". This book was written by Dr. John Gray. My girlfriend at that time was convinced the book was the bee knees. I own a lot of self help books and so she wasn't worried about the self-help book stigma regarding myself. I read the book and was sadly disappointed. Why? Because one rule of thumb I have for separating the wheat from the chaff is this: one size does not fit all. Anyone selling a one-size-fits-all remedy is selling snake oil. Dr. Gray's book is a one-size-fits-all remedy. It's bunk.
Another example of a bad self-help book by a doctor was part of a self-help movement industry in the 1990s known as business books. All kinds of self-help business books were written in that period for a business audience targeting personal success and better management practices. Tony Robbins comes to mind. Many of them were obviously bunk just from the titles. For example, "The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People", by Dr. Steven Covey, is bunk just from the title. Highly effective people are not all the same and do not share the same habits. Duh. Dr. Gray's relationship book suffers the same title flaw generalizing that women are from Venus and men from Mars. Anyone selling self-help that squeezes a single remedy as effective for everyone is selling snake oil. It is noise.
Now that we have buyer beware and active reading requirements out of the way then let's focus on self-help that works.
The first self-help practice is map your physiology and psychology. You wouldn't go randomly hiking in the woods without a map would you? Don't go wonder around your mind without one either. One size does not fit all with mental remedies. What size are you? We need a map that outlines the obstacles we cannot walk through and trails that are easiest to traverse. Those mountains and trails are distinct to each individual.
So your journey on self-help starts with mapping who you are. There are no remedies in this phase. We all need to understand things we can change and things we cannot. In other words we need to update the Serenity prayer:
“God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and wisdom to know the difference.”
to and Ability training:
"Education trains me with the ability to accept the things I cannot change, confidence to change the things I can, and knowledge to know the difference."
Educate yourself on who you are specifically. I got bad news here. Only a few extremes have names. If you are diagnosed bipolar then that's bad. Generally speaking all of us have tendencies based upon the organics of our personality. Addiction, for example, runs in my family. Thankfully that genetic disposition passed me by, but I do have addiction tendencies that need to be actively managed.
We all need to have an accurate profile of who we are if we are to effectively treat ourselves. Modern medicine in 2020 can only help us directly under life-threatening conditions because that is all we have designed healthcare to provide. The rest is up to us and perhaps supplemental treatment from medicine adjacent industries such as grief counseling.
Once we have our mental map of who we are specifically with regards to our mental health then we know the mountains we have no hope to climb and trails we can traverse. These mental mountains and trails are not always clear from reading. Some mountains can only be determined as mountains by making attempts to climb them and some trails will have dead ends. Self-help then is a journey of starting with a crude map and then refining that map through exploration.
There is one personality mapping technique that is worth special consideration here: group therapy. Group therapy is a much hyped remedy used in modern entertainment. Group therapy is a helpful mapping technique but not a remedy in and of itself. Group therapy can help you better understand your own mental profile by seeing similar profiles in others. Group therapy helps people relieve fear and panic of feeling alone in the woods. However, group therapy as a remedy, on the other hand, is highly suspect. For example, Alcoholics Anonymous or AA is commonly promoted in entertainment and in society as a remedy. However, science has debunked AA as an effective remedy. Studies have shown that people who forgo AA treatment have the same recovery rate as those who attend AA. Group therapy may help you better understand yourself and releive the depression and stress of feeling alone in the woods, but it is not necessarily the remedy for the problem at hand. Further there have been many studies that show lives of solitude common in the modern era are detrimental to mental health. This is especially true in times of a health crisis. People such as myself who are prone to live alone may want to consider group therapy as a temporary way to fend off any new detrimental affects of living in isolation. In other words use group therapy as a way to prevent new detrimental mental health affects due to a crisis. This is the same idea as using grief counseling.
So for my money if I needed someone to talk too because of a health crisis then I've asked myself this question: therapist or group therapy? For me, group therapy. Why? Because I want a diversity of opinion, even if the noise-to-bandwidth is high. Also, I have had a few conversations with psychiatrists just as a matter of life and I'm not impressed.
So let's talk remedy now that we've covered the need for mapping.
But wait, we haven't really covered any specifics with respect to mapping other than group therapy?
The purpose of this essay was not to supply specifics. I'm not a doctor. My purpose of this essay was to recommend how to you begin your journey of self-help. I wanted to debunk the idea that all self-help is snake oil. I also wanted to promote the active reading requirement for self-help because of the high noise-to-bandwidth ratio. I also wanted to split self-help into what I see are two distinct components: mapping your own profile of unscalable mountains and common trails along with remedies we commonly associate with self-help. Self-help is not quick-fix remedies. Self-help begins with an education of who and what you are clinically, what I call a mental map.
I am not going to make specific recommendations for either mapping or remedy. I am going to relate my own journey so as a kinda group therapy. You can take my journey and see how it relates to your own life. My self-help solutions provided may not apply to you at all.
I was born under a bad sign. On a clinical level I wet the bed until I was ten-years old. I sucked my thumb in public until I was sixteen. I rocked myself to sleep every night until I was thirty-five. I dreamed I could fly also until I was about thirty-five. On a side note those dreams were increasingly unsatisfactory as I got older as the time I could fly and the heights I could scale gradually declined. If I were to begin a session with a therapist this is the kind of clinical information I would supply them because that is what is well documented in the literature of the day.
I have many other neurological abnormalities beyond those just listed. I suffer from what is now called body sway. Seems I was born with an inner ear disorder that prevents me from fixing on horizon. In other words my mind thinks I'm sailing even when I am standing still. The twist is my inner ear never corrects for horizon. As a result I'm am highly prone to motion sickness. I also have a high degree of body sway and cannot stand still. As you can imagine this defect has had a lot of impact on physical ability. I have no aptitude for sports and that kinda thing.
Another condition I suffer from are random bouts of flight-or-fight emotions. If I had one sentence to describe my childhood it would be this: I spent my childhood crying. People operate under a misconception that certain behaviors are cause-and-effect, that there must be some underlying external event cause or trigger. That is just not true. In this I can relate to women more than men. Women commonly go through abrupt hormone changes and find themselves crying, binge eating, or other behaviors for no apparent reason at all. My fight-or-flight mechanism is broken. It just goes off. When I was younger I commonly experienced night-terrors. As I've gotten older I learned that I suffer from light migraines. Light migraines are painless. However, the migraines did induce night terrors, which I discovered as an adult in my forties. I started waking up in a panic and with a blood pressure over 200. The thing is that the flight-or-fight emotions do have external triggers. That sucks. There are things in life I must avoid as they increase the daily frequency of these emotions. Surprising me, for example, will set one off. As you can imagine this makes relationships problematic. It is almost impossible not to sneak up on someone when you live with them.
Despite everything you just read I am not disabled. This is because I also won the genetic lottery. I was born with a high IQ. I'm an 'A' student when put in a class of other 'A' students. I have never tested my IQ. However, when I am in a class of 'A' students I typically score in the top 3%. But it is more than just IQ. I have an extraordinarily hight EQ, or emotional quotient. I love everyone and am an eternal optimist. I am a happy, well-ground person by default. This means for me that I don't need to find happiness, I just need to manage my deficiencies as detailed above to get to my default state.
As you can see my journey will be distinct to me. Your journey will be distinct to you. You are most definitely not me.
My journey involved managing random and triggered mood swings. Very large mood swings. I have perhaps 1-2 fight-or-flight attacks per day living alone working remote. These can escalate to panic attacks if not managed. Even they they do happen on an ongoing basis where the frequency was daily in my youth. Self-help has provided me with tools to mitigate them to once-per-month on average? There really is no frequency. I can go months without them or have multiple in one day. Hormones I guess.
Panic and fear are definitely a result of our fight or flight nature. I have these emotions daily, sometimes for triggered reasons, but often times just randomly. This is why I never bother educating people I interact with about the triggers. I'm going to have them anyway. I have learned to manage them. I no longer cry willy nilly and for the most part people are happily unaware.
There are some self-help things specific to my distinct need that are not worth mentioning. For example, I did extensive development of meditation practices to develop micro-meditation. I can meditate anywhere, anytime, for a second or two. This allows me to dissipate runaway feelings. Most of you are not dealing with that level of fight-or-flight panic attack needs.
Below are some of the self-help practices that I've used since I was seventeen to manage panic and fear. The are three groups of three in order of most significant to least significant, top-to-bottom respectively. The following categories are where I split out the types of self-help books I've used to manage my mental health.
* Substance abuse
* Sleep
* Exercise
* Meditation
* Visualization
* Environment
* Distraction
* Diet
* Entertainment
Group One
Let's talk substance abuse. We are talking alcohol mainly and drugs in general. Don't. I do not partake in any drugs of any kind. Of course my particular mental profile recommends extreme caution. I have limited control over the attacks of flight or fight. Substance abuse runs in my family. We now know that addiction happens upon first use. We also now know that if one is not addicted to a substance by the age of thirty then the odds of addiction go way down. I'm not taking that chance. Substance abuse is a well understood cause of mood swing. During an infodemic as with coronavirus one may find oneself experiencing high degrees of mood swing. Substances like alcohol will only amplify them. Limit your alcohol intake.
Let's talk sleep. I'd list exercise higher in priority than sleep if not for the fact that one of the main benefits of exercise is that it helps regulate sleep. Every day it seems there are new studies linking sundry health problems with lack of good sleep. If you are feeling panic and fear than I highly recommend experimenting with sleep improvement if you cannot sleep well. There are some simply things you can try like do not keep any electronic devices in your bedroom. Other things require much more effort, like daily exercise.
Let's talk exercise. Exercise builds health in so many ways. It helps regulate diet, hydration, heart rate, and mental health. I put sex in this category. Good sex will get your heart rate going. Good sex is also correlated with good exercise, meaning they are somewhat the same thing. I highly recommend finding your aerobic limit. My aerobic limit is 45 minutes per day five-to-seven times per week. Any more and I'm not feeling additional benefit. I've had many conversations with people about aerobic benefits and believe that the correct amount is specific to your physiology. Some people seem to just need three times per week for thirty minutes to realize optimal mental health benefit. Some people find lifting weights is the mental health ticket.
Group Two
Let's talk meditation. Meditation is my chew toy. I'm always gnawing on it. Meditation for me is a regulation device. Meditation allows me to somewhat take control. Somewhat. Limited control is very satisfying though. I cannot ever completely eliminate the fight-or-flight attacks. I can mitigate the impact when they happen with meditation. Formal meditation requires an hour or so with a dedicated environment and objects of focus. I started with that but found I needed these benefits more than once per day. I then spent many years working out how to micro-meditate. Meditation can temporarily suspend all feeling of panic and fear when practiced correctly. Better stated meditation takes the focus of your mind and puts it somewhere else. In doing so everything currently focused in your mind is suspended. This is sometimes referred to as an alternate state of consciousness. I think of it more as putting the car in neutral while driving. At some point you have to either accelerate or brake but temporarily being in neutral relieves stress and resets stress mechanisms.
Let's talk visualization. The journey of a visualization session is a important for me as the imaginary conversation. Normally I detest all forms of tradition and ceremony. They do nothing for me, ever. Yet another reason why I loathe religion. However, visualization is an exception. In my visualization I take a long nature walk. It starts on a spring day with lush green grass and sporadic trees easily walked through and letting in lots of sunshine. Lots of sunshine. There are butterflies of purple, orange, and yellow wings. There are lots of flowers and honey bees about. Sometimes I stop and pick a certain childhood weed I use to chew and chew on it. There is a babbling brook making gentle calming noises. I walk up the trail and it ends at the brook about half way to my destination. I then stroll alongside the brook with sunlight glancing. Eventually I reach a flat area with rocks of all sizes scattered about. They are gray in color. Sitting on one of those rocks is my spirit guide. He's a dwarf straight out of the Lord of the Rings. He's also chewing on a weed. His face is so beardly that only his nose and eyes are visible. He's wearing a hat. The hat changes all the time, although almost always a red color. I pick a rock and sit on it. I begin talking to my spirit guide about whatever is on my mind. He never talks back. I just get knowing glances. My spirit guide in many ways functions the same as reading something out loud. If one is stuck with writer's block then one exercise that can help is to read what you've written out loud. You'd be surprised at how clarifying it can be reading something out loud can be. My visualization works in much the same way. The long walk and then again talking to Demgy the Dwarf who never talks back also clarifies things. Visualization for me is a thinking mechanism where meditation is a feeling mechanism. Unlike with meditation I never felt the need for visualization other than the one-hour long form. In fact the more time in visualization I spend the better the benefit. I have no micro-visualization technique. Visualization can help with panic and fear. It helps to clarify the thinking in an unemotional setting, or better stated a relaxed environment setting. It is in some way the opposite of meditation. Meditation focuses on not thinking. Visualization is a talking environment.
Let's talk environment. Always pay attention to your environment whether at work or sleeping. There are always things that one can do to spruce up any environment to be better for your mental health. Environment in some ways can be the most specific to dial in. This is why work environments are so offensive. Work environments are sterile first and second you cannot modify them. Having the right amount of light is crucial. Having the right amount of background noise is crucial. I always have music going. Some people prefer talking of television. Some people work best in silence. It is insane to attempt to meet all these in a shared work space. Your sleep environment is most important followed by your exercise environment. Get the environment wrong and neither will be good. My ideal sleep environment allows in sunlight so I can register sunrise with my eyes. This is crucial for my light migraines. A stressful environment will amplify the stress of an infodemic. If you are experiencing coronavirus panic and fear try changing your environment to reduce stress. Perhaps just buy brightly colored fresh flowers. Or try a more involved measure such as rearrange an entire room.
Group Three
Let's talk distraction. Take your mind off things with distractions. I do not recommend fidget devices. They work at first but then they create a new normal. I recommend taking up a new hobby or activity. This is what I wrote in my skepticism essay,
Let's talk diet. Diet may be one of those things you prioritize much higher than I do. Diet doesn't help me with emotional control for managing panic and fear. I've never had much success with diet, including fasting. My body goes into shock if I don't eat. I get dizzy and light-headed if I go without eating. I have fasted for twelve hours and nothing. Diet may be something other people find helpful in managing panic and fear, not me. So why it is here? Diet is extremely important but I just don't find it so in my life.
Let's talk entertainment. Entertainment is a specific form distraction worthy of its own distinction. Effective entertainment helps me regulate emotions. The emotional pathways will realign from fight-or-flight to engaging the entertainment emotional pathways. It is worth exploring many types of entertainment from playing musical instruments to computer games. I do not recommend recreational drugs because they amplify mood swings when you are not on them. I find entertainment provides panic relief and does not amplify panic when I'm no longer engaging in entertainment. Drugs have a way of heightening mood swings when not on them.
That's it. That's my personal journey of self help. Be an active reader and learn to separate the wheat from the chaff. Seek out books written by doctors but realize there will still be much noise. Prioritize building a profile or map of your mental state. You'll need to test boundaries to truly discover things you cannot change and things you can in order to create an accurate map. Once you have this map then you will know where to apply your energies in looking for remedies. I gave a profile of myself to help you understand just how specific the map must be. I then listed three groups of topics that have been beneficial to me, although diet is marginal even as I spent years conducting experiments to know that.
There are thousands of things I did not mention. Things like prayer, chanting, role playing, sports, music, social gatherings, helping others, and so on. Your self help program will be as specific to you as mine is to me. Avoid anyone pushing one size fits all such as with titles like, "The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People."
One last word on reading. Humans have been speaking since the dawn of time. Humans have only been reading en mass since the 1500s and the advent of the printing press. Human brains are still evolving to read. If you have reading limitations this is nothing to be ashamed, nor is it abnormal. People such as myself with high reading comprehension skills are abnormal. So how does one perform active reading if reading itself is limited? There are alternatives. I suggest finding one that allows for skipping unwanted content. Audio books are very common. Find a player that will allow you to fast forward over irrelevant content. I also suggest taking notes. When I was younger I always wrote things down. I took notes in meetings and in class. I'd take notes on books I was reading. Over time I trained my mind to take mental notes and came to rely on written notes less. I think you will find reading notes you wrote a bit easier than other things because the words will always be familiar to you. I also recommend engaging others in conversation. Preferably others who have read books that you cannot. Try and glean information this way. I do not recommend the news recommendations being reporting on panic remedies of the day for precisely for the reason they will be one size fits all.
I hope this helps. If you find yourself considering looking towards self-help to manage your fears and panic then hopefully this was useful in putting self-help in a context that gives you a path forward.
Carry on and customize your self help to your mental profile.
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Have you got the coronavirus blues? Are you feeling a lack of control because the coronavirus infodemic? Never fear, Mr. Wonderful is here!
If you find yourself considering looking towards self-help books to manage your fears and panic then hopefully this is useful in putting self-help in a context that gives you a path forward.
Yesterday I was helpful with an essay on choosing skepticism. Skepticism helps reduce the effects of panic and fear using emotional distancing in much the same way social distancing helps with limiting the spread of biological viruses.
Today I'd like to help with reducing the spread of panic and fear by recounting my journey of self help. Ready?
What is self-help? Self-help commonly gets dismissed as 100% garbage. Self-help gets a bad rap because like all capitalists endeavors there exists exploitation. Some exploiters are selling snake oil remedies. Some self-help exploiters are just selling books. Sadly, self-help books and science-fiction books suffer the same fate where so called experts dismiss the entire genre as garbage and throw out the baby with the bath water.
I can assure you that self help books are very effective from my own life's journey. People who poo-poo them are every bit as stupid as Donald Trump. Why? Reading is and always has been an active process. The active process is separating the wheat from the chaff. In my line of work being a software engineer we call this a noise-to-bandwidth ratio. Donald Trump calls out fake news because he is stupid. Why is he stupid, a moron, and imbecile and a complete dullard. Why? Because there is no such thing as the opposite, "real news". All news has noise just like all signal has noise. All news requires active reading to separate out the noise from signal. News has always been that way. Anyone decrying "fake news" is exposing their lack of understanding of active reading, there is no pure signal. A lack of active reading is the same as reason so-called experts dismiss all of self-help and all of science-fiction as noise. These experts are just stupid idiots.
Cry my beloved country, cry? How is it we have a world leader with no understanding of active reading? Fake news has always existed like with the National Enquirer. So why did fake news make the headlines? Fake news got its moniker from an opportunist in San Diego who figured out a way to game Facebook's keyword algorithms. He generated fake outrageous articles for profit. When he was finally caught he was asked why he mostly targeted a conservative audience. His response was that he didn't initially. He discovered he wasn't making any money with fake liberal news and so concentrated on fake conservative news. Why? Because liberals are active readers. Liberals are also skeptics. The liberal audience is far more fragmented than the conservative audience. This is why Air America failed on AM hate radio that is dominated by conservative talkers. Conservative AM radio is just a formula of liberal bashing, conspiracy theories, wedge issues, and anti-communism. In other words noise is the product. A skeptic never buys into conspiracy theories.
If active reading were the norm in the United States then "fake news" would not be relevant. Fake news is just the noise in the signal. This noise has always been there and always will be. There is no need to call out fake news as an active reader. Propaganda has always existed. Duh. Your job as a reader is to be an active reader. When someone like Trump feels like a victim of fake news he is simply exposing the fact he has no understanding of active reading, he's ignorant. But his ignorance is in "good" company with all the "experts" who dismiss all self-help and science-fiction as noise. It is a time honored tradition to use a position of power to dismiss others.
Active reading is required for self-help books. The noise-to-bandwidth ratio is high. One needs the ability to separate the wheat from the chaff. The first step towards beneficial self-help then is to be an active reader and that requires a large degree of skepticism. This is why I started yesterday with an essay on managing panic and fear using skepticism. Skepticism is an active practice that requires reading multiple sources and then again multiple opposing sources. Skepticism is active emotional distancing from information that then affords information updates and corrections.
One must be an active reader with self-help books in much the same way one must be an active reader with healthcare. Homeopathy is a multi-billion dollar industry that preys on people's panic and fear. Speaking of homeopathy then I should get back to answering my original question.
What is self-help? Is it exercise education? Are diet books self-help?
For this essay we are going to limit self-help to mental healthcare. The history of the stigma surrounding self-help is that it arose out a new age movement that was selling snake-oil in crystal power and other nonsense as spiritual healing. This spiritual healing was viewed as something the medical industry ignored. The con artists of self-help were selling fake remedies cheaper than drugs and therapy. Here, buy some crystals, hang them in your window and feel the healing power.
That is the stigma of self-help, but it is not the entire story.
The medical industry exposed a new fact using data collected during the 1960s. That new fact was that far more people suffer from mental conditions than the medical industry could ever hope to accommodate. Especially when one considers that a psychologist requires a medical degree. Psychoanalysis then is a very expensive conversation and a very limited resource. The 1970s then saw the beginning of attempts to try and remedy the shortage. New kinds of therapist were licensed that did not require medical degrees. Councilors were trained with new counseling programs such as grief counselors. This effort still goes on today with such new ideas such as therapy dogs in airports.
Doctors also started writing self-help books for the general public to help with a mental healthcare demand the medical system could never meet. These are the kinds of self-help books I am referring too. Before Sam Harris started his recent campaign to promote meditation as a medically sound practice the doctors in the 1970s started doing research in meditation, fasting, and other eastern traditions to see if there was any truth in their prescriptions. Turns out there was. It is common practice today for therapists today to recommend meditation, visualization, and other eastern practices because they have proven to be effective. On the other hand, pharmaceutical eastern medicine such as Chinese Medicine has turned out to be bunk.
My self-help journey can be stated as reading self-help books written by doctors who have experimented with things like meditation and found them helpful. There is still a lot of noise even in this class of books. Many homeopathy products on the market, especially vitamins, have doctors willing to pimp themselves out for profit. The doctor written books have a very high noise-to-bandwidth ratio. Choose wisely.
For example, one of the most popular self-help books in the 1900s was a relationship book, "Women are from Venus, Men are from Mars". This book was written by Dr. John Gray. My girlfriend at that time was convinced the book was the bee knees. I own a lot of self help books and so she wasn't worried about the self-help book stigma regarding myself. I read the book and was sadly disappointed. Why? Because one rule of thumb I have for separating the wheat from the chaff is this: one size does not fit all. Anyone selling a one-size-fits-all remedy is selling snake oil. Dr. Gray's book is a one-size-fits-all remedy. It's bunk.
Another example of a bad self-help book by a doctor was part of a self-help movement industry in the 1990s known as business books. All kinds of self-help business books were written in that period for a business audience targeting personal success and better management practices. Tony Robbins comes to mind. Many of them were obviously bunk just from the titles. For example, "The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People", by Dr. Steven Covey, is bunk just from the title. Highly effective people are not all the same and do not share the same habits. Duh. Dr. Gray's relationship book suffers the same title flaw generalizing that women are from Venus and men from Mars. Anyone selling self-help that squeezes a single remedy as effective for everyone is selling snake oil. It is noise.
Now that we have buyer beware and active reading requirements out of the way then let's focus on self-help that works.
The first self-help practice is map your physiology and psychology. You wouldn't go randomly hiking in the woods without a map would you? Don't go wonder around your mind without one either. One size does not fit all with mental remedies. What size are you? We need a map that outlines the obstacles we cannot walk through and trails that are easiest to traverse. Those mountains and trails are distinct to each individual.
So your journey on self-help starts with mapping who you are. There are no remedies in this phase. We all need to understand things we can change and things we cannot. In other words we need to update the Serenity prayer:
“God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and wisdom to know the difference.”
to and Ability training:
"Education trains me with the ability to accept the things I cannot change, confidence to change the things I can, and knowledge to know the difference."
Educate yourself on who you are specifically. I got bad news here. Only a few extremes have names. If you are diagnosed bipolar then that's bad. Generally speaking all of us have tendencies based upon the organics of our personality. Addiction, for example, runs in my family. Thankfully that genetic disposition passed me by, but I do have addiction tendencies that need to be actively managed.
We all need to have an accurate profile of who we are if we are to effectively treat ourselves. Modern medicine in 2020 can only help us directly under life-threatening conditions because that is all we have designed healthcare to provide. The rest is up to us and perhaps supplemental treatment from medicine adjacent industries such as grief counseling.
Once we have our mental map of who we are specifically with regards to our mental health then we know the mountains we have no hope to climb and trails we can traverse. These mental mountains and trails are not always clear from reading. Some mountains can only be determined as mountains by making attempts to climb them and some trails will have dead ends. Self-help then is a journey of starting with a crude map and then refining that map through exploration.
There is one personality mapping technique that is worth special consideration here: group therapy. Group therapy is a much hyped remedy used in modern entertainment. Group therapy is a helpful mapping technique but not a remedy in and of itself. Group therapy can help you better understand your own mental profile by seeing similar profiles in others. Group therapy helps people relieve fear and panic of feeling alone in the woods. However, group therapy as a remedy, on the other hand, is highly suspect. For example, Alcoholics Anonymous or AA is commonly promoted in entertainment and in society as a remedy. However, science has debunked AA as an effective remedy. Studies have shown that people who forgo AA treatment have the same recovery rate as those who attend AA. Group therapy may help you better understand yourself and releive the depression and stress of feeling alone in the woods, but it is not necessarily the remedy for the problem at hand. Further there have been many studies that show lives of solitude common in the modern era are detrimental to mental health. This is especially true in times of a health crisis. People such as myself who are prone to live alone may want to consider group therapy as a temporary way to fend off any new detrimental affects of living in isolation. In other words use group therapy as a way to prevent new detrimental mental health affects due to a crisis. This is the same idea as using grief counseling.
So for my money if I needed someone to talk too because of a health crisis then I've asked myself this question: therapist or group therapy? For me, group therapy. Why? Because I want a diversity of opinion, even if the noise-to-bandwidth is high. Also, I have had a few conversations with psychiatrists just as a matter of life and I'm not impressed.
So let's talk remedy now that we've covered the need for mapping.
But wait, we haven't really covered any specifics with respect to mapping other than group therapy?
The purpose of this essay was not to supply specifics. I'm not a doctor. My purpose of this essay was to recommend how to you begin your journey of self-help. I wanted to debunk the idea that all self-help is snake oil. I also wanted to promote the active reading requirement for self-help because of the high noise-to-bandwidth ratio. I also wanted to split self-help into what I see are two distinct components: mapping your own profile of unscalable mountains and common trails along with remedies we commonly associate with self-help. Self-help is not quick-fix remedies. Self-help begins with an education of who and what you are clinically, what I call a mental map.
I am not going to make specific recommendations for either mapping or remedy. I am going to relate my own journey so as a kinda group therapy. You can take my journey and see how it relates to your own life. My self-help solutions provided may not apply to you at all.
I was born under a bad sign. On a clinical level I wet the bed until I was ten-years old. I sucked my thumb in public until I was sixteen. I rocked myself to sleep every night until I was thirty-five. I dreamed I could fly also until I was about thirty-five. On a side note those dreams were increasingly unsatisfactory as I got older as the time I could fly and the heights I could scale gradually declined. If I were to begin a session with a therapist this is the kind of clinical information I would supply them because that is what is well documented in the literature of the day.
I have many other neurological abnormalities beyond those just listed. I suffer from what is now called body sway. Seems I was born with an inner ear disorder that prevents me from fixing on horizon. In other words my mind thinks I'm sailing even when I am standing still. The twist is my inner ear never corrects for horizon. As a result I'm am highly prone to motion sickness. I also have a high degree of body sway and cannot stand still. As you can imagine this defect has had a lot of impact on physical ability. I have no aptitude for sports and that kinda thing.
Another condition I suffer from are random bouts of flight-or-fight emotions. If I had one sentence to describe my childhood it would be this: I spent my childhood crying. People operate under a misconception that certain behaviors are cause-and-effect, that there must be some underlying external event cause or trigger. That is just not true. In this I can relate to women more than men. Women commonly go through abrupt hormone changes and find themselves crying, binge eating, or other behaviors for no apparent reason at all. My fight-or-flight mechanism is broken. It just goes off. When I was younger I commonly experienced night-terrors. As I've gotten older I learned that I suffer from light migraines. Light migraines are painless. However, the migraines did induce night terrors, which I discovered as an adult in my forties. I started waking up in a panic and with a blood pressure over 200. The thing is that the flight-or-fight emotions do have external triggers. That sucks. There are things in life I must avoid as they increase the daily frequency of these emotions. Surprising me, for example, will set one off. As you can imagine this makes relationships problematic. It is almost impossible not to sneak up on someone when you live with them.
Despite everything you just read I am not disabled. This is because I also won the genetic lottery. I was born with a high IQ. I'm an 'A' student when put in a class of other 'A' students. I have never tested my IQ. However, when I am in a class of 'A' students I typically score in the top 3%. But it is more than just IQ. I have an extraordinarily hight EQ, or emotional quotient. I love everyone and am an eternal optimist. I am a happy, well-ground person by default. This means for me that I don't need to find happiness, I just need to manage my deficiencies as detailed above to get to my default state.
As you can see my journey will be distinct to me. Your journey will be distinct to you. You are most definitely not me.
My journey involved managing random and triggered mood swings. Very large mood swings. I have perhaps 1-2 fight-or-flight attacks per day living alone working remote. These can escalate to panic attacks if not managed. Even they they do happen on an ongoing basis where the frequency was daily in my youth. Self-help has provided me with tools to mitigate them to once-per-month on average? There really is no frequency. I can go months without them or have multiple in one day. Hormones I guess.
Panic and fear are definitely a result of our fight or flight nature. I have these emotions daily, sometimes for triggered reasons, but often times just randomly. This is why I never bother educating people I interact with about the triggers. I'm going to have them anyway. I have learned to manage them. I no longer cry willy nilly and for the most part people are happily unaware.
There are some self-help things specific to my distinct need that are not worth mentioning. For example, I did extensive development of meditation practices to develop micro-meditation. I can meditate anywhere, anytime, for a second or two. This allows me to dissipate runaway feelings. Most of you are not dealing with that level of fight-or-flight panic attack needs.
Below are some of the self-help practices that I've used since I was seventeen to manage panic and fear. The are three groups of three in order of most significant to least significant, top-to-bottom respectively. The following categories are where I split out the types of self-help books I've used to manage my mental health.
* Substance abuse
* Sleep
* Exercise
* Meditation
* Visualization
* Environment
* Distraction
* Diet
* Entertainment
Group One
Let's talk substance abuse. We are talking alcohol mainly and drugs in general. Don't. I do not partake in any drugs of any kind. Of course my particular mental profile recommends extreme caution. I have limited control over the attacks of flight or fight. Substance abuse runs in my family. We now know that addiction happens upon first use. We also now know that if one is not addicted to a substance by the age of thirty then the odds of addiction go way down. I'm not taking that chance. Substance abuse is a well understood cause of mood swing. During an infodemic as with coronavirus one may find oneself experiencing high degrees of mood swing. Substances like alcohol will only amplify them. Limit your alcohol intake.
Let's talk sleep. I'd list exercise higher in priority than sleep if not for the fact that one of the main benefits of exercise is that it helps regulate sleep. Every day it seems there are new studies linking sundry health problems with lack of good sleep. If you are feeling panic and fear than I highly recommend experimenting with sleep improvement if you cannot sleep well. There are some simply things you can try like do not keep any electronic devices in your bedroom. Other things require much more effort, like daily exercise.
Let's talk exercise. Exercise builds health in so many ways. It helps regulate diet, hydration, heart rate, and mental health. I put sex in this category. Good sex will get your heart rate going. Good sex is also correlated with good exercise, meaning they are somewhat the same thing. I highly recommend finding your aerobic limit. My aerobic limit is 45 minutes per day five-to-seven times per week. Any more and I'm not feeling additional benefit. I've had many conversations with people about aerobic benefits and believe that the correct amount is specific to your physiology. Some people seem to just need three times per week for thirty minutes to realize optimal mental health benefit. Some people find lifting weights is the mental health ticket.
Group Two
Let's talk meditation. Meditation is my chew toy. I'm always gnawing on it. Meditation for me is a regulation device. Meditation allows me to somewhat take control. Somewhat. Limited control is very satisfying though. I cannot ever completely eliminate the fight-or-flight attacks. I can mitigate the impact when they happen with meditation. Formal meditation requires an hour or so with a dedicated environment and objects of focus. I started with that but found I needed these benefits more than once per day. I then spent many years working out how to micro-meditate. Meditation can temporarily suspend all feeling of panic and fear when practiced correctly. Better stated meditation takes the focus of your mind and puts it somewhere else. In doing so everything currently focused in your mind is suspended. This is sometimes referred to as an alternate state of consciousness. I think of it more as putting the car in neutral while driving. At some point you have to either accelerate or brake but temporarily being in neutral relieves stress and resets stress mechanisms.
Let's talk visualization. The journey of a visualization session is a important for me as the imaginary conversation. Normally I detest all forms of tradition and ceremony. They do nothing for me, ever. Yet another reason why I loathe religion. However, visualization is an exception. In my visualization I take a long nature walk. It starts on a spring day with lush green grass and sporadic trees easily walked through and letting in lots of sunshine. Lots of sunshine. There are butterflies of purple, orange, and yellow wings. There are lots of flowers and honey bees about. Sometimes I stop and pick a certain childhood weed I use to chew and chew on it. There is a babbling brook making gentle calming noises. I walk up the trail and it ends at the brook about half way to my destination. I then stroll alongside the brook with sunlight glancing. Eventually I reach a flat area with rocks of all sizes scattered about. They are gray in color. Sitting on one of those rocks is my spirit guide. He's a dwarf straight out of the Lord of the Rings. He's also chewing on a weed. His face is so beardly that only his nose and eyes are visible. He's wearing a hat. The hat changes all the time, although almost always a red color. I pick a rock and sit on it. I begin talking to my spirit guide about whatever is on my mind. He never talks back. I just get knowing glances. My spirit guide in many ways functions the same as reading something out loud. If one is stuck with writer's block then one exercise that can help is to read what you've written out loud. You'd be surprised at how clarifying it can be reading something out loud can be. My visualization works in much the same way. The long walk and then again talking to Demgy the Dwarf who never talks back also clarifies things. Visualization for me is a thinking mechanism where meditation is a feeling mechanism. Unlike with meditation I never felt the need for visualization other than the one-hour long form. In fact the more time in visualization I spend the better the benefit. I have no micro-visualization technique. Visualization can help with panic and fear. It helps to clarify the thinking in an unemotional setting, or better stated a relaxed environment setting. It is in some way the opposite of meditation. Meditation focuses on not thinking. Visualization is a talking environment.
Let's talk environment. Always pay attention to your environment whether at work or sleeping. There are always things that one can do to spruce up any environment to be better for your mental health. Environment in some ways can be the most specific to dial in. This is why work environments are so offensive. Work environments are sterile first and second you cannot modify them. Having the right amount of light is crucial. Having the right amount of background noise is crucial. I always have music going. Some people prefer talking of television. Some people work best in silence. It is insane to attempt to meet all these in a shared work space. Your sleep environment is most important followed by your exercise environment. Get the environment wrong and neither will be good. My ideal sleep environment allows in sunlight so I can register sunrise with my eyes. This is crucial for my light migraines. A stressful environment will amplify the stress of an infodemic. If you are experiencing coronavirus panic and fear try changing your environment to reduce stress. Perhaps just buy brightly colored fresh flowers. Or try a more involved measure such as rearrange an entire room.
Group Three
Let's talk distraction. Take your mind off things with distractions. I do not recommend fidget devices. They work at first but then they create a new normal. I recommend taking up a new hobby or activity. This is what I wrote in my skepticism essay,
"What if its too late? What if you are not a currently a skeptic yet and feel trapped in your panic and fear? One remedy that works for me is to start a new project that when completed leaves behind a tangible accomplishment in the real world. Take up knitting and knit yourself a hat to display for all the world to see! Something like that. This infodemic will end. If you take up a new constructive project then at the end of your current terror you are currently feeling then you will have what you constructed as a reminder you no only survived a previous infodemic, but made something new that you still use! This builds self confidence and this new confidence can even be invested in a new journey of becoming a skeptic with information defenses."
Let's talk diet. Diet may be one of those things you prioritize much higher than I do. Diet doesn't help me with emotional control for managing panic and fear. I've never had much success with diet, including fasting. My body goes into shock if I don't eat. I get dizzy and light-headed if I go without eating. I have fasted for twelve hours and nothing. Diet may be something other people find helpful in managing panic and fear, not me. So why it is here? Diet is extremely important but I just don't find it so in my life.
Let's talk entertainment. Entertainment is a specific form distraction worthy of its own distinction. Effective entertainment helps me regulate emotions. The emotional pathways will realign from fight-or-flight to engaging the entertainment emotional pathways. It is worth exploring many types of entertainment from playing musical instruments to computer games. I do not recommend recreational drugs because they amplify mood swings when you are not on them. I find entertainment provides panic relief and does not amplify panic when I'm no longer engaging in entertainment. Drugs have a way of heightening mood swings when not on them.
That's it. That's my personal journey of self help. Be an active reader and learn to separate the wheat from the chaff. Seek out books written by doctors but realize there will still be much noise. Prioritize building a profile or map of your mental state. You'll need to test boundaries to truly discover things you cannot change and things you can in order to create an accurate map. Once you have this map then you will know where to apply your energies in looking for remedies. I gave a profile of myself to help you understand just how specific the map must be. I then listed three groups of topics that have been beneficial to me, although diet is marginal even as I spent years conducting experiments to know that.
There are thousands of things I did not mention. Things like prayer, chanting, role playing, sports, music, social gatherings, helping others, and so on. Your self help program will be as specific to you as mine is to me. Avoid anyone pushing one size fits all such as with titles like, "The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People."
One last word on reading. Humans have been speaking since the dawn of time. Humans have only been reading en mass since the 1500s and the advent of the printing press. Human brains are still evolving to read. If you have reading limitations this is nothing to be ashamed, nor is it abnormal. People such as myself with high reading comprehension skills are abnormal. So how does one perform active reading if reading itself is limited? There are alternatives. I suggest finding one that allows for skipping unwanted content. Audio books are very common. Find a player that will allow you to fast forward over irrelevant content. I also suggest taking notes. When I was younger I always wrote things down. I took notes in meetings and in class. I'd take notes on books I was reading. Over time I trained my mind to take mental notes and came to rely on written notes less. I think you will find reading notes you wrote a bit easier than other things because the words will always be familiar to you. I also recommend engaging others in conversation. Preferably others who have read books that you cannot. Try and glean information this way. I do not recommend the news recommendations being reporting on panic remedies of the day for precisely for the reason they will be one size fits all.
I hope this helps. If you find yourself considering looking towards self-help to manage your fears and panic then hopefully this was useful in putting self-help in a context that gives you a path forward.
Carry on and customize your self help to your mental profile.
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