Mental Health Coffee Time

As I have begun to explore my goals and desires, one concept that has struck out to me was the concept of inner selves. In our adult world, I often find myself governed by my pragmatic, goal-oriented adult self. This self is hyper-rational and focused on achievement, and sometimes also image-conscious. This “adult” self is in contrast to my “child” self, who remains hidden behind my adult self. In this post, I want to explore the differences between my child and adult self, and allow strategies for balance between the two of them during my adult life.

As a young child, I was governed by a dominant sense of self which was free-flowing, curious, nonjudgmental, and inquisitive. As a child, I was extremely curious, and I always loved to read fiction, learn about history, and read about new applications in science and technology. I remember I often spend my entire break during recess holed up in a corner, buried in a new book. The world was delightful to me, and I wanted to spend as much time learning about it as possible. I remember that I would write short stories, and invent new games, and make up characters in my head. I would read and explore and create not out of a sense of achievement, or wanting to prove myself in any capacity, but just out of a sheer joy of existing and creating.

My personal relationships were the same way. As a child, there is an innocence and a lack of superficiality with personal friendships. I remember that I became friends with people simply because of how they made me feel in the moment, without any pretense. One of my best friends was someone who shared my joy of playing imaginary games, and I remember we’d pretend we were magical characters playing on the playground. Another friend shared my love of books and stories, and we’d stay up all night talking about the newest releases. I would do things out of joy and out of love, such as biking for hours in the cul-de-sac or taking long walks outside.

Sometime during adolescence, the adult version of myself eventually kicked in and became the more dominant self. The shift for me happened around adolescence, and it impacted my free-flowing child self in more ways than one. I became hyper aware of social norms and where I fit into the world, and I noticed myself sometimes becoming friends with people because of their popularity, rather than because of their intrinsic qualities. I also stopped doing things that I enjoyed out of sheer joy, and began to do things that I felt would set me up for success. For instance, instead of spending the summer reading or writing or playing with friends that made me feel alive, I began to spend summers doing extracurricular activities in order to get ahead.

For me, the dominance of my adult self peaked around late high school or early college. During this time, my hyper rational adult self was driving nearly all my decisions: whether I would study, what extracurricular activities I would engage in, how I spent my free time, and even to an extent what friends I hung out with. There were brief times in college in which I’d let my inner child self shine through: for instance, when I took a computer science class as a freshman, I was motivated to learn it out of curiosity and interest, rather than goal-setting, or when I travelled to Chile after my freshman year. Still, my hyper rational self was very dominant, and this dominance of my adult self was one of the leading factors in my depression. The suppression of my child self prevented me from experiencing true joy, and made life feel gray and nondescript.

As I went into late college and then after graduation, I began to realize the importance of letting your child self have a voice even into adulthood. I started to realize that it was in activities in which my child self was shining through that I often felt the most happy and satisfied. For instance, reading a great book, going on a beautiful hike, or having dinner with friends purely for the sake of enjoyment. I slowly began to feel the joy of creating again, writing short stories and scenes. I also allowed my child self to make a decision about which career I wanted to pursue, when I made the decision to switch my career from computer science into finance. I began to slowly experience the sheer joy of living in the moment and doing the things that I enjoyed, which slowly began to inject some color and texture into my life as I grew older.

Nevertheless, while most of the beginning of the blog post focused on the negatives of the hyper rational self, the adult self does have its place. Obviously, if I let my child self dominate the discussion, I might not be able to live a safe, healthy, and comfortable life. My adult self works in conjunction with my child self to ensure that my career is something that satisfies both my inner desires as well as allows me a comfortable life. Moreover, the adult self does have a purpose in refining and creating goals. My child self can sometimes be a little self-focused, but the adult self can help broaden the child self to look beyond myself and work to actually help people. For instance, my child and adult self worked together to help me decide to start tutoring nonprofit computer science classes for underprivileged kids. Similarly, my rational self and my child self have been working together to help me write a book, which was one of my longstanding goals, or to create this blog and podcast.

Ultimately, we do need both our child self and our adult self in life; however, I believe that the child self should be at the core. It should be the adult self’s goal to enable the child self’s dreams to come through, perhaps refining or expanding the child’s dreams along the way. The adult self, however, should not overrule the child self, forcing the child self to give up its dreams and natural joy of life. These days, I have focused more on creating harmony between my child self and my adult self, by keeping my child self near and close to my heart, and allowing my adult self to protect my child self. For me, my adult self is like a safe, comforting, and knowledgeable parent, who lifts the child self up onto her shoulders, to let the child self see, explore, create, and love.

In this week’s topic, we wanted to share our stories about romantic love and how it relates to our own mental health. On the surface, romantic love seems very different from mental illness. What, if anything, do depression, anxiety, and low self esteem have to do with love? However, I’ve noticed that in my own experiences they can be inextricably linked to each other.

Growing up in today’s society, we are often inundated with the message that we need to find the “one,” our “true love,” our “special someone,” in order to complete us. We seek out someone else in order to fill the voids that we have within ourselves and within our own lives. When I was younger,  although I was never a huge believer in romance, I still internalized that message. In high school, I was a very high achieving, straight-A type of person, who never took a day off from work or from trying to get ahead. Instead of trying to achieve balance in my own life, I sought out romantic partners who I perceived as being very chill, rebellious, and a little spontaneous: ie. the typical “slacker boy.” Those qualities don’t always make someone a good romantic partner, as I learned from my various failed early crushes or early relationships.

However, as I grew older, I also began to rely on sexual and / or romantic partners to fill the voids I had within myself. During my junior year of college, I was very depressed, anxious, and unable to sleep over two months during my fall semester. It was the lowest period of my life. During this time, I initiated a physical relationship with one of my best friends at the time. We didn’t treat each other with respect and the relationship ended poorly. I was using the relationship as a crutch in order to deal with my own emotional problems. Although I did develop real feelings for the person, our foundation in that relationship was not the foundation for a healthy relationship.

After I graduated from college, I was having a hard time being separated from family and friends as when I moved back to California. I felt very lonely and I had a strained relationship with some of the people who were close to me. During that time, I entered into a relationship with another boy who had experienced a lot of the same issues: depression, relationship problems, anxiety. I began to rely on him to fill the emotional void within myself and confided him about problems I had not told anyone else. However, once again I did not develop a strong foundation for a romantic relationship. We both had alternatively anxious and avoidant attachment styles, and our entire relationship was a push and a pull that was hardly ever communicated to each other.

Eventually, through therapy and friendship, I began to fill my own emotional voids in myself. I used therapy to work on my emotional issues, and no longer relied on romantic relationships in order to fill the void inside myself. I filled my life with more meaningful work, strong friendships, and hobbies and interests that made me no longer rely on another person to bring me stability or happiness. I still struggle with romance, especially given the importance that society places on it.  For instance, I have become deeply sad when good friends deprioritize our friendship after ending up in a romantic relationship.  However, I’ve realized that as long as the quality of friendship remains high, it is okay if there’s a little less time for me in a relationship.

Instead of looking to someone to fill my emotional voids, I now look at relationships as a form of connection. It’s a way to give and receive love. I no longer think of anyone as a “true love” or a “soul mate”; I’ve realized you are your own soulmate because you are the person who is with you for the entire journey of life. I’ve realized the importance of prioritizing yourself in any relationship, whether it’s a friendship or a romance. Instead, for me a relationship is about the three pillars of love: support, respect, and trust, and reflecting that back to yourself. Now, in a romantic partner, I look for someone I can share experiences with, but someone who I can also stand on my own two feet without.

When people think of kindness, people often think of being kind toward others. A random act of kindness, for instance, might be giving up your seat for a pregnant woman on a train, or paying for someone’s coffee behind you in line. On a deeper level, kindness can manifest by listening to a friend in need, or helping a family member out who is struggling with his or her health. While recognized in society, kindness is often something that is undervalued in Western society, at least compared to other virtues such as ambition, beauty, intelligence, success, or popularity.

Yet there’s an aspect of kindness which is less talked about, and that is kindness towards oneself.  Although it may seem like a difficult place to start, kindness towards oneself can often be a prerequisite for being kind to other people. If your heart is full of negativity and criticism towards yourself, then it is easy, even expected, that the negativity will pour back out to others.

Kindness towards oneself is something with which I have always struggled. In my previous blog posts, I talked about my history of depression and anxiety. One of the roots of my depression was the criticism and unkindness that I constantly unleashed onto myself. When I was growing up, I was extremely unkind to myself. I thought that I was a failure, that I was not good at anything, that I had failed to succeed in both a personal and a professional lens.  I remember the earliest roots of unkindness forming its tendrils in middle school. In middle school, when I was made fun of by my peers, I internalized their unkindness, allowing their opinions to form my sense of self. I continued to echo their criticisms onto myself long after they had left.

During high school, my self criticism and unkindness remained. I talked previously about how I was very high achieving in high school. When I failed to achieve, I believed myself to be a failure and engaged in negative and self-destructive self-talk. The unkindness extended to social spheres: such as when I went to college, I considered myself a failure if I was unable to fit in socially.  My lack of unkindness to myself led to many unhealthy situations: mental fatigue, burnout, staying in jobs which required 90 hour work weeks, becoming involved in unhealthy romantic relationships. My lack of kindness permeated out towards me: I often felt that my friends and I were unkind to each other, and I extended my negativity and criticism to those close to me.

My journey to being kinder to myself was quite complicated. In many ways, it was and is the most difficult part of my mental health journey. The first time that I had considered being kinder to myself was when I went to therapy during my junior year. I remember during therapy telling my therapist that I felt that I was damaged, that I felt like something was wrong with me. When she challenged the belief, asking me — what if nothing is wrong with you? — it took me several minutes before I was even able to understand what she meant. She introduced me to CBT, to challenge my basic thoughts of self criticism and unkindness to myself. Through working with her, and later with my current therapist, I have learned to create a kinder and less critical inner mind. One particularly effective way at fostering kindness towards yourself is to view yourself as a small child, the way you were at 5 years old. It’s to remember that even though you are an adult, you are still that five year old child. How would you like that child in you to be treated?

Kindness is also something I practice extensively in meditation, a habit that I picked up a year and a half ago. With kindness, it often starts with a visualization; visualizing warmth, light, and happiness inside yourself. The idea of self kindness is a cornerstone of meditation: if your own heart is filled with kindness and love, it will more easily spill over to other people in your life.

Kindness means prioritizing yourself and self care. It’s about treating yourself with gentleness, about treating your failures carefully, about celebrating your successes without arrogance. It’s about reframing the critical voice inside your head into a voice of comfort and respect. If you fail an important exam, or get rejected by a group of friends, or get passed up for the promotion, shift that inner voice from one of criticism to one of gentle comfort and of healing. Kindness in the face of failure is treating yourself like you would a five year old child who just fell down and scraped her knees: you’d comfort her to get up and gently remind her to try to walk again.

It is a lifelong journey to learn how to be kinder to yourself, but more than anything else, it is essential for mental health. It’s the difference between having criticism and negativity in your core instead of a core full of love, care, and generosity. If you are struggling to feel kind to yourself, we highly encourage you to seek a therapist and begin to practice activities in your life: whether it’s exercise, friendships, hobbies, gratitude journeys, or meditation, that enable you to be in touch with your kindest self.

As someone who works in tech, I always hear the famous Steve Jobs quote: “Stay Hungry, Stay Foolish.” This can be taken in different directions: in one interpretation, the quote is a prescription to stay curious and to dream big.  However, Andrew and I were drawn to the word hunger and what it meant in the context of motivation, achievement, and pursuing our goals.

Hunger by necessity is a negative word. The literal definition of hunger is to be lacking something so essential to human life that we cannot survive without it. It signals a deprivation, a lack, a need for something that is missing. Just as hunger is a powerful biological cue incentivizing living things to seek food, hunger in a goal setting sense is a powerful cue incentivizing living things to seek change, because of a lack of something in their environment.

Hunger is not always a bad thing. There are times when hunger for change is the right emotion. For instance, in the context of the Black Lives Matters protests in the summer of 2020, the concept of hungering for change is both necessary and apt. There is a deprivation of justice that is happening, and hunger is an appropriate emotion in that case to seek a change.

However, in other cases, the word hunger might be less apt. When entrepreneurs urge their startup employees to stay “hungry,” what is it that they are actually implying? Often, startups encourage and even expect their employees to devote their lives to work, to contribute 80 to 90 hour weeks as the norm. Some entrepreneurs even harken back to their own childhoods in relative poverty: they say that their own childhood has encouraged them to always stay hungry, to always hustle. As a child of immigrant parents, it is something that I (and Andrew) have heard many times. Growing up in the 70s in India, my parents grew up relatively poor. Their ability to be “hungry” for a better life enabled them to work extremely hard to make the journey to the US.

As adults, it is common for many first generation Asian parents to transfer that hunger on to their children. They had to be hungry, they reason, in order to stay secure in life, so it only follows that their children will have to stay hungry as well in order to be secure. They encourage their children to study for 80 hours a week, to sacrifice their mental health for their academics, because they think that hunger is what will enable their children to be financially safe as adults. They do not realize that their own hunger (a necessary construct which was needed to escape post-war India or Cultural Revolution China) has actually given their own children a great blessing: the freedom to live a life where “hunger” need not be a primary motivating force. 

And that, in essence, is our problem with the word “hungry.” By encouraging people to stay hungry, it is encouraging people to keep their deprivations from their childhood, such as their lack of economic stability or their childhood traumas, as a primary motivator in their lives, long after the hunger might be actually necessary. Instead of attempting to patch the deprivation in life through therapy and mental health care, people try to address it through accomplishment and achievement and working hard without the realization that it could lead to burnout.

Hunger, at its core, is a negative motivator. It is running away from something (the hunger) rather than running towards something. Sometimes running away is necessary, but something it isn’t. Someone who grew up deprived of love and then is “hungry” for love may seek to fill that hunger through unfulfilling relationships or by absorbing themselves in work, but neither hunger will fulfill them in the long term. It is food for the hunger, sure, but the food isn’t satiating.

So if hunger isn’t a good motivator, then what is? Why do anything at all if your life doesn’t have a significant deprivation? Well, for us that goes back towards the running towards something rather than running away from something. It is better to fill your cup up with therapy and kindness and then use that as a motivator to do things in the world. So we propose a different motivating force than hunger: love. A love for yourself and for other people, and a love to share yourself with the world and make the world around you a better place.

It is something that Andrew and I are still struggling with today. But this blog is an example of it. It is motivated by love: a love for ourselves, to share and destigmatize our own mental health stories, but also a love for other people, to share these stories in the hopes it will help others.

With that, we’ll leave it off for this week. Next time you are motivated to do something, ask yourself: why am I doing this? Am I doing it out of a negative motivator (hunger)? If so, is that hunger truly necessary? And perhaps, is there a way to change that motivation around to a more positive motivating force, to be motivated by love instead of by hunger?

When we are young, we often think that we are our thoughts. It’s a simple assumption for our minds to make. For many of us, our thoughts run through our mind constantly, making it hard to separate our thoughts from ourselves.  It took me a long time to grasp this; what am I without the endless stream of thoughts that are running through my mind 24/7? When our thoughts are helpful and uplifting, this might not seem like such a problem. However, in the case of mental health, when thoughts can often be dark, insidious, scary, and disorienting, it’s extremely helpful to get some separation from thoughts to see the clear sky which is resting underneath.

In our beginner’s blog post and podcast, we discussed the roots of our mental illness beginning in high school. Andrew and I touched on a lot of the self destructive and self-hating thoughts that we had back then: feeling like there was something wrong with us, feeling like we were not good enough at anything, and self hatred for who we are. In the moment, we took all those thoughts as a fact. The most central tenant in treating depression and anxiety was for me, learning to create distance between these negative thoughts and who I was underneath.

It was not school, or college, or a relationship or a friendship which made me finally seek out distance between my thoughts and my sense of self. It was something more primal and basic than all of that: sleep. During my junior year of college, I experienced the worst insomnia of my life. Before this experience, I assumed that insomnia just meant a few sleepless nights. It can sound pretty trivial to struggle with sleeplessness, and even when I confided to my friends about it, they rarely understood the magnitude of grief and struggling that it caused me.

Sleep is central to being human, yet it can also be elusive. It’s another thing in life that we cannot control, despite the fact that we want to desperately. My struggles with sleep started early junior year. I remember clearly one day I was studying for an exam and I felt completely unproductive; I felt that I was unable to retain or to understand any of the material. I decided that I would aim to go to bed early that day. I tried to force myself to sleep at 9pm, but I was unable to fall asleep. I tossed and turned in bed for hours, feeling progressively more and more anxious as I was unable to fall asleep. I kept thinking about how tired I would be the next day due to my sleepless night and how I would fail my exam and be an even greater failure.

Well, as many sufferers of insomnia will know, the anxiety snowballed. The next day, when I went to bed, the anxiety returned. I would feel my heart pumping loudly and my hands shaking and feel completely riled up as I was about to go to bed, as if my body had entered into fight or flight mode. I would be unable to sleep, while getting progressively more anxious that I was unable to do so. After tossing and turning the entire night, I’d wake up utterly exhausted. This went on for over two full months: I’d get maybe three hours of sleep total each night.

It’s hard to underestimate the impact of chronic insomnia. Each day I felt as if I had a splitting headache, was unable to focus on basic tasks, and lived in a constant state of arousal. For someone who was already in the depths of depression, chronic insomnia and anxiety on top of it made the semester unbearable. When I went to the doctor in the hopes of treatment, they prescribed me a very strong tranquilizer often used on heart patients. I decided to not take the medicine. I tried everything else: benadryl, routines, melatonin, dim lighting, wind down rituals. Nothing was able to stem the constant flood of anxiety that I felt after sunset each day. It was as if when the sun goes down, my body felt as if it was about to be hunted by a tiger.  In retrospect, it’s no surprise that I felt unable to fall asleep given my level of anxiety.

It was then that I read about CBT: Cognitive Behavioral Therapy and ACT: Acceptance Commitment Therapy. Each warrants its own blog post, but the key takeaway was to be able to create separation between your mind and your automatic thoughts, to realize that you are not my thoughts. In the night, when my mind would go down an anxious spiral, instead of believing in my automatic thoughts (such as “I wouldn’t be able to function the next day,” “I need to get to sleep tomorrow,” “I’ll fail the test if I won’t be able to sleep”) I simply noticed the thoughts, letting them drift away like clouds in the sky. I realized that underneath the anxious thoughts, there was another mind present: a quiet, calm, and receptive mind free of anxiety. 

The idea that you are not your thoughts is at the core of treatment for mental illness, since mental illness usually does stem from cognitive distortions. (basically, bad thoughts). Gaining separation from your thoughts and realizing that your thoughts do not define you was a pivotal way of shifting my thinking and allowing myself to get better. So remember, thoughts are clouds: sometimes they are big and fluffy and beautiful and can make the sky a more interesting place. Other times, they can be large, dark, and disorienting. Either way, they aren’t you: you’re the clear sky underneath it all. Whenever the clouds get so much, just let them drift on away from you to enjoy the sky behind it.