On my morning cycle rides, I’m always taken aback by the number of children on the roads at 7.30 am. Some waiting for schoolbuses to take them from one box to the next, some manning chai stalls and selling cheap plastic toys at red lights. Not all of them carry bags, but all of them carry baggage. Perhaps their spines are already beginning to curve.
Or maybe I’m just projecting onto them. The years of 9th and 10th grade were particularly tough for me, in no small part due to the whole concept of standardized exams. And my school in particular, well-known for its “smart” students, taught us how memorise textbooks back-to-front, and recite the answer to every question that might come up in these exams; but gave no sense of how to ponder the mysteries that life would eventually throw at us.
In classes my mind would slip away in awe of our 100-year old architecture, wondering about the people who came before us in these very rooms, and I’d get into trouble for not remembering the finer points of the Rowlatt Act (1919). I’d try to decode Shakespeare for fun (because, for whatever reason, we were doing Shakespeare at 14), but had my Chronicles of Narnia confiscated in lunch break because we weren’t really encouraged to read for fun, not with exams always around the corner. I’d day-dream about climbing trees, trying to correlate my diagrams of xylem and phloem with the grass on the football field; but all that mattered at the end of the day was that mitochondria was the goddamn powerhouse of the goddamn cell.
Which is to say, I learned fairly early on that our systems for success, and our systems for happiness, are two entirely different concepts.
Our systems for success, and our systems for happiness, are two entirely different concepts.
By the time I passed out of school, I was no stranger to The Big Sad, but the right vocabulary eluded me until I read Matt Haig’s Reasons To Stay Alive a few years later. The fact that someone else had come face-to-face with depression was revelatory to me; equal parts tragic and comforting. But it’s one thing to attribute The Big Sad to some imbalanced neurochemistry in your brain, to some dice-throw of the genetic lottery — it’s another thing entirely to spot the larger patterns behind why so many us feel like we’re swimming through barbed wire everyday.
According to Dr Kaustubh Joag at the Centre for Mental Health Law and Policy in Pune, mental health is not purely “biomedical”, but also “psychosocial”. This means that your happiness isn’t just about the chemicals in your brain, but also the social stressors around you. And spending the second half of my teenagedom in the fantastically artistic, fatally moody poetry-slam community of Pune, I began to notice the same trends play out — a lot of people weren’t exactly happy, but we were all caught in similar spiderwebs of competition, scarcity, hierarchy and expectations, and the problem seemed too widespread to be attributed to neurochemistry alone. Matt Haig explains it beautifully:
“The world is increasingly designed to depress us. Happiness isn’t very good for the economy. If we were happy with what we had, why would we need more? How do you sell an anti-aging moisturizer? You make someone worry about aging. How do you get people to vote for a political party? You make them worry about immigration. How do you get them to buy insurance? By making them worry about everything. How do you get them to have plastic surgery? By highlighting their physical flaws. How do you get them to watch a TV show? By making them worry about missing out. How do you get them to buy a new smartphone? By making them feel like they are being left behind. To be calm becomes a kind of revolutionary act. To be happy with your own non-upgraded existence. To be comfortable with our messy, human selves, would not be good for business.”
It’s not a revolutionary new idea, that our mental health is tied into the power systems around us (and I’d encourage you to read the works of Mark Fischer and David Graeber to learn more about what small cogs we’ve become within “late capitalism”). But through the pandemic, this joyless hamster wheel seems to have taken on a life of its own; it seems to have left us with a deep dissatisfaction at the way things are, at the way things could be, and a yearning for something that we can’t quite see, can’t quite touch, can’t quite imagine, but can only hope is waiting for us around the corner.
Which leaves us with the only question worth asking:
What do you do about The Big Sad?
The “psychosocial” doesn’t look like it’s going to get better on its own (and that's just in my own, fairly cushy frame of reference; I'm not even going to get into the roles that income inequality, casteism, homophobia and other dominant power structures play in this). But can we look towards the “biomedical” once again, and try to use physical health as a way to also understand our mental health?
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When I took up running in September 2020 (i.e. in the middle of the joyride that was the pandemic), it was for purely lockdown-related reasons. Having been inside since April, I just wanted an excuse to go outside, and go outside everyday. Little did I know how it would shape the rest of my life.
The benefits of running are obvious — you lose some weight, you get some Vitamin D, you get a cool entry on Strava that you can show off to your friends. But the sense of discipline that it brought to life within me was entirely unexpected. And also extremely welcome.
One of the side-effects of The Big Sad is that you end up moving from happiness to happiness whenever you can get it, because otherwise you’ll fall off a cliff into despair. There’s numbness then excitement, numbness then excitement, and you never really get to see what can be built with a brick after boring brick. But athletic goals don’t really give you that option, and you can’t caffeinate your way out of them the night before the deadline.
You never really get to see what can be built with a brick after boring brick. But athletic goals don’t really give you that option, and you can’t caffeinate your way out of them the night before the deadline.
I got started with an app called Couch to 5k, which starts with a simple premise - you’re a couch potato, who wants to be able to run 5 kilometres in 8 weeks. For your first week you’re basically just walking 60% of the time, and running for the other 40%; it progressively decreases your walk:run ratio over time, until you can run for 40ish minutes by the end of these 8 weeks.
And the coolest part is, it doesn’t push you to your maximum limit. I ended every “run” excited to come back to the next run, because I had just enough gas left in the tank to remain excited about it.There’s something extremely beautiful about doing some hard work, and being able to look back proudly. And that makes you feel good about yourself. And that makes you feel good about the world. Brick after boring brick, I was making my way out of The Big Sad.
There’s something extremely beautiful about doing some hard work, and being able to look back proudly. And that makes you feel good about yourself. And that makes you feel good about the world.
There are plenty of other reasons that running makes you feel great as well. Runner’s high, for instance, is a phenomenon where a strong run leaves you with just a really really good feeling about your life and your body and everything in between and around it. Apparently the calf muscles act as your second heart, and the increased blood circulation that comes with calf exercise leads to runner’s high. I’m no scientist, so I can’t tell you the exact reason behind it, but hey, I’m not complaining.
Physical activity also releases endorphins - a category of brain chemicals that apparently regulate your response to pain and stress, and keep you happy in their own way. I’m not the right person to break down the science behind them, but again, I’m not complaining.
And the best part? You’re too tired to sit ruminating upon the end of the world and other such nonsense once you’re tucked into bed, which drastically reduces your capacity to overthink. And you end up sleeping like a baby, which puts you in a really good mood the next day.
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I’d like to clarify, at this point, that I don’t think you can run your way out of mental illness as a concept. I’m not qualified, academically, professionally or ethically to write about ADHD or schizophrenia or dissociative identity disorder or anything severe that requires psychiatric care. If you’re hallucinating, please do not go for a run because this random article said so.
I’m not a psychologist or a psychiatrist, but I am an English major. So while I’m not qualified to give any actual therapeutical advice, I’m totally allowed to talk about Shitty Feelings, and make up new words and concepts. Here’s the one that’s been most helpful to me - “The Big Sad”. I use this as a loose parallel to low-lying depression and anxiety, but mostly to encapsulate the general sense of blah, of breakdown, of emptiness, of tiredness, of loneliness that I see reflected in a lot of people around me.
If you’re not at an SOS stage, and want to know more about the relationship between physical and mental health, I’d highly recommend Bessel van der Kolk’s magnum opus The Body Keeps The Score. It looks at the way trauma settles in the body, but even if you’re not traumatised it can unlock some deep clues about how taking care of your body can correlate with taking care of your mind. In Chapter 16, he writes -
“One of the ways the memory of helplessness is stored is as muscle tension or feelings of disintegration in the affected body areas: head, back, and limbs in accident victims….When people are chronically angry or scared, constant muscle tension ultimately leads to spasms, back pain, migraine headaches, fibromyalgia, and other forms of chronic pain…. A major challenge in recovering from trauma remains being able to achieve a state of total relaxation and safe surrender.”
I mentioned that running helped with sleep, but the true game-changer was yin yoga, a style of yoga characterised by holding static poses for long stretches, often minutes at a time. Apparently your hips store a lot of stress (especially if you sit a lot), and holding poses like “frog” and “pigeon” at the edge of your pain threshold allows your body to get comfortable with messy leftover emotions that may be stored in your body, and ease into “a state of total relaxation”, instead of freaking out when things get uncomfortable.
Focusing on your breath at the “edge” of these holds gives you a bridge between your sympathetic nervous system (which controls your fight/flight/freeze instincts) and your parasympathetic nervous system (which controls your rest/digest instincts). For a lot of people affected by The Big Sad, we spend a lot of time stressed out (physiologically, not just mentally), and not enough time getting our nervous system to calm TF down — and I swear to god, you would not believe the quality of sleep after 40 minutes of yin practice.
And then the next day you just wake up in a good mood, and then you’re on this really fun cycle of knowing who you can be when you’re happy and energised, instead of cranky and tired :)
van der Kolk also writes about your Heart Rate Variability, or HRV, which “measures the relative balance between the sympathetic and the parasympathetic systems”. A high HRV indicates an ability to adapt to different states of stress, in a really healthy way. To put it in laywoman terms — if you see a lion coming to attack you, how fast would you be able to run away? And, more importantly, once you’ve run away and the threat of the lion has subsided, how fast would you be able to come back to rest?
If you see a lion coming to attack you, how fast would you be able to run away? And, more importantly, once you’ve run away and the threat of the lion has subsided, how fast would you be able to come back to rest?
The world of Haig, and Fischer and Graeber, the world of you and me, it does not allow us to rest when it is time to rest. We go to sleep thinking of office; we go to office thinking of sleep. Our phones are always demanding our attention, whether it be an actual emergency or Bajaj goddamn Finance. Someone, somewhere profits off of keeping us in this state of unease, of agitation, of isolation. In his book The Psychopath Test, Jon Ronson explains how a few human beings without empathy can set up this dog-eat-dog system for the rest of us — and I’m not convinced this is the natural way of things. I’m not convinced that constantly being in a fight/flight/freeze response is the natural way of things, and I’m not convinced that this is the best way to keep ourselves happy.
I’m not convinced that sitting at our desks for 8 hours a day, staring into screens, having every single piece of information at our fingertips (regardless if it’s true or false), moving from room to room and box to box just to get drunk on the weekends, is what is best for our physiology, for our happiness, for our quality of life. The Industrial Revolution happened only 200 years ago, the assembly line came into its own just over 100 years back, even the internet as we know it is only about 30 years old. I don’t know that human evolution was ever intended to move at this pace.
But there doesn’t seem to be an alternative, we must keep chugging along.
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During the pandemic, something else happened that caught my attention.
There’s this beatboxing Japanese Buddhist monk called Yogetsu Akasaka, and his cover of the Heart Sutra went viral. For 108 days, he livestreamed his music to the rest of the world, hoping to cultivate some peace, compassion and (quite literally) harmony in his little corner of the universe.
There’s a meditative quality to loopstation-music that I’m fascinated by, but incorporating formal Buddhism takes it to a different plane entirely. I’m not sure I can adequately explain the Heart Sutra without adding about 300 pages to this essay, but to me it uses chanting-meditation as a way to blur the lines between the inner world and outer world, between the “real” and “unreal”.
The sound of many voices coming together to focus on the present moment, holds something really magical for me. Imagine, if you will, the feeling of connection that might come from knowing the people around you are not locked up in their own boxes and agendas, but live with you in the same present moment, in the same space of attention, the same breath. The same vibrations resonating in our chests.
There are various forms that meditation can take — some prefer to chant, some prefer being guided by teachers, some prefer to focus on their breath. For some, a full-body scan — you start at your feet, relaxing each muscle you encounter on your way up, your calves, up through the hips, through the heart, through the chest, the throat, and finally through the mind. That’s the one I’ve found the most accessible; I hope you have too.
I'm not going to get into the scientific benefits of meditation here, for I'm an amateur myself. But there's something very cool about being able to ground yourself in the present moment. Too often I've found myself replaying the embarrassing situations I had gotten myself into; too often I spend energy (that I don't even have) worrying about climate change, war, communalism, political directions, all that good stuff waiting for us in the future. None of that is my control.
The only thing in my control is my own body. And through that, I've learned to cultivate a better relationship with my mind.
Through this essay, I've only begun to scratch the surface of what sort of relationships are designed to keep us in harmony, and have entirely left out the role that nature and the outdoors play here (and you can read the fantastic book Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer to learn more about what relationships our ancestors shared with nature). There's so much more to say about these topics, which is why I've started a whole magazine about them. For women, who have historically never been encouraged to cultivate good relationships with our bodies and with even going outside the house after dark, the stakes are higher. I won't pretend to know everything, but something about working out, and making sure to spend time in nature, and being able to stop these barreling trains of thought by focusing on the nervous system, has been absolutely life-changing for me. It's been a 13-year journey of finding happiness and harmony, and it's probably going to go on for a really long time. I hope you'll join me along the way.
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