The true, wandering, improvised story of one man's quiet journey from unfit and unhealthy to something better. The chronically slothful author seeks to feed two birds with one seed, breaking out of his cycle of neither exercising nor publishing by s...
Some years ago, when I was at an unusually low place in my life, I recognized that I had some problems and wanted to better understand them. So I made a map.
It started when I realized I had a lack of presence and engagement in social outings, especially when I was out with my wife. She's a very outgoing extrovert, an extreme "E" on the introvert-extrovert spectrum, and tends to do most of the talking for us. The stories of my married life are known to me as much through her telling as they are from my own memory. To a large degree, this is a natural side-effect of me -- an introvert -- having married an extrovert. I am also the youngest of four sons, and living in a world where others talk for me is just part of who I am. But I had come to notice that I was even more withdrawn than usual, and it was detracting from my self-esteem, which was in turn limiting my social presence: I wasn't sufficiently proud of my own opinions or life stories to share them, and not sharing them was making me feel pointless and invisible. The two were carrying each other along in an unhealthy downward spiral. To make things worse, this was happening at a time my wife and I were having some relationship challenges, and I found myself unjustly resenting her for what was really my own issue.
Negative feedback loops require external intervention. If I could find a means of beefing up my self-image from some other direction, perhaps this would improve my social presence and break the cycle. If I were excited about some aspect of my life, it would give me something I would want to talk about, something I wouldn't be inclined to prevent myself from sharing. Reflecting on sources of pride in my life, I started picturing them as a diagram of boxes and arrows -- a benefit and hazard of working as a software developer for well over twenty years. I decided to sketch them out, and soon the diagram expanded to a network of interrelated activities and states of mind.
I found this diagram to be quite useful. At times when I'm down or feeling unfulfilled, I can look at it, reflect on where I'm having issues, and see activities I've identified as improving those areas. I call it my Mental Health Map. It has grown and changed over the years, serving as a "living document" that can be tweaked to better match my current reality. Here's how it looks today.
Oops! This image does not follow our content guidelines. To continue publishing, please remove it or upload a different image.
As with any map, "the map is not the territory", an expression coined by Alfred Korzybski to describe the fact that maps are representations of a thing, and should never be confused with the thing itself. For my Mental Health Map, I select the activities and states I'm most interested in affecting, and all else is excluded. It's not meant to be a full representation of my psychological workings. It is a tool.
Until today, the "Physical Fitness" state wasn't even on the map. Exercise is rolled into the "Physical Care" activity, and the arrows indicate that it benefits my energy and mental clarity. Today, I chose to elevate physical fitness itself as something that contributes to my self-esteem. I've always thought of myself as primarily leading a life of the mind -- something I plan to discuss more in a later chapter. This change represents a conscious desire on my part to acknowledge more fully the role physical fitness plays in my self-image.
When I update the map to assist me in getting myself to a better overall state of mental health, I highlight no more than three activities that I need to focus on. If you try to do too many things at once, you diffuse your energy and accomplish less than you could have through a more targeted approach. In light of my effort to reach "orbital velocity", I highlighted "Ritual" and "Physical Self-Care". I left "Work" highlighted, for two reasons. First, and most obviously, I need to work in the professional sense, to pay the bills and keep myself feeling like my career is a source of satisfaction. Second, work also represents writing, and part of my commitment here is to publish often, to build habits that will lead to a better conversion ratio for me as an author.
I'm sharing my Mental Health Map here in the hope that you might see this and be inspired to think of your own life outlook in terms of the states you want to improve and the activities that might directly or indirectly improve them. That could mean making your own mental health map, or it could just give you a useful way to frame things when journaling, talking with friends, or whatever it is you do to reflect on life.
I made my own map using Scapple, a simple diagramming tool from the makers of Scrivener, my favorite authoring software. It's an application I use primarily for my software development, to help me get my head around complex relationships among the classes in my team's code. I've found it's also great for this.
My Mental Health Map is not something I look at frequently, but it has proven useful many times now, when I'm feeling down or aimless or unfulfilled and need some help seeing ways to get back on track.
