Mind-mechanics vs Magical Thinking

[NB: If you're reading this before May 29, please join the Mental Health Webinar to learn about everything mentioned here and more. Register here.]

200 years ago if your child happened to have a mental illness that mental illness would have been attributed to magic. You might have hired a priest to exorcise away the demon that had “inhabited” the child. Or you might blame one of your rivals for the disease and claim that they were practising witchcraft, an accusation with dire consequences for the accused.

In a way magical thinking is perfectly understandable. Before the work of Sigmund Freud and other pioneers in psychiatry we didn’t understand mental illness and even after Freud (maybe even until now) there are huge gaps in our understanding. Magical thinking is something humans in every culture do when they encounter anything they can’t explain.

In modern times, magical thinking still exists when it comes to mental health but it looks quite different. Modern magical thinking tends to externalise mental illness. So we might think “I am depressed because of what my spouse, my parent, or my boss did.” There may be an element of truth in that but it’s not completely accurate. The truth in a very literal sense is that your anxiety or depression is being triggered by a certain thought and that thought is causing a certain biochemical stress response in your body. That stress response is what you experience as depression or anxiety or in extreme cases even something like schizophrenia or bipolar disorder.

As a health coach I would like my clients to have an intimate relationship with reality. We don’t have to like reality, but we do have to be close to it. We have to understand and accept reality for what it is. In this regard, magical thinking is the enemy. It offers a diagnosis which is impossible to find a medicine for. If you believe that your spouse, your boss, or the capitalist system is responsible for your anxiety then you’ve taken it out of your hands. You can’t feel well until they change and you don’t control their lives or how they behave. But you do control your own life.

OK, so what is really going on with mental illness or even sub-clinical depression, anxiety, etc? At its simplest level, mental illness is about two processes: a) You have a thought which triggers an emotion and b) the emotion triggers a biochemical reaction in your brain.

These two processes correspond with the two treatments we have for mental illness: therapy and medications. Therapy can take multiple forms but ultimately therapy addresses the thoughts and the emotions that trigger the biochemical reaction. Unfortunately therapy doesn’t seem to be very effective for most people at least according to the clinical data. Anecdotally I’ve had a few clients who’ve been in therapy for years who’ve found that working with me as a health coach even for a few months to be far more productive than years and years of therapy.

What about medication? Nearly all the common psychiatric drugs - including SSRI inhibitors such as prozac or zoloft and so on - were not approved for use in depression originally. They were originally developed as epilepsy drugs and then repurposed for use in other mental health conditions.

Elsewhere I’ve mentioned that these drugs aren’t always effective, that their effectiveness decreases with time and that they have a lot of side effects. All of those things are true. But the lesson from those drugs is that targeting the biochemical pathways can be an effective way to alleviate some of the symptoms of mental illness. Drugs are not the only tool we can use to target those pathways. Lifestyle interventions - nutrition, exercise, cold exposure, heat exposure and even walking in nature - also seems to affect these pathways.

Ultimately in order to improve our mental health we need to address both pathways. Both the thoughts and the mindset that triggers us and the hormones that are the result of being triggered. But sorting out trauma is hard and we don’t all have the time or the headspace to do that in a meaningful way. Therapy can be great for many people as a way to really change the thought patterns, but that’s a long-term project. In the short term, there are little things we can do every day using some of those lifestyle changes I mentioned that can make a big difference to our mental health and maybe even give us the headspace to embark on the longer term changes that get at the thought and emotion pathway.

Mind-mechanics - biomechanics of the nervous system if you prefer - offers a way of understanding our mental health that does not depend on magical thinking. What's happening to you is happening wholly within you. That doesn't mean that it's your fault - there could be external triggers that are very real, including a history of abusive relationships. Nor is it your fault that your body is engaging these pathways to trigger depression or anxiety - your body is trying to protect you by engaging those pathways.

Once we understand what's going on we have options. We don't have to be imprisoned by our depression or our anxiety or our addiction. We can choose another way. If this sounds at all appealing to you I urge you to join me at this Sunday's webinar.