Tag: mental health

Categories
Health and Wellness

Social Media, Dancing with the Devil

Like many people at one point in my life I got on the wagon and took a break from social media. In fact I went over two years without posting to Facebook. Last year changed that for me. Sitting at home recovering from surgery, then six weeks of radiation treatment and stay at home orders due to COVID gives a person a lot of idling free time.

Since then, I have been investing in having a healthy relationship with social media, mainly Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn and Twitter. No doubt TikTok and Snapchat have their place but I am pretty sure the world does not need to see me, a 52 year old man trying to do the latest dance steps. At the end of the day my goal is to make social media enhance my life not take it over.

I won’t spend a ton of time on the evils of social media but like so many things– gambling, alcohol, drugs and even shopping there is an addictive quality to it. The question is how to dance with the devil but not get roped into to going to Hell.

L0026618 The History of Witches and Wizards, 1720 Credit: Wellcome Library, London. Wellcome Images images@wellcome.ac.uk http://wellcomeimages.org Witches dancing in a circle with the devil. The history of witches and wizards… Published: 1720 Copyrighted work available under Creative Commons Attribution only licence CC BY 4.0 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Research has shown that we can suffer from feelings of dissatisfaction and frustration with our own lives when we see post and pictures from friends that can lead us to perceive that their lives are better than ours. I know, I’ve been sucked down that rabbit hole. Obsessing over getting a new bike or wondering if I need to trade in my car for a newer model, the seed being planted from just scrolling through friends’ post about their latest acquisition.

The list of ills goes on and on. I found a great blog post from Iraylo Durmonski on many of the negatives as well as how to make better use of social media. He hits on many of the same points that I will cover below.

So why the big change and the re-embracing of social media. Blame it on the two big C’s- COVID and cancer.

Just as the world was shutting down for the year in the spring of 2020, I found myself at home recovering from a bilateral neck dissection. The first in several steps to treat a head & neck cancer that I had been diagnosed with at the end of 2019.

So what’s a fellow to do when confined to the couch under doctor’s orders. Facebook & Instagram became a quick an easy way to share what was going on and how my recovery was going. Phone calls and emails from friends and family are awesome but telling the same store and providing the same information over and over is down right exhausting.

This was my first big moment of realizing what a great tool social media can be. Face to face visits weren’t possible but reconnecting with friends on Facebook provided a great boost to my spirits and morale. The trick was and still is knowing when enough is an enough.

I don’t have a magic ratio formula to tell you that you have X amount of minutes per day that you can spend clicking likes and posting pictures from college that you found in an old photo album while cleaning off your bookshelves. I may have spent several days last summer doing this and to be honest it was a blast. Reading friends comments and taking a walk down memory lane was just the boosted I needed to get me through a rough part of my recovery from surgery.

It has now been a year since I took my toe out of the water and took a deep dive into the social media pool. Along the way I’ve developed a list of rules for myself that I feel have allowed me to have a healthy relationship with social media.

  1. No trolling unless you want people to think you’re a D bag. This is a great way to get unfollowed and lose friends along the way.
  2. If you are getting your news and facts from social media you may want to rethink that practice.
  3. Avoid debating politics and religion. Trust me you are not going to change my mind and I don’t believe I’ll change yours. Let’s save our energy for something more productive like debating whether or not Taylor Swift is the greatest song writer of her generation.
  4. Only positives. This goes along with trolling but basically I follow the law my mom laid down long ago for me, “If you don’t have anything nice to say then don’t say anything at all.”
  5. Get rid of deadweight. Cut loose your “friends” who are trolls, constantly post fake news and demonstrate that they are one or more of the following… racist, homophobic, misogynist, xenophobes or just general D bags. You wouldn’t hang out with them in person why give them your time on social media.
  6. Use it as intendeded. Look at it this way, you wouldn’t go to your friends home and just randomly flip through their stuff. Why do the same online by aimlessly flipping through others’ posts and pictures. Take the time to be mindful and full of good intentions. Use messenger to reconnect with an old chum from school, write a review about a positive experience you had at a local business or maybe plan a large picnic and invite your friends from online to show up and actually interact in person.
Categories
Health and Wellness

Meditating in Traffic

Just a few weeks ago, I wrote about about my struggles with learning and trying to meditate. I use the metaphor of trying to remain calm while moving in high speed traffic. Well, yesterday I put my metaphor to the test and meditated while in traffic.

“Amazing!”, you are thinking that in a month’s time I can find the calm and patience to meditate while driving in my truck as it moves through traffic and not crash the truck. Even more impressive, I did all of this in the east bound lane of I-70.

The truth is the truck nor any of the hundreds of vehicles in front of or behind us were moving. My, wife, two of my cousins and I were stuck in an all too typical standstill due to a wreck ahead of us. This was no fender bender that could be cleared in a few minutes. An eighteen-wheeler had left the road and crashed upside down on the lanes below a mere quarter of a mile in front of us.

It’s gonna be a long wait.

This particular section of I-70 runs through Glenwood Canyon on the Western Slope and is a marvel of engineering. The west bound lands sit forty to fifty feet above the east bound lands, which traverse along the Colorado River. The truck driver while navigation a turn had lost control of his vehicle and sent the truck through the guard rail where it had flipped and landed upside down on the east bound lands. Amazingly, no one included the driver were killed.

I didn’t take me long after moving to Colorado to learn that if you spend anytime driving in the mountains you make sure to carry supplies to get you through these type of lengthy sits in traffic. Whether it’s snow, rock slides, forest fires or careless drivers, at some point you will find yourself camped on the side of the road. This means an emergency kit is always carried in your vehicle. Blankets for cold weather, extra water, food and charging cables for phones are all a must. On our way to do a hike we were well stocked to wait this one out.

As cars squeezed to the side to allow emergency vehicles through, it was obvious that we were in for a long wait. Already word had trickled down the line that there was an eighteen-wheeler overturned and it was going to be at least four hours before we were moving.

The wife and cousins entertained themselves with a round of selfies and silly videos before they decided to follow the stream of drivers and passengers walking down the highway to check out the carnage up ahead.

No bad time for a selfie.

I chose to stay with truck. I was frustrated and disappointed that we would not make it to our destination just down the road to do the hike to Hanging Lake. The phrase, “close but no cigar” applies here.

Playing games on my phone and scroll through my list of books in iBooks was doing little to relieve my frustration. My thumb paused above a book, Meditation for Fidgety People, that I had recently downloaded. The book is about the author Dan Harris’s journey of discovering the power of meditation. A few pages in I realized that instead of reading about someone else meditating maybe I should give it a try in a real world moment. Being frustrated with something out of my control was the perfect optortunity to practice the practice.

Pushing my seat back I folded my long legs underneath me and got situated for a go at something until this point I had only tried in the quiet privacy of my home. I opted to leave my sunglasses and hat on as I was self conscious of the other motorist walking back and forth.

Eyes closed. Deep breathes. Focusing on the breath. Were people staring at me as they walked by? A quick one eyed peak revealed that no one was. A bit more relaxed. Mind wandering. Bring it back. Stop judging yourself. Focus on the breath

I’m pretty sure my fear of people staring at me while I meditated was overblown. Everyone was focused on walking down I-70 to gawk at the wreck.

Sounds. The Colorado River gurgles by a hundred feet from the highway. The rumble of idling diesel engines. Bits and pieces of conversations float by. Attention to the breath. In. Out. A dog barks. Back to the breath. In. Out.

Ten minutes or has it been twenty?

Eyes open. Nothing has changed except my attitude. The traffic is still unmoved. The sun is warm and shinning on my face. One last deep breath.

This is equanimity.

It’s starting to click.

Meditation can help relieve that anxiety, but so can making the best of the situation and just having fun with it.
Categories
Health and Wellness The Cancer Journey

Sitting Still at 1000 Miles per Hour

It’s day 10 and I can’t decide if I hate Jeff Warren or is he like one of those popular kids I use to pretend to hate in high school, but in reality wanted to be like and liked by them. And then there’s his girlfriend, Tamara Levitt, with her calm sexy voice dropping pearls of wisdom at the end of each session. Together they are the bane of my early morning existence.

I so want to sit down and start my day with twenty minutes of quite energizing meditation. Something that will take me through the day in a Zen like state that has others saying to themselves, “he’s like Outcast, just the coolest motherfunker on the planet”

I want to be Jeff, cool and in control, with a touch of Tamara, who always has just the right antidotal story to illustrate a point. Instead my brain and thoughts are a jumbled garden with bees alighting on flower after flower never taking the time to settle before they are off to the next thought.

I’ve never actually met Jeff or Tamara and despite my time with them in my head over the last ten day, I have no idea if they are boyfriend and girlfriend.

The last ten days sitting on my living room floor in the last of the night’s darkness at 5:30am with these two in my ears coaxing me towards a calmer more enlightened me have been unexpectedly hard. So far I’ve learned about equanimity (I don’t have it), my homebase, which feel likes a house party, and popping out of my thoughts with inner smoothness. I hear it, understand it but I can’t get it.

You only have to try and mediate or just try to sit still with your eyes closed for ten minutes to realize that mediating is hard work. Jeff reminds me of this daily, that mediating is about using brain muscle we didn’t know we had, before he puts me through another round of exercises that leaves my gray matter mushier than when we started.

I’ve come to befriend Jeff and Tamara via the Calm app. With their help and too hold myself accountable, I have paid up front for a whole year of this subscription based service that is going to teach me to meditate and in turn find a new inner calm.

That may sound a bit cliche and hokey but it’s not far from the truth. The last year I’ve spent a lot of time with my own thoughts as I laid around recovering from surgery, stretched out on a table getting blasted with radiation or just walking the neighborhood trying to get my strength back. All of this down time has helped me realize is that I don’t know myself as well as I thought I did. Crazy, after 52 years, I don’t know myself completely. I am hoping that a deliberate dive into meditating will help me get to know me better.

It’s a process. I get it. Ten days is just a drop in the bucket, but come on brain, calm down and throw me a bone.

Whoooaaa! What just happened?

It’s the next day. I stopped writing the above because trying to explain mediation, much less understand it on a personal level and how to do it correctly was making my brain hurt. Yet, some how today, early this morning it all clicked. Just for a second but somehow on day 11 I meditated (or at least what I think it did) for a split second and then it was gone like a tendril of smoke I could see it drifting further and further away from me until the wind broke it in to a thousand indistinguishable particles.

The rest of the meditation session was not nearly as fulfilling as my mind kept wandering (according to Jeff and Tamara wandering is part of the process as you should acknowledge it and gently bring yourself back to your home base) back to that split second.

Imagining putting together that split second with another split second and another and evidentially those seconds become minutes have me excited for this small break through that happened while seated on the dog bed in my living room this morning.

I really don’t hate Jeff and Tamara but like anyone that pushes you into a state of discomfort there is a certain amount of resistance you have to that person as they push you. Once the break throughs happen the resistances become a challenge.

“Is that all you got?” becomes my mindset.

And yes I know that meditation is not a competitive sport but if the push to do better moves me to a place of quite contemplative deeper and better understanding of myself I’ll take it.