Public Comment

The brains and minds of people are limited, and following sustained exertion, they need recovery time and rest. If you overextend the mind, in any way, shape or form, it can sometimes cause damage from which it is hard to recover. This is a type of damage that many people, including mental health professionals, would have a hard time understanding and/or measuring.

When I push too far beyond what I know to be my natural limits, I seem to incur damage to the operating systems that make my personality work. I was in such a situation in 2018, and it affected how I behaved; it also made me far less tolerant of any kind of demanding situation. The reversal to such damage took me a long time to do, despite my knowing some types of self-training that I utilized, that eventually fixed it.

So many people treat their minds as though machines that should always work for anything. This may be okay for some, but it doesn't work for me. When I am not at a hundred percent, I might refuse to do things that other people expect me to do. I will also postpone some tasks until such time as I am ready to do them.

People have not been pleased when I've refused to do as they expect. Often, I will refuse a task or series of tasks because I know my limitations and I know that based on those limitations, trying to do the thing(s) will be beyond what I can reasonably do. I don't ascribe to "no pain, no gain." Pain is an excellent signal provided by the body, giving us information that we must back off from whatever it is we're trying to do. 

People sustain damage when they are growing up. Those who had messed up childhoods and teen years, once we reach adulthood, may have to do a lot of work on ourselves to get to a place of clarity and of being well. 

When you get tired, you deserve rest. If you don't get rest, it is bad for you. The human mind and body were designed to let you know when you need such rest. If you try to override those messages, it doesn't mean you've reached new heights in stamina. 

(If you are subject to any kind of mental illness, you need to avoid energy drinks, such as "5-Hour Energy." I've drank Red Bull without a problem, but I'm tolerant of caffeine, and maybe Red Bull isn't the strongest of the lot.) 

This is another reason that I could not do full-time work. Everyone has their own levels of what they can do and what they can't. If something isn't working for you, you should find a way to stop doing that. 

Mental illnesses can be worsened through overexertion of the brain. A severe manic or depressive episode can overextend the brain. This is where the illness is creating damage to the parts of the brain that were working for you. That's why it matters a lot that you keep symptoms in check. In the case of psychosis, a fully blown episode of nonmedicated psychosis, in a week's time, according to one psychiatrist, can create enough damage that it can take ten years to get back to square one. Another psychiatrist said that it takes three days to recover from stress--normal levels of stress. 

The time it takes to mentally recover from a relapse of psychosis--that's why I'm in my fifties and haven't made it very far in my "writing career." If I compare myself to the really successful writers, very few of them suffered from schizophrenia of the type I have. 

Being medicated seems to impact the capacity to endure exertion. Before I was medicated, I could do a lot more without undue strain. But it is hard to know for certain because this is also before I got ill with schizophrenia. The condition seems to sensitize me to stress. I get stressed out from driving in the Bay Area, and I don't drive very much. My insurance agent recently told me the low mileage per year will lower my auto insurance bill soon. 

Self-care includes necessarily getting the rest we need. Sometimes rest means playing--doing something fun. And sometimes it means plopping one's behind on the sofa and taking a nap. Doing something we perceive as hard, really is hard because that's the only way it can be defined. If you are doing something hard, you probably need rest from it at some point. Yet this could have exceptions. I have a picture in my mind that maybe a genius physicist or mathematician could get rest through solving a puzzle like Rubik's Cube. But that's just conjecture. I don't know very many genius-mathematicians or physicists so I couldn't tell you. 

Yet I do know we're all of us made of soft stuff, stuff that can be injured through overwork or through hard environments. We differ in how much we can handle and in how much rest we need, but all of us can only handle so much, and all of us need to take it easy some of the time. 

Jack Bragen currently publishes four books on lulu.com, and they can be viewed by clicking here.