Really great thread. Thank you for sharing, might seem cliché, but that really is the first step to addressing an issue like mental health. Whatever you’re dealing with, doing your best to share and articulate your experience has absolutely zero downside. It helps you and helps others who might be feeling similarly, but just didn’t have the words. Sorry if you experienced negativity about it elsewhere, those people need help in their own way.
To answer you, I am not over 40, so I can’t speak to that specifically. However, I am someone who has struggled a lot mentally. I’ve been open, here and elsewhere, about my sobriety. Even with all that work put in for that and considering myself “healthy”, mentally and physically, I would still say I struggle at times mentally and likely will to some extent for the rest of my life.
Many of my experiences, I’d say they’ve done a degree of permanent damage that I’ve ostensibly had to recover from. In truth, I think issues like anxiety and mood imbalance were always present, they were just exasperated and brought to the fore by what I did to myself. I think I say all this, to point out that it’s not something that can be 100% “fixed” at any given time in a lot of cases, mental health (in my experience) is something that is continuous and that you have to work at and regularly make changes to accommodate.
For me, it took years of healthy living and “white-knuckling it” as it were. I can’t stress enough how much diet and paying attention to stomach health will aid you, not just physically, but mentally. People with really, really poor gut health, they’ve been shown to exhibit symptoms found in schizophrenia, manic depression, etc. It’s come to be known as a second brain in recent years and I think I agree with that wholly. If the gears and clockwork are turning properly in your body, particularly the stomach, your brain functions differently and I have no problem believing that. It may be hippie-like of me, but we are an interconnected organism; one thing going wrong/right can kick off a chain reaction, etc.
Aside from that, as others have said. Simply interacting with people, friends, loved ones, talking about it or simply talking at all about anything, it helps. Contrary to what anyone thinks, we aren’t intended to be solitary, isolated people. Believe me, I considered myself pretty anti-social for a lot of my life, so it would be easier if that were the case. It’s simply not how humans are wired. No matter your disposition, you must have connection, love, contact. Without it, like I said, things begin to go wrong. As others have said too; limiting online “connectedness”, social media, news, “doom-scrolling”, etc. That helps immensely. To tie back into what I just said about interaction, I firmly believe we aren’t intended to be staring into screens constantly, get outside and do something, or even just do earthing. Something as simple as feeling your feet against grass, something that isn’t man made, has an impact.
All I can really say other than that, is do not give up. No one said it to me when I struggled, but I will say it to you, it will get better. I promise.
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