How to deal with dissatisfaction

Transcript by Sean Jackson

Aidan Cammies (AC): Hi and welcome to Brainstorm - the podcast exploring how our minds work, how work affects us and how we can best deal with it. We are Aidan Cammies 

Damiano Tescaro (DT): and Damiano Tescaro. Explorers of the office jungle and mental health aficionados. Buckle up, because ideas are about to get wild.

DT: Hello Aidan

AC: Hello Damiano, how’s it going?

DT: It’s going quite well this week in particular has been a nice, open, different week that the past couple of months which have been extremely intense. How about your week, how have you been?

AC: Yeah, these past few weeks have been bad for various reasons, which I will touch on. But today I am feeling like a human again so I am very happy about that.

DT: Yeah, that’s a good place to be.

AC: Yes, I feel that’s probably a good base level.

DT: Definitely and I think this will be an interesting episode because we skipped one month - which is unusual for such a successful podcast as ours with millions of subscribers.

AC: I really missed you.

DT: Part of the reason for this [missing a month] is in EMEA we had a virtual event and there was a ton going on on both sides. While you were doing some experiments, I understand, can we call them experiments?

AC: Yeah, for a bit of backstory - although I have probably talked about this on the podcast before, I have got ADHD. It is still relatively new to me, I was diagnosed maybe a year and half ago, so am still pretty new to it all and the medication that I was on which is Xaggitin (which acts as a stimulant) one of the annoying side effects was my stomach was not feeling great in the mornings and it has had a negative impact on my appetite. I just wasn’t hungry, which isn’t great for staying healthy.

DT: I am not super familiar with this, but do you have to take the medication every day?

AC: It is once per day, though occasionally you can take a tolerance break at the weekend, or if you’re not especially busy. It is mainly to help regulate a person’s energy levels. Without it, I have always been dependent on caffeine or sugar, or to release enough norepinephrine or dopamine - the things in your brain that help you focus on stuff, and the happy chemical that rewards you for doing something good.

Recently I moved houses, I switched GPs and mental health teams and I was chatting to the new doctor and we decided to try a new medication to see if we could get rid of the side effects. On the face of it, we thought they were very similar, they had the same active ingredient, methylphenidate hydrochloride, but the difference is it released 30:70, which means rather than 20% of the medication being immediately absorbed by the bloodstream and 80 is released slowly over the day, instead you have 30% that hits you immediately and 70 over the rest of the day.

My thinking was, that’ll be good because when it comes to the evening, it’ll be out of the system, I’ll be more tired and ready for sleep. But for something that on the face of things looked so similar it has been absolutely terrible. The last three weeks I’ve had really bad headaches, which get worse when I am upside down or feeling more pressure - obviously the standard response to that is ‘don’t go upside down’ - but it’s really weird how many times I’ve found myself having to go upside down!

DT: I was about to say, were you doing a lot of handstands, training and yoga?

AC: Yeah, I am also Batman, so the night job gets in the way. But I was also getting the side effects that I was trying to avoid of bad stomach, no appetite, but have also felt a lot more lethargic and have been experiencing depression symptoms, which I’ve not had for a few years, and I have not missed.

DT: It was such a tiny change, it doesn’t sound like it would be so bad.

AC: Exactly, that was my thinking. I thought it would be fine. Is it me, is it the lack of sunlight, am I not doing a good enough job at work, classic mental health conditions, trying to trick you that it’s not their fault. But as of today, I am back on the old medication and I am no longer feeling like a sad zombie. I am super excited to be back, and I think you mentioned this earlier, it is interesting how clear it is once you get past a bad time that you’ve been through. You realise ‘oh wow, I was really not having a good time there.

DT: It is good to be able to look back and have perspective on things. But also, and I don’t want to sound like I am sugar coating this, but you have the element of experiencing and enduring through this. There was a phrase that I heard in the past associated with LGBTQ Trevor Project was that it gets better afterwards. I think we’re much more resilient than we think we are. And yes, not everything is a successful experiment, but the fact that we do it and get to the end on the other side is a testament to our strength. I am delighted to have you back, I hope that you find something that helps you wake up in the morning with a healthy appetite.

AC: That is a really nice way of putting it. I would not have known it was as terrible as it was unless I tried. A lot of mental health is trial and error. I might have mentioned this before, our brains are so complex we know more about the nearest star system than we do about how our brains work. If they were so simple as to be understood, we would be so simple we wouldn’t understand.

DT: It is interesting to think about it as an outsider to this world. You’re taking medication to influence your mental energy levels, but this has dramatic consequences on things like appetite, on how you feel in the morning, on how your stomach feels. It is a side effect that influences so much more, it is your energy level, it is literally how you feel. It is something that most people can relate to.

AC: It is really interesting. Some of these things seem disconnected. But our mental health is not just in our brains, we’ve got plenty of nerves and essentially a ‘brain’ inside our stomach, our spine, our nervous system, we have neurons all over our body. It’s not like when you have a broken leg, where you can use localised injections and that’s the only area it is affecting. Our brain controls everything, therefore everything is connected to it.

DT: I was talking to a friend of mine a couple of weeks ago, and this comes back to the general situation where the lockdown is going on and on, and conversations like this are becoming more frequent certainly in my group of friends, I don’t know if for you it is the same?

AC: Oh yeah, it’s all we talk about. It’s like non-stop therapy sessions. I don’t know if other people love it or hate it, but I love it.

DT: Do you find that people are getting a bit bored somehow? It is still top of mind, but it is still there, it’s still happening. Or do you think that people are getting more interested to really understand what is going on behind the scenes?

AC: Good question. There was a great article I read about how our search capacity feels depleted. Our brains have been running on this adrenaline driven, high alert. A pandemic is an existential threat and our brains perceive it as such so it is difficult to wake up in the morning and think calmly ‘I’m going to do some yoga, I am going to meditate and focus on my work’. Your brain wakes up and goes “arghhhhh, OK, food. Work. Everything is terrible.” It would be great if the brain woke up and went “we’ve been doing this for three months now, it’s all cool, this is normal.” Unfortunately this doesn’t happen. But you’re right, the fact the people are talking about it or are more likely to talk about it does make it seem easier, or if it doesn’t make it easier at least it show people that it is a very human normal thing to go through rather than feeling like you have to do something on your own.

DT: One thing that struck me and tells me how weird I am sometimes, is that this friend of mine and myself are quite introverted, we like staying at home, watching a movie with a cup of tea, the usual stuff. But even for her, and she lives in London with her husband, she has started to miss the interactions. I guess in Lonon you have daily habits like the Tube in the morning that almost like social rituals. She has started to miss that. I was very surprised, I thought of all people she would be the last to miss social interactions. But on the other hand, I was surprised to find that I was almost fine with it. I am in a place where I am not tired of the pandemic. I miss seeing my friends more often, but working from home is such a comfortable way to work, just because I have the space to recharge. As introverts we need to recharge when we expend energy and being at home for most of the day gives me so many opportunities to take the 10 minutes and quickly recharge.

The other thing I have noticed, while we’re on the subject, is for the past two or three months, preparing for the virtual events, I had so much work and I didn’t realise how much time I was putting in, working to unspeakable hours. But I think it acted like a protection ring for my brain. It kept me so busy that I never really had a moment where I thought ‘Oh I miss XYZ’. My brain was constantly thinking about the next thing to do.

I would often work late into the night, which is not something I am a fan of doing, I don’t think it’s healthy. But I was surprised to discover that the side effect of this was my brain did not have the time to linger in that feeling of isolation. I found it interesting because it was like anti-venom to the loneliness. Have you ever felt like this, has your perception of the lockdown changed in this time.

AC: It is really interesting, I have definitely noticed in the past when I’ve been like that. I know a lot of people, and my dad is definitely one of those people, without being able to work they feel a bit lost. I definitely am not like that. I appreciate sometimes having a single point of focus. I notice that when I’m doing something that does not have a clear definition of ‘done’ sometimes I will spend far more time than is necessary and not recognising when good enough is good enough, or sometimes I don’t know how I can finish something so I never start it.

I was giving a presentation earlier about how it’s OK to not be OK, one of the things I chat about it is when I was doing my dissertation which should have taken nine months but I did it in three weeks and I do not recommend doing that. It was not good. It was all about procrastination, but I got it done and it was absolutely terrible. I had eight months of stressing about how I needed to start it, then three weeks before the deadline I realised I really needed to start.

But during those three weeks I could not think of anything that was not to do with the dissertation. So much so that I slept in the Students’ Union, 70/80% of the days. I bribed the security guard with Kit Kat Chunkies, cos technically you weren’t supposed to stay overnight and you definitely were not supposed to sleep overnight. But I was still working at 4am in the morning powered by horrible sugary energy drinks. In hindsight maybe I should have used that experience to inform me about talking to a professional about this because this is not a normal way of doing things. Did I do that? No I didn’t. I was worrying about what I would do for a job or how I would get food, or my eczema that had flared up. But I wasn’t thinking about during the three weeks. I don’t think the whole stress fuelled, procrastination powered approach is worth it.

DT: I get you, absolutely. To be honest, I surprised myself when I was talking to my friend and came to that realisation when I looked back and saw I was powered by adrenaline. But I realised it kept me in a strange suspended balance. But I also realised it put me in a high frequency mode that this week as the workload returned to normal, I am having a bit of hard time going back to normal. I am so over-activated all the time, that I had a couple of conversations with my partner and he was like “ok, let’s chill for a second” I’d be up at 7:00 am and eating biscuits and be like “what if we made a YouTube series where we talk about your experiences when you were a child, and I do the subtitles,” and he’d go, “wait a second, what? No. Why do you think I’d want to do this, I don’t want to do this.” I was thinking, ‘but this is an opportunity, you don’t understand, there is a market for this, we should think about it’.

Being so hyper all the time it is tricky to bring it back. There are times when falling asleep becomes strange and there is also an inner sense of guilt that is linked to that. I think there has been a connection between my performance workwise and my state of mind

I don’t think I fully processes how these things went, but I am happy that this week things started to go back to ‘normal’ because I’m not sure if that was healthy either.

AC: If you need any help finding ways to procrastinate, Aidan from the past three weeks can find plenty. I definitely find it easy to go ‘oh what if we did this? Is this a cool thing? Maybe there’s a niche in the market for it, maybe it will help people’ When in actual fact I just want to collect Pokemon cards again - ok, that’s find Aidan, you can do that now…

DT: How did you cope in those three weeks, knowing that you were doing this sort of experiment, I guess you were mentally prepared for some side effects, but at the same time were you able to maintain clarity in your goals?

AC: No. It’s one of those weird things that because it is very meta in that I was prepared to think that these meds could be bad, but I was not expecting them to be causing that level of brain fogginess. Looking at it in hindsight, if I had that clarity in the moment, I would have recognised three or four days in these meds aren’t working. Sometimes there is an adjustment period, but with stimulants they are generally pretty fast acting and it does not have to build up in the system for too long over time depending on the medication, obviously everything is slightly different. But I should have recognised that I should have called the experiment off, but because I had resorted to that really brain foggy lethargic ‘ah well maybe it’s just me’, I continuously put off calling the doctor, which I could have done at any point, I have the number and can call any time, but I just though ‘no, it’s fine,’ until I eventually did call and I thought ‘why did I not do this sooner?’ It is really interesting how the main means of thinking about stuff and being aware of how you’re actually feeling is compromised it becomes very difficult to not get stuck and spiral.

I was quite lucky, and this is one of the things I wanted to talk about today, routine, satisfaction and managing to still do things even when you’re not feeling great, because I did not feel great, I didn’t feel good or even OK. But I still went to the gym and that was because I’d set up accountability with a friend. Most days I set daily intentions, I’d write three intentions and what the first step was in achieving them. I didn’t get them done all the time, but sometimes I would, little and often, I’d stick to the routine of writing in my diary about how I’m feeling every evening, even when I was not feeling great, I’d still keep those routines going because I know they help. And as much as I wanted to go to bed, or stay up until 3am and play more Pokemon, I realised that if I set up routines when I am feeling OK and I am very grateful that I did do that, because it is difficult to start doing those things when everything feels sucky.

DT: It feels like our mind tripping our good intentions. Why is it so difficult sometimes to start when we are at our peak feeling good and things seem to be in a balanced state, and sometimes it feels easier to start when we are at our lowest. It is like the paradox of the artist who unless you are in complete pain, how can you produce art? Because the best love stories and songs all originate from a breakup. I have no idea why this works, do you have any idea why this happens?

AC: I see parallels between that and the news. I try to stick to a low information diet, I try not to check the news every single day. If there is something that is really important I will hear about it from someone, but I don’t need to check the news every day or every hour, because so much of the news out there is negative or exaggerated because that’s the stuff that elicits an emotional response. A story about how wild fires are raging and the planet is doomed in X years unless we stop global temperatures rising by 3 degrees, which is very true, and I am aware of that, but I don’t necessarily need to be reminded about it on a daily basis. If you compare that to ‘on the whole literacy rates, pregnancy survival rates and poverty overall over the past X years. Which one are you more likely to click on when you wake up in the morning?

If you see that sort of thing every day, I’d ideally go for the nice one, but in reality you will be drawn to the bad news, here are the top ten bad things of 2020, your brain is drawn to it, you internalize it. That’s one thing that I’ve done which has definitely helped.

DT: Did you find that limiting or controlling your information diet allowed you to find more energy to start new projects or ideas when you feeling good?

AC: Yeah, it was something that I started when I was feeling good.

DT: The reasons I ask is because I’m thinking about my creative process. There are times when I feel as though I would love to take some pictures, completely randomly and the only rule that I abide to is the 15 second rule, which is that there is a window of reward mechanism that the brain has when you get the inspiration you get a dopamine rush in your brain that rewards you for your good idea, I find that I respond quite well to that, but I am very bad at planning. So it is hard for me to say “this weekend I will spend two hours taking pictures because I feel the artistic need to express myself”. This literally never happens, but it is very possible that at 6:30 tonight I will decide to take some pictures for no reason whatsoever and if I can jump on this 15 second train I will be very happy. This makes it difficult for me to be predictable and plan ahead when it comes to these little good moments. But it is more about recognising when the train comes and to jump aboard as quickly as possible. 

AC: I find it interesting that your default is to fight. My immediate reaction when I’ve come up against a challenge has been ‘turn off laptop, I’m going to go and lie on the floor now and stare at the ceiling, roll on a yoga mat and inevitably pick up the Nintendo Switch.’

Obviously that is not a long term way of doing things, things are never going to be great 100% of the time. That’s something our brains don’t like thinking about. The analogy I like to use is, we’re not really that much more complicated than SIMs characters, we have a hunger bar, tiredness, need to go to the toilet and at any point those are all there and if they are not all full, we are not happy. We’re constantly going, ‘oh I am a bit hungry, oh I’m a bit tired.’ And even if all those base needs are met you’ve got ‘oh I can’t go and meet my friends, oh I still have to do the washing up, oh I still have to send all these emails.’

We’re constantly playing this impossible game where we’re always chasing this imaginary feeling of zen-like satisfaction where I have done all the things. My email is empty, I’ve just had some great food, I’ve watched a show.’

DT: My house is perfectly clean.

AC: Have you ever felt like that, where you have done all the things?

DT: No. Hahaha

AC: Has there ever been a time where you have done some of the things and felt good about it?

DT: Definitely. To me this is a question about triggers, like in the example before, I think I trained my brain to see some of the triggers that give me the highest efficiency of pleasure. I have friends who enter a meditation phase when they clean their house or they do the washing up or they iron their clothes. I loathe doing all of those things. But give me a guide on how to tune my video recording software to do the latest codecs and I will spend weeks.  We were talking about keyboards earlier, I’ve spent I don’t know how many hours watching videos of people clicking buttons. And this to my brain feels like a perfectly reasonable and productive use of my time. It gives me joy and I am content with that. There is a point where I stop myself from over analysing it and just say “I really enjoy this”, I am going to just enjoy this. But the overall feeling of completion when all the stars are aligned, I don’t think I’ve ever been there.

AC: No, I don’t know anyone who has. It is so weird that our brains are always striving for something that doesn’t exist. I like what you mentioned about the codec tuning and specifica about finding the best keyboard because that’s life. We’re always going to have some bad stuff and some good stuff. You can always do some researching. For me, it was finding the best humidifier, I spent about two and half hours doing that, because my skin gets really dry in winter. I could have spent that doing two hours focusing on something else that needed doing, yes the house needs cleaning, yes I need to reply to those emails, but I don’t need to do it in these two hours.

It is definitely something I have been struggling with and obviously it’s more difficult when our offices are our homes. We have location triggers, it is difficult to go into the lounge and sit down to relax and enjoy a show, I sit down, I turn on the TV, my brain goes, you have 789 unread emails, I am sad.

I think something that we need to do and something that is very easy to say or share, but actually doing it is so difficult is accept that you are going to feel bad, like I definitely have these past few weeks. There is no way we can chase this impossible nirvana state of everything being completed, even if we do the house gets dirty over time. So rather than striving for that, strive to not necessarily enjoy but to experience the bad stuff.

DT: I love that word that you use, experience.

AC: There are going to be some way that you can’t make the experience itself more enjoyable. There are going to be times where you made a mistake and you did something wrong. Hopefully you’re in a psychologically safe team where people accept that it just human, but sometimes you are just going to do something wrong. You’re going to say the wrong thing, or feel in your chest or wherever you experience that notion, anxious or terrible. Rather than immediately trying to get away from this emotion, try leaning into it. The next time you feel anxious about all the things you need to do, try and fully experience it, it is something your brain does not want to do. Your brain reacts like ‘but that’s a bad emotion. We don’t want to do that.’ Try and fully focus on it, go ‘oh no, I haven’t done the emails, that’s bad that’s terrible, what happens if I fully focus on this feeling right now, and you feel it and you’re still there and it’s not a big scary monster even though your brain thinks it is. Counter intuitively chasing those bad feelings actually makes you more satisfied overall. I don’t use the word happy, because happiness is a fleeting emotion.

DT: Being a verbal thinker myself for me it is really important to have people around me that I can trust and confide in and talk about these things, just verbalising these thoughts and feelings with somebody allows you to gain a different perspective, it is almost like looking at things from a car. You’re not in the street, you’re in the car, driving by those feelings and those thoughts, you can still see them, and you can still feel them, but they are somewhere else. This is around a conversation on meditation that I hope we will do. As a take away I think it is brilliant. And we are perfectly on time to wrap up. Unusual for us, but there we are.

Not only am I super happy to have done this episode after this long break, I want to say “thank you Aidan for this, thank you for sharing your experiences with us, because I know it is a very personal thing and it means a lot not only to me, but the millions of listeners that we have.

AC: I know it sounds cliched and I say it all the time but things are easier when you share them with other people. Obviously that’s not the same as walking up to the person serving you coffee and going ‘do you want to hear about the past week of depression I’ve had?’ There is obviously a fine balance, but like you say for some people verbalising it is not always the best way. Some people might find they can more easily gain self awareness of their thoughts by writing it down.

I still do that, I’m not sure it helps in the moment, but it is nice to go and look at what you wrote three months ago. Oh three months ago it was summer and I went for a nice walk in the park and I had a happy day. This again relates to what we were saying earlier about doing those habits, doing those things when things are going well, first makes it easier because once you start a habit it is more difficult to stop, and I think in the future we should chat about habits. But doing it when you’re feeling great, makes it easier when you’re not feeling great. It reminds you that you can’t get away from the bad stuff, the bad stuff is always going to be there, but the good stuff is going to be there too.

DT: This is beautiful, I want to clap and wrap this into a little gift and send it to future Damiano whenever a moment, or a little dip. Thank you always Aidan.

AC: Thank you. Hopefully we don’t have another month gap.

DT: Yes indeed. Also in the last episode we had some guest and want to remind people if you want to join the conversation we’re delighted, if you have ideas, or want to speak with us shoot us an email and we’re more than happy to talk

Take everyone and remember, that it is ok

AC&DT: To not be OK