Abhijit Naskar's Blog - Posts Tagged "depression"

To understand mental health, we must first understand what is mind? And by understand, I mean realize, in our bones, what this mind thing is. So, let's try to figure out. I assume you know what water is - what it is made of. It's made of hydrogen and oxygen. That's why, water is H2O. Likewise, mind is made of neurons - most of which are inside our brain and the rest are spread across our body like a network, not just to drive our body, but also to receive information from the environment.

We have about a hundred billion neurons in our brain. And just so you know, the number of neurons remains almost the same, since the time of our birth, what changes as we grow up and live through time, is their interconnections. For example, when you practice a certain task over a long period of time, the neurons responsible for that task, get substantially interconnected, and as they get more interconnected, you become better at that task.

Now, where does mental health come in all this? Well you see, we are animals. Yes we are, technically speaking. But since we severed our dependency on mother nature, by building civilizations, modern civilizations, we became somewhat non-animal. Which means, we no longer rely on the internal mechanisms that helped up animals to survive in the jungle alongside other animals. And these mechanisms are what we call instincts. But by instincts, I am not talking about the way you use the term in everyday life. I am not talking about just gut feeling. Instinctual drives helped us survive in the merciless kingdom of the wild - the drive for reproduction, the drive for staying alert and so on.

Now, the drive for staying alert is the instinct that's responsible for most of our modern everyday mental health issues - anxieties, stress and so on. Why, because we are not wired in our brain to stay calm - we are not wired to remain peaceful - we come from a long line of ancestors, who had to remain alert all the time, in order to be able to fight any possible predatory attack. And this evolutionary instinct of alertness still remains quite strong in the human psyche, except, now, we have labeled it with problematic terms like anxiety, stress and so on.

We have started to delude ourselves with the belief that these everyday mental health issues are our enemies that have risen recently, but the matter is quite the opposite. As I said in my book "What is Mind", fear, anxiety, stress - these are not our enemies. You cannot get rid of them, by thinking of them as enemies. They are evolutionary wisdom in the face of danger. So, you should not try to get rid of them, rather you should try to befriend them.

Accept them as part of your life - accept them as part of your being - rid yourself of the fairytale notion, that you ought to be full of happiness all the time - rid yourself of the false belief that being sad is bad, that being upset or disappointed is bad - these are all human conditions - one can't erase them, just because one doesn’t like them or one's society presents them as evil. Only when you accept yourself, the way you are, along with all your joys, sorrows, miseries, disappointments, failures, achievements and ecstasies, can you truly step beyond the dualities of existence - only then can you become truly alive to life itself.

Mental health awareness doesn't mean fighting stress, anxiety, depression and other everyday mental health issues, rather it means consciously modulating the habits that intensify those issues. Once you are in control of your habits, instead of letting your habits control you, you would automatically be in a much better shape, both mentally and physically. In fact, if we put aside the severe neuropsychological conditions, there is no such thing as mental health awareness, there is only awareness. Awareness breeds health, whereas callousness breeds more suffering.

Facebook is not just injurious to health,
It's now a full-on humanitarian crisis.
If you think it's just a harmless bad habit,
You're fanning the flames of social necrosis.
Social media ought to make people social,
Not make pavlov's dogs out of humanity.
Yet all that facebook actually does today,
Is drive society towards clinical insanity.
Social media is not necessarily bad,
So long as it doesn't feed on our stability.
Yet facebook has devised the perfect algorithm,
To learn, pump and monetize human instability.
Facebook is the definition of what AI must be not.
Algorithm without humanity is mental holocaust.

“Simple, Sonnet

Serenity is born of simplicity,
Insecurity is born of clutter.
Patience empowers perseverance,
Selfishness brings down disaster.

But what’s a life without difficulty,
Difficulty delivers durability.
Don’t be ashamed of darkness in life,
It’s in darkness we shine most brightly.

There’s nothing shameful about fear,
It’s a problem when the reason is baseless.
Trouble of privilege is trouble of lies,
Reject all privilege and rush to the helpless.

It is human nature to shed tears when in agony,
Taking pain to wipe another’s tears is humanity.”


“Basit, Şiir

Barış doğar basitlikten,
Korku karmaşıklıktan.
Sükunet doğar sabırdan,
Belalar bencillikten.

Ama dertsiz hayat nasil hayat,
Zorluk bize cesaret getirir.
Karanlık hiç de ayıp değil,
Karanlık bize parlamayı öğretir.

İnsan korkmazsa kim korkacak –
Sebebi doğruysa korkmak ayıp değil.
Servetin derdi yalan derdidir,
Dünyada gerçek dertler eksik değil.

Dertte olduğunda herkes gözyaşı dökmeyi bilir,
Ama başkasının gözyaşını silmek için
derdine katlanmak, çok azı bilir.”

I don’t do Netflix,
I don’t binge for adrenaline.
I find it far more soothing to
listen to old BBC radio shows
while I do my writing.

Happiness is not a matter of exhilaration,
Happiness is a matter of moderation.
Just because all the monkeys are partying,
doesn’t mean you gotta give submission.

So I say, get your priorities straight,
Happiness will take care of itself.
If you don’t know to draw your own lines,
That’s not freedom, but apish descent.

I don’t scroll till I pass out,
I don’t drink till I feel sick.
Happiness means happy-in-less,
Trends don’t bring you peace.

Life is like the lunar cycle,
sometimes it is full shining,
sometimes it is half shining,
other times it goes totally dark.

But one thing is certain,
no one phase lasts forever,
it all just keeps changing,
thus light is sustained
through life’s brief encounter.

The unpredictability of life
is what makes life predictable.
Sometimes it rains cats and dogs,
the next moment sunshine is unavoidable.