ISC Podcast Ep. 08 - (Prelude to ‘The Stoked Series’). [11.03.2023]
(Note: This review was originally posted on our old website, innerstrengthcheck.com. Due to the fine folks over at WordPress, that website is now toast. Henceforth, please refer to the current website for any new material! Links on socials and Youtube to be updated as I get to each one. Regards, - Brady)
Furthermore - it’s funny how things are cyclic, huh? (and by cyclic I mean the very bipolar-flavoured cycles of excitement and burnout that neurodivergent folks often follow, irrespective of any other DSM considerations.
As I write this little preface, I’m only just crawling out of a pretty severe year in 2024 mental-health-wise, and am feeling a similar Stoke again.
Sometimes you’ve gotta push that needle. Sometimes you’ve gotta sit back and, well, let the languishing play out a little bit. Not for too long, though. That leads to SPOOKY mental-health territory.
…Thank Mr. Skeltal I guess? /oldermemesir
As I write this, I’m just back from a surf.
Watching someone’s Lancer RPG on Twitch with sweet fuck-all idea what is going on, and vicariously intimidated by the prospect of running it as a GM. But also keenly interested.
Whilst out in just past the great shorelines of the Blue Yonder, I had a moment. I reflected just how much my previous episode focused on what I'd noticed about other content-creators, namely the generalised anxiety meta around a perceived need to push out content with the temporal precision of bowel movements.
But in honesty, there's a reason we also produce things. It's not all exclusively a downward-pressure from sociological forces. Otherwise, we'd all just be mindlessly rote-producing content to appease fuck-knows-who, right?
We write blogs, make vlogs, snappy TikTok brain-frying content, deep-fried memes, novels, albums, reviews, podcasts, whatever, because it meets a need.
Arguably, some of that need is for potential validation, reassurance and, if taken too far, slavishly being beholden to the Gods of Metrics.
But also - creative people make creative output because they have things they want to say. Things they're passionate about. Means of catharsis and self-expression.
I'd like to turn the lens more inward, for the next episode/s, to really start speaking my passion about what I'm genuinely excited for, curious about and otherwise looking forward to in 2023.
I can't do any of that, however, without speaking to some context. Previous podcast episodes and blog posts allude to this, but I'd love to frame exactly how I've started to get my Stoke back.
Let's begin, and let's get stoked.
PRELUDE - MENTAL HEALTH - WHERE’S YOUR HEAD AT?
I’ve had the meta-knowledge that I am engaging far, far too much in internalising negative events, thoughts, what I’m doing too much of/not doing enough, as causally my own fault.
Even having consistent thought-challenging, introducing rational alternatives and explanations for why not everything is me-facing hasn't had much weight. I'd been trying to reframe things as 'you're not entirely, categorically a piece of subhuman shit' by pointing out the impact of work stress, psychosocial stressors, the meta-narrative of helplessness that runs so deep through society and our generation. But it just wasn't sinking in, and often still isn't.
badum-tish
I’m my own person, and I have mental health comorbidities, but I cannot stress to you how much of these factors I truly believe are attributable to adult ADHD, and indeed growing up neurodivergent in general.
Given it directly impacts the ‘seat’ of personality, attention, planning, judgement, analysis and other important functions, myself like many others have a baseline tendency towards self-seppuku, and making overly unfair expectations, standards and evaluations of ourselves.
Mentally ill folks, the neurodivergent, trauma-survivor and similar folks (or combinations thereof) are often able to work in such a wonderfully nuanced, compasstionate, integrated tapestry of thought and balanced language with others.
But we often fall prey to the rigidity of black-and-white/all-or-nothing thinking when it comes to out own self-belief, self-image etc. Not to say people who are neurotypical or even mentally health aren’t fallible to these cognitive distortions. Moreso, it’s important that whilst the neurodiversity movement is about embracing and owning differences, these conditions have potential to be heavily disabling if not identified, acknowledged and managed.
Hell, research demonstrates that simply living with conditions such as ASD, ADHD and other executive/social functioning ass-whoopers, can be a source of secondary depression of it's own accord. Estimates are, according to a meta-analysis by Sandstrom et al (2021), that 'ADHD was three times more common in people with mood disorders compared to those without'.
To quote the hilariously-titled-but-mega-informative online resource Additude.com:
This type of “secondary depression” arises as a direct consequence of the chronic frustration and disappointment that many individuals with ADHD experience.
All the struggles that ADHD symptoms can bring, like troubles with school, relationships, work, executive functions, and the demands of everyday life can lead people with the condition to often feel not good about themselves, making them prone to low self-esteem and negative self-concept.
Making sure that ADHD is properly managed and treated, in these cases, can be key to lifting depression. But by some estimates, 25 percent of adults with the disorder haven’t gotten appropriate ADHD treatment.
“I frequently see depression in adults whose ADHD wasn’t recognized and treated in their younger years,” says Yvonne Pennington, Ph.D., an Atlanta-based psychologist who specializes in adult ADHD. “Having endured so many blows to their self-esteem, they’ve accepted the idea that they’re lazy and stupid-or not good enough to succeed socially or professionally.
Way to hit me in the feels, bro.
Often, it’s not until therapy, writing it down, talking it out or some similar reflective moments of insight until we realise that there’s a duality going on.
Nuance, compassion and balanced thinking for others; overwork, unrelenting standards and categorical/labelled self-talk for ourselves. Things we take perspective with friends and urge them to treat as time-limited, we often can typecast ourselves with as though they're an immutable characteristic. ‘I’m stupid/never going to/don’t have the capacity to XYZ’.
Depression and anxiety overlayed atop this neural structure, simply enhances and powers up both the problems with task initiation/perseverance, disorganisation (difficulty prioritising, managing and ordering tasks from washing up to planning a project), time-blindness, forgetfulness and the slew of cognitive distortions that come with either being mentally ill, neurodivergent or both.
Evidently, the problem for me has not been for lack of awareness. It's not been a lack of psychoeducation on my part.
If anything, the parallel guilt of knowing these things about oneself and yet, watching yourself engage in the world’s most bumbling Let’s Play in third-person while you’re doing or not doing things, is hard to not castigate yourself for.
BUT.
There's been a good recent mix of me returning to more of a coaching approach with my self-talk, and some medication changes providing scaffolding from which to start engaging in changing small behaviours. It can be very tempting for those not doing well to sink into extremities of self-discipline - dieting, over-exercise, overwork etc - and taking a long-form, slow-crawl method of improving one’s self is not as Instagrammable as say, a rapid weight-loss before/after snap.
As someone who’s always been doggedly independent/counter-dependent as hell, especially when it comes to being disciplined with diet and exercise, it was a real hard admission to take on a chronic disease management plan with my GP recently. Specifically, it was hard when the plan was for treating health concerns that some preventative care through those two very things could do well to change.
Until my most recent spell of depression and burnout, I’d never had any issue with movement. It was an underlying self-medication that had been treating an impulsivity I didn’t have a name to until my diagnosis age 31. It was baffling to me that I'd lost interest in exercise, something that'd never changed in 33 years spent depressed a lot of the time.
But times change, things change. And that includes the symptom profile of even familiar mental health conditions.
Fortunately, I swallowed that counter-dependency schema and told it to fuck off. Recently started hitting up exercise physiology through my local Kieser centre. Atop that, I’ve been encouraged to re-engage with surfing and walking again. Another juncture where I could relentlessly beat myself up over knowing better, as I had been recently, or I can accept I’m a human being and just need some additional supports right now.
Also Kieser, not Kaiser.
‘Der Hmph’ - Kaiser Wilhelm, probably, 2023.
I’ve done a lot of work on accepting my constant, frenzied desire to be spinning 100 plates at once, is as much a product just of how I’m wired (i.e. a brain trying to self-stimulate by way of cognitive poking and prodding) as probably a desire for experiential avoidance of underlying anxiety, depression etc. However if we go back to the idea of internalising things as my fault, awareness or not, it’s also been super convenient for depression to ignore the overarching influence of our burnout-inducing modern lifestyle. In particular, the disembodied frenzy and ennui associated with being perpetually online.
The great irony of all that is, half the reason I moved to regional Victoria away from Melbourne was exhaustion and burnout with trying to keep up with the frantic pace of society. Of course, my partner and I both pre-empted a lot of this was grass-is-greener syndrome, but it’s taken quite some time for me to realise that a small but powerful change to my overall levels of burnout are to engage in social media particularly via what some folks are calling JOMO - that is, the Joy Of Missing Out.
th a plethora of apps. A helpless piece of fabric in the cognitive washing-machine that is our modern digital media ecosystem.
Carrying more of a healthy, normal human assertiveness into my work and personal life has been healthy. I work a very, very stressful job, challenging and rewarding although it may be.
A more balanced approach, I’ve recently come to realise, is thus:
I cannot work in the industry I work in, live with Muh Condishuns and navigate the futile effort that is keeping up with the digital Joneses.
Maybe, part of this yearning to be kept up-to-date across all these apps (which are increasingly designed to induce such craving for all of us) might also just be a keen-ness to feed the beast of my restless brain. Which is fine, natural and normal for me.
Having an innate propensity to again (sigh) not do things by halves, I think it’s the depression that has influenced keeping me reined up, at bay and withdrawn. It’s been a weird sensation to not engage in the lifestyle I want to, out of some horribly-skewed notion that everyone else’s well-intended notion of rest (i.e. as much downtime/reduced activity as possible) isn’t my own.
Alongside the irony that taking a powerful legal stimulant has on down-regulation my anxiety/beehive-of-thought brain, I can feel either the newly-introduced antidepressants probably starting to do their thing.
As opposed to being dismissive of my own wisdom and awareness, I’ve also been working diligently on trying to internalise my own good advice.
As opposed to keeping up with the churning whirlpool that is modern online life, when I myself (and my partner) have complex health issues to navigate, I’ve been okay with re-prioritising my time and energy away from mindless scrolling.
I’m ready to deliberately be protective of my time and energy, but also begin harnessing the relentless drive in a way that is tempered and oriented more towards what I want to do with my life and time.
Now. On that very topic!
I’ve been recently keen on throwing myself (healthily) into this very... project? Podcast? Blog? Hobby? In a way that isn’t dismissive of that energy.
I think I’ve repealed enough of that punitive and critical mind to finally get The Stoke back.
Future episodes will cover exactly what I'm frothing on for 2023 in the following domains:
Tabletop (i.e. Kickstarters I've ordered, news happening in the TTRPG/wargaming space, my intentions as a Game Master and solo player)
Board Games (recently purchased board games, the leering backlog of BG's sitting on my Ikea shelf, Kickstarters and other cool stuff in the works in this space this year)
Music (so, so many gigs and good releases! Plus also what I'm aiming for in my music journey re: guitar, bass, writing etc)
Vidya (self-explanatory)
And other hobbies/pursuits (surfing, lifting, drawing, writing, etc!)
I dub these, The Stoke Series.
Stay tuned!
(EDIT: Those past Stoke Series episodes are also coming soon - stay tuned!)