The Pandemic of Mental Illness

Wikipedia defines a Pandemic as, “an epidemic of infectious disease that has spread through human populations across a large region; for instance multiple continents, or even worldwide.” The definition goes on to say that a stable disease is not considered a pandemic.

Is mental illness a disease? If yes, would it be considered a pandemic disease? Is mental illness stable? No, it is growing. Some health speakers are predicting that mental illness will rise from 1/5 to 5/5 and that it will rise worldwide!

This may be a crazy statement but what I am seeing is widespread DIAGNOSIS of mental illness that is making people believe that they are mentally ill and that there is nothing they can do about it. In some cases this diagnosis alone defeats the individual’s possibilities.

Okay, so let’s ask a few questions about rising mental illness.

1. What if it is not mental illness rising but is actually our diagnosis of anything outside of a normal brain (which does not exist) that is rising?
2. What if our expectations of what we deem to be success is way beyond what it needs to be and is dragging down our happiness?
3. What if we are learning how to achieve but not how to sit in the moment and that is burning out the nations?
4. What if we could instead optimize our mental health through prevention and learn how to move our mood and focus? What if this could turn the prediction around?
5. What if we could change how stress damages us by learning first to react differently and secondly when the stress response is activate to learn to balance it with deep breathing?
6. What if we learned that we are all okay as we are and that all of us need a little something sometimes – that we don’t have to “fit” but we do need to learn about our gifts and our bridges?
7. What if we knew that it is our differences that help our species survive and that our differences may even be an intentional design?
8. What if we began with our children – teaching acceptance and balance and breathing rather than teaching solely achievement?
9. What if we began to see all the good that is being done in the world rather than share only the bad news with our family?

Can we reverse the trend of mental illness and convert it to greater mental health?

I believe we can.

Patricia Indigo Irwin
http://wwwpatriciaIndigoirwin.com or http://www.patriciairwin.me

Identify your adrenaline triggers to help optimize your mental and physical health

The events that occur each day in our lives, whether they simply show up or they are events that we have created, are for most of us automatic external triggers that work as little currents in the river’s flow of our day. They may push us to be excited and happy or they may push us to feel anxiety, sadness or even anger. Excitement and anger in particular have a tendency to release the feel good hormone or adrenaline part of the chemical reaction of the fight or flight stress response.

Today, I invite you to consider that we release little bits of adrenaline throughout our day that we are mostly unaware of. We might release it because we received good news, or we received bad news, or we became angry or perhaps we were startled simply because the alarm went off. These little boosts of adrenaline propel us throughout our day and can do real damage over time.

It can take up to 4 hours for blood vessels to re-dilate after the stress response has been activated. This is compounded when we jump from adrenaline reaction to adrenaline reaction without any timeout to breathe deeply. When we breathe slowly and deeply we are inviting the parasympathetic nervous system in to balance our adrenaline reaction and minimize physiological damage. Over time we can begin to see signs of burnout and severe sadness as we “use up” our adrenaline response.

To optimize mental health consider observing what triggers, for you, the adrenaline reaction known for faster speech, faster shallow breathing and a desire for movement and under normal circumstances (no tiger in sight) learn to invite your balancing parasympathetic system in immediately upon observing your adrenaline response.

Also note that the Adrenaline response can become very addictive. I call it the “First Addiction” because it is the first “feel good – do more” type of chemical in our bodies that we begin to want more of.

Mother’s Day Raindrop in my Coffee, Core Love

Today, I decided to enjoy my morning coffee in my patio, then the rain came and I quickly gathered my books and papers. It was only beginning and so tiny droplets fell here and there; first onto a page I was reading and then onto my writing. I scooped up the pages, books and my coffee and just as I was about to enter the house a single drop of rain fell into my coffee.

My first thought was “eww” did that roll off my roof? Then I realized how far that single drop of rain had travelled to end up in my coffee. I looked up at the sky and had a sense of what it might feel like to be a droplet inside that massive cloud above. I wondered, what sort of experience it might be to be scooped up from a river, ocean or lake, to travel with the wind and to final fall from maybe 20,000 feet or more to land “plunk” into my coffee. I took a moment from my fleeing the rain to stand, my face toward the clouds appreciating the experience and wondered, “where was this rain coming from, how far had it travelled?’ Soon, in my mind, I floated within the clouds feeling a cool and moist breeze as if I was in a spa made of cool air.

It reminded me that no matter how far we travel from our source that we are always a part of it and that no matter how far we are from our mothers on this Mother’s day that we are always a part of where we came from. Becoming a mother is like ripping your heart out of your body, putting legs on it and setting it loose to experience the world without you. No matter how far the heart travels it remains connected somehow.
Some of us today will celebrate Mother’s Day with our Mother’s and for some of us the reminder of mother is filled with pain. We might have grown up with mothers that were just how we wanted them to be, and for others the mothers were absent or worse – they were there and abusive.

No matter what your experience was – remember that the experience was perfect because it made you who you are today. I hope that you will honor the source today- whether it is simply the clouds above sprinkling the water of life in your coffee and on your face, or the source represented in the mother that you see today. Mother’s day is not about good or bad mothers but more a celebration of love from the core of our being. This core of love is one that we can access in ourselves regardless of our experiences with mom.

Mothers are one of the vessels in which a child is trained and then set free. We never own our children but simply are gifted and trusted with their presence for a very short time. If you are feeling that your mother was not there for you – don’t carry that throughout your life, and maybe choose instead to turn your experience into a gift for others who experience the same sense of loss, frustration and anger. Show them through your example how to access the core love, that lives within us all, for themselves.

This is one of the keys to optimize our mental health – learn how to find core love within – regardless of what is going on around you. I hope that you will choose to transform what you learned into something wonderful and set it free throughout the universe to land in someone else’s coffee.

Patricia/”Indigo”

Happy Mother’s Day
Bonne Fête des Mères
Feliz Día de la Madre

Let’s Talk about Optimal Mental Health rather than Mental Illness

The stats are amazing. When we focus on mental illness we hear statements that it is entirely possible that we will (in the near future) reach 5/5 people having mental illness of some degree. Wow, that is scary and also insane! What are we measuring for mental illness? Why we are not focused on mental health and prevention? What is it that is driving people into illness? So many questions arise as I contemplate this idea. Could it be that we are comparing ourselves to a normal brain that does not exist? Survival of our species depends on diversity which includes not only culture and gender but also diversity in how we think and how we view our world and our challenges.

In other words I believe we are so busy labelling anything that does not fit “into the box of normal” that we are leading ourselves toward mental illness rather than honoring the variety of our minds and learning how to use this diversity and remain in great mental health.

So, rather than “Let’s talk about mental illness” I propose we talk about Optimal Mental Health for all! Let’s look at the needs of the individual thinker not the whole group as one mind. And above all let’s stop trying to fit into some imaginary “normal” parameters!

Read more in the new book The Wave Riders – Riding the Creativity & Mood Spectrum at TheWaveRiders.com – soon to be released.

Can anyone stay positive all the time?

Well I think they can try to be positive (or put on a great front) and I think that while trying to always be positive that we might miss out on the “other view” of our great works. Some people believe, as do I, that the lower energy state, some call depression is really the ability to focus in on details that can be improved – such as in our art, our writing, our music….

Where I believe that the lower insight period becomes a problem is when we put that negative analysis on ourselves, our lives and our relationships. I believe that some of the more negative view is necessary and that it only becomes a problem when we make it part of who we are.

I love this quote from George Bernard Shaw:

“Both optimists and pessimists contribute to society.
The optimist invents the aeroplane, the pessimist the parachute.”

In other words, be optimistic with your pessimism and teach your children to criticize for improvement –only gently their works, not their lives and others around them.

Creativity is known for not being detail focused so we can use our criticism, our lower energy state of pessimism, in a new way with a new meaning that simply means “time for our detail focus, for alternative views” because without these views we might not see how to improve on what we create. Focus it on what you do – not who you are nor the people around you! As always remember to be gentle with yourself and others.

Optimizing our Mental Health

Optimizing Mental Health means to have the best mental health that we can have. Like Life Long Learning or Life Long Fitness, we can strive for Live Long Mental Health by using tools that allow us to have some control over our moods and by coming from the path of prevention of illness to create a lifetime of great mental health from which all the energy for survival and possibility begin. We can work with people ready for change that may have suffered from mental pain and we can work with our youth and children to teach great mental health from our earliest stages of growth. Sometimes we can prevent the crossing the line into deep sadness when we learn to ride the waves of our productive self in balance.

Often the simplest path to optimal mental health is to appreciate what we have rather than striving for what we think others have.

Choosing how to feel after a hit of anger or criticism

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Today, I am feeling the warm touch as the sun moves above the horizon to greet me at the patio table where I sit to have my morning coffee. A feeling of peace has come over me, an understanding that not everyone will love me and that it is okay. Not a single person is loved by everyone that they meet. Anger thrown at us from others is more about what they are dealing with inside and not about our wholeness. Not everyone loves every American Idol contestant and that does not diminish the fact that they are great at what they do and that if it is their passion then no matter what is said about them – they should continue to howl from their deepest self.

I think it is even more important today, than it was in the past, to teach our children and ourselves not to compare who we are to what we see and not to judge ourselves on from the comments of others. We can teach our children that they are whole regardless of the good opinion of others. Imagine if that was the only lesson that you truly understood as you grew into an adult – that no matter what you do, no matter what people think of you – that you are whole and good and right just as you are. What if you knew that without accomplishing a thing – that you have value?

We all have challenges and we all need to accept a hand up sometimes – that is normal – perfection is not. Today, I hope that you will ask yourself, “Where in my life am I accepting criticism as reality and allowing it to defeat me?” “What will I replace that criticism with that is even more powerfully positive in my life?”

Having a hit of criticism or anger thrown at you can create a build-up of negative emotion within your mind and body. If you have been hit recently with either of these – look to see what is it that might be learned from this? Once you have explored it, simply to learn from it, then look into your body at the feeling it may have created. In your mind, pull the feeling into your hand and decide what you want to do with it. You may decide to stomp on it, throw it or discard it in other ways. Exploring, filing or discarding that which is disempowering can release the negative emotion stored within. Ignore the emotion and it may instead build up power while you carry it throughout your day.

In the past I have wrapped the feeling that was disturbing me, that seemed to be in my belly after unprovoked anger was thrown at me, into a ball. I had allowed this attack to penetrate me and it seemed as though it would not leave. I chose to view it as a lesson in how to stay whole even through an attack and instead saw the feeling that was sitting in my belly as a ball of energy held within my hands. I bounced the ball in a humorous way for a few times and then tossed it in a bin in my mind.

This allowed me to acknowledge the emotion, to the pull the emotion out, and to put it wherever I wanted to so that I no longer needed to carry it with me each day. It is these types of “hits” that touch us deeply that have great messages of learning. What feelings will you chose to carry with you and share today? What feelings do you need to acknowledge, to explore and to displace?