The human brain is one of the most extraordinary organs in our body. It holds approximately one hundred billion neurons which fire endlessly throughout the day, allowing us to breathe and blink and make grilled cheese sandwiches and watch hours and hours of Tik Tok. Really, us humans are only capable of such amazing feats because of the squishy pink lump that sits between our eyes. Cool, right? Unfortunately though, the brain doesn’t always have our best interest in mind.
Sometimes it works too hard when the answer is right in front of us. Other times it creates fantastical scenarios that will probably never happen, whether we want them to or not. Overall, the goodness that our brains bring is often balanced out by the negativity of doubt, anxiety, and depression. These are battles that every human must fight each day in some capacity and I believe that’s where our mental health originates.
Let me give you an example in the form of a day in my life: I wake up in the morning and the first thing I do is check my phone. I check my notifications, answer texts I missed in the night, then go straight to Instagram. Oh look, I lost a handful of followers. The thought only has to pass briefly through my mind to stick like a bug in a trap. Why does this keep happening? What am I doing wrong? Do people not like me?
We continue our day. I go to class and meals and I scroll through Depop in my free time, but suddenly it’s late afternoon and it seems that nothing has gotten done. I come back to my dorm and I forgot to make my bed, my laundry is overflowing, and I have an essay due soon. Suddenly I’m alas with the entire weight of the world on my shoulders. My mind shouts: GET EVERYTHING DONE NOW! wiht whatever semblance of calm that I had is ripped to shreds.
Now it’s nighttime, and I’m exhausted. I worked through my most pressing issues, but now I’m wondering how I can get ahead so this doesn’t happen again. I need to do better, obviously. Work should be my main focus. So instead of enjoying dinner with my friends I hole up in my room. When my roommate tries to chat I blow her off with my fingers resting on my laptop keys. I text my boyfriend in the language of complaints, wondering how my life got so stressful in so little time.
The whirlwind of fear and anxiety I felt earlier has settled into a simmering pot of anger, but I don’t quite realize it until there’s no more work to be done. Not until I’m laying in bed at the end of the day, asking myself how I got so upset. I want to say, because people are annoying, keep bothering me, don’t understand how busy I am. And then I think, am I a terrible person? No, no. Because when I think harder I remember my Instagram followers and the pressure I put on myself to do everything at once, and the punishment I endure because of those high standards.
The culprit is my brain. It’s those hidden, insubstantial thoughts that truly bring me down on a bad day, and they might do the same to you. They tell you things that seem to add up in the moment, but in the end they don’t amount to who you are at all. You’re not a terrible person. You’re just a human with a brain.
So the next time you feel caught up in a storm of your own creation, take a step back and think about where the first bolt of lightning struck. That way, you’ll have a chance at salvaging a potentially great day.