DRMacIver's Notebook
Learning from experts in having problems
Learning from experts in having problems
I was in a conversation with two other people, let’s call them Alex and Pat,Brought to you as the first two members of my standard quartet of placeholder names: Alex, Pat, Kim, and Charlie. I wanted a good set of gender neutral names to use when writing Voting by Example and standardised on these. the other day where Alex and I had clearly had rather more mental and physical health problems than Pat.Or, possibly, had just hit the point of actually having learn to deal with it when they hadn’t. I could very easily have been Pat 10 years ago and it wasn’t because I lacked problems, I was just ignoring them
Alex and I were sharing tips about how to recognise different types of low function days and what to do about them. I think we’d just been talking about the significance of temperature in extremities - cold feet in particular for me are a strong sign that my low function day will be improved by something that raises my heart rate. A hot bath is an excellent choice, jumping jacks are a solid second place.
Pat said something to the tune of “Huh, I’ve never paid this much attention to my body for debugging bad days”. Alex and I gently pointed out that this was because they hadn’t had to, and that people with sufficient problem in this space tended to learn these skills out of necessity.
Now, the thing is, these skills are actually useful to everyone, and they’re not that hard to learn if someone is teaching you. But if you’ve got relatively common and severe problems you both have a much stronger signal to work with and many more opportunities to practice, making it much easier to learn on your own. You’ve also got a much more urgent need to learn them, so you tend to seek out literature on the subject, have conversations like Alex and I were having, etc. and so naturally become something of an expert on them.
If you don’t have that particular class of problem though, you will still have cases where you urgently need the skills. Everyone has bad days from time to time, everyone goes through bad experiences, and knowing how to deal with strong emotions and low function and the like is very useful for those times.
Fortunately, there’s a way of getting that without having to have to have recurring mental and physical health problems: You can just talk to and read people who do and pick up skills from them that they find useful.
I’ve adopted this strategy in the past by reading up on cPTSD. I’m pretty confident I don’t have cPTSD, but the cPTSD literature is really useful for understanding trigger management, and I certainly get triggered. Knowing how to distinguish a Fawn from a Freeze from a Flight is really useful,It’s also useful but less difficult to distinguish these from a Fight as is the more basic skill of being able to notice the bare fact that I’m triggered at all.
Another place where I’ve been actively using this strategy recently is borrowing tactics from people with ADHD. I don’t have ADHDThough I have a significant number of friends and strangers on the internet who randomly email me to tell me to go get my ADHD diagnosed ASAP who disagree. I think they’re wrong. I have ADHD tendencies but fall well short of actual ADHD., but a lot of ADHD problems are normal problems dialled up to 11, or experiencing normal things as if they were the worst and most overwhelming version of them.
But… sometimes you do actually get the worst and most overwhelming version of them, or sometimes you’re exhausted and anxious and so it also feels like everything you can normally handle is dialled up to 11, and it sure is useful to have strategies for this case.
One general category of solution for when things get too overwhelming is externalisation of state. The easiest version oof this for me is to just talk out loud about what I’m doing. “What am I doing this morning? I need to finish writing my notebook post… I need to get everything packed… I should look through all the drawers to make sure I’ve not missed anything… I’ll do that now actually because it’s really important and I mustn’t forget it”.
A more extreme version of this which I’ve been deploying at work recently is extremely detailed TODO lists in a shared slack channel called drmaciver-todo.Slack because I’m already always in Slack, so it stays relevant, and shared because only shared digital objects have object permance. I don’t know why this is, but for me and many others digital objects are only real if they’re shared with other people. If only I have access to them they fade from memory. This involves writing down everything I have to do today, adding to it as things come up, modifying it as I work on things, with big green checkmarks when tasks get completed.
This level of detailed TODO list is very much an ADHD strategy, or at least a strategy I’ve learned from people with ADHD, but that’s because right now I have very ADHD shaped problems: There is too much stuff to fit in my head and it’s resulting in my being constantly distracted and lost, and I need to externalise my working state. Essentially I’m building a functioning extended brain, because my internal brain can’t cope with its task list right now, and as a result borrowing strategies from people who regularly can’t cope with their task list is very useful.
This is another reason I like talking to people about their problems: When I do, I learn about their solutions, and even if I don’t share their exact problems there’s a very good chance that at some point in the future I’ll have something similar enough that those solutions might apply.