Kevin opens up about some recent struggles and offers tips and advice on how to get through hard times.
Kevin opens up about some recent struggles and offers tips and advice on how to get through hard times.
Get-Fit Guy is hosted by Kevin Don. A transcript is available at Simplecast.
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Welcome back to Get Fit Guy, Kevin Don here. If you are a regular listener, you may have noticed that this is the first new episode for a WHOLE MONTH. I want to talk a little about why this was and what I did to get back to speaking with you more regularly.
So, in ‘full disclosure’, I took a month off for my mental health. The reason I’m talking about this is that I know how many people listen to this show and therefore it is statistically probable that listeners may experience something similar. I also want to state the obvious that I’m not a doctor or medical professional and this is my own personal experience.
You may know that I am what is commonly now referred to as ‘neurodiverse’. To be specific, I was diagnosed with Asperger's syndrome, which is now just grouped in with other things and referred to as Autism Spectrum Disorder. There are many different things that this means to me and ways it impacts my life. Most notably, I find it really quite a challenge to know what people mean, what different life scenarios mean and how to navigate them. For the past 7 years, I have had a best friend, or anchor person. This person was invaluable to me in keeping me on an even keel and I trusted their advice about things I needed to do. Unfortunately, as happens in life, that friendship had some challenges and I lost my anchor person. This was a huge blow, because I now had to navigate things while basically flying blind.
On top of this, you may know that I am not only a coach, but I am also making significant efforts to change my own life for the better. To this end, I spent the last year or so trying to do as well as possible at my degree (Philosophy) so I could move to an elite university. I managed this, but the stress of doing so was very large and also I now need to move to a brand new university, in a brand new city where I don’t know a single person. This can be a major challenge for anyone, but for neurodiverse people, it's maybe even harder to cope with change and the attachment I have to weird things like my favourite barista at my local coffee shop.
Anyway, all of this combined to totally overwhelm me. I had been spiraling down all summer, but it reached a head a month ago and I just hit rock bottom and basically couldn’t function. I wasn't eating, I lost 12 lbs in weight, I was struggling to go outside and very very emotional. I realised that with only 5 weeks to go before I was due to start at a new university, that I needed to sort things out and fast. Moving to a new city is challenging enough, never mind the pressures of a much more challenging institution. If I wasn't able to steady the ship, I would be starting at a disadvantage and probably fail at my endeavours to be better in my life.
Fast forward 4 weeks and yes, I’m still having big challenges, but things have improved to the point I feel like I can move and start university again and be able to cope with the demands. Regular listeners will know that I don’t see fitness as being shredded at the beach. It’s being disease free and being healthy in body and mind. Philosophically speaking, identity or the self is murky, but one thing we cannot say for certain is that the mind and body aren’t connected. So far, they need each other. So, it would be remiss of me to want everyone to be healthy and not talk about the mind. I can only talk about it in terms of what I know. The network has a psychology show. But I do know what has helped me even out this month and I can talk about the mind in terms of philosophy too, totally in my lane there.
So, what has helped me get from rock bottom despair to be able to think about doing a big challenge like education and relocation?
Talking.
The most important thing I did was talk. I told everyone that would listen about what had happened. This was really important for a few reasons. Firstly, without my anchor person, I wasn’t sure if what I was feeling was right. Was I wrong? Talking with different people allowed me to get their opinions. If you get external ideas on things, it helps you either reassess things or to have some acceptance of them. Many people I know don’t talk about their problems. Many others have regular therapy. Others have less healthy ways to deal with the acute trauma of a loss and that might be alcohol or drugs. For me, it was talking to a large number of people. This also validated my experience. It doesn’t make things instantly better to hear people confirm that what you experienced was wrong or bad. But it does validate your experience and makes it a little easier to know it wasnt your fault. In addition to talking with friends, I do want to note that I did also hire professional support and have been going to therapy. I have been doing a therapy called EMDR, which is used most commonly for PTSD. I might talk about this in another episode when I have had more sessions and am better placed to talk about it. Friends are great because they can be there sooner for you, they are cheaper than a therapist and they listen for longer than an hour. But there is no substitute for the real thing. Therapy is a 10/10 for me.
Staying Busy.
When the wheels first fell off, all I wanted to do was hide in my apartment, wear comfy hoodies, not shave, not shower and not do anything but sleep. This meant I was alone all day with the thoughts. Flashbacks to my lost friendship and also future worries about university. I swung wildly from thinking I wasn’t good enough to attend this school to this school isn’t actually very good because if it were, I wouldn’t have gotten in. And of course all the in between points like thinking I had somehow faked my results and the entire interview and selection panel of a global top 20 university.
Once I decided that a better strategy was to set myself the task for the next month to do 2 things a day that would maybe be nice, things improved. For me this looked like: one place I wanted to eat at (as well permission to eat whatever I wanted- I have to tell you many pizzas have been eaten this month) and I also set a task to complete one physical goal a day. That might have been to walk a minimum of 10,000 steps with my dog, Maverick or to try a new activity. I tried hot yoga, Filipino stick fighting, a running class and a circuit class.
I might have lacked the desire to go to hot yoga, but when I was there, someone else told me what to do for an hour and I wasn’t able to think about my stress and problems. Sure, they came back when I walked out, but I bought myself an hour where my mind and my heart were relaxed. I wasn’t in fight or flight mode. This was critical in reducing my overall stress load.
Nutrition
At first, I wasn't eating and my body weight plummeted. This is bad. Once I started to show myself some love though, I was finding that Pizza and ice cream were my craving. This is a lot to do with dopamine and the hormones we crave when we are so down. So I made a pact with myself that I wouldn’t give myself a hard time for eating whatever I wanted for dinner, but I had to make sure my other meals were nutrient dense. We still need good nutrition no matter how bad we feel. It’s ok to comfort eat, but get in your vitamins and minerals.
Forgiveness
When things go wrong, we all want to understand what happened. We want to fix things or we want to have closure. In a relationship or friendship or maybe even a job loss, this isnt always possible. If the other person won't talk to you, then you can't fix things. This gets frustrating and you might panic, I know I did. It’s ok. It’s normal to panic, maybe even experience every emotion: anger, sadness, rage, despair. But you shouldn’t add guilt on top of this. Don’t feel guilty for how you feel. That’s just gaslighting yourself. Feel what you feel, acknowledge it and forgive yourself. At the same time, when you are ready, try to understand what happened to lead you to this point. Therapy might help unlock this for you. Have you had a trauma or group of traumas in your life that have you locked into a certain way of responding to triggers? What can we do to avoid repeating the same cycle in future. I know for sure that it hurts so much to lose my anchor person, so what can I do to make sure it doesn’t happen again? I’ll leave you this week with a short poem called ‘There is a hole in my sidewalk’ by Portia Nelson
Chapter 1
I walk down the street.
There is a deep hole in the sidewalk.
I fall in.
I am lost... I am helpless.
It isn't my fault.
It takes forever to find a way out.
Chapter 2
I walk down the same street.
There is a deep hole in the sidewalk.
I pretend I don't see it.
I fall in again.
I can't believe I am in the same place.
But, it isn't my fault.
It still takes me a long time to get out.
Chapter 3
I walk down the same street.
There is a deep hole in the sidewalk.
I see it is there.
I still fall in. It's a habit.
My eyes are open.
I know where I am.
It is my fault. I get out immediately.
Chapter 4
I walk down the same street.
There is a deep hole in the sidewalk.
I walk around it.
Chapter 5
I walk down another street.
If you have any questions or would like to just say ‘hi’, please email me on getfitguy@quickanddirtytips.com
Get-Fit Guy is a Quick and Dirty Tips podcast. Thanks to the team at Quick and Dirty Tips Morgan Christianson, Holly Hutchings, the director of podcasts Brennan Goetschius and Davina Tomlin. I’m your host, Kevin Don. If you have a question for me, leave me a voicemail at 510-353-3104 or send me an email at getfitguy@quickanddirtytips.com. For more information about the show, visit quickanddirtytips.com, or check out the shownotes in your podcast app