Cycle Maintenance at Christmas: minding your mental health

Posted on: 22 December 2021

Professor Ian Robertson is Co-Director of the Global Brain Health Institute at Trinity College. He is Adjunct Professor at the Trinity Institute of Neurosciences (TCIN) and Fellow Emeritus (Psychology). Here, Professor Robertson encourages us to re-engage with a slower rhythm to take care of our mental well-being this Christmas.

The secret of wellbeing over the next two weeks, I recommend, is a nice cup of hot milk before 10, bed by 10.30 and up for your brisk morning walk before seven am every day. You may indulge yourself with a small sherry some evenings.

Actually, that might suit some of us just fine and there is absolutely nothing wrong with it.  In fact, people pay thousands for regimes like this and call it a health spa.

But I will not pretend that this is for me. Not just because I don’t like hot milk, but because this dark time of year for me is usually about generating light and noise – rumbunctious, shouted dinner conversations after too much wine and – maybe – a bit of song.

But it can also be about the luxury of falling asleep on the sofa to wake at 1 am and discover an old movie starting on the TV that you watch until 3 over a slow nightcap. And, if we are lucky, the crisp air of a deep winter walk. Maybe even the skin-burn of a winter swim in the sea.

A quiet festive season on your own or with just another person or two is however potentially just as great as the big family gathering because both are all about rhythm – or, more accurately – a change in the rhythm of your life.

Rhythm is action paced in time and as anyone who likes music knows, rhythms have to change, and to co-exist at different scales, to draw us into the melody. Our brains have such rhythms – from 50 cycles per second oscillations of mental flow, through 10 c/s of relaxed wakefulness, to the 1 cycle per second of the post-dinner droopy eyelids. Then there is the 6 hour cycle of our diurnal day-night rhythm which some of us defy with gusto at this time of year.

There is nothing quite so satisfying in jazz as when the theme emerges after many minutes of improvisation, a reassuring background rhythm emerging back out of musical chaos.

For me, this season should be about improvising away from the faster frequency rhythms that guide – and sometimes imprison – us during the rest of the year. And that means re-engaging with a much slower rhythm of the year – and taking profound comfort in the sense of returning to the background theme of our planet’s year-long cycle around its sun.

So here are some suggested tips for minding yourself and your rhythms over the next two weeks:

• Try to carve out some time to do nothing. It may be hard for some of you, but being free of any have to’s, if even only for a few hours, will make your brain feel like an un-yoked donkey suddenly free to roam.
• Try not to fill these precious episodes with swipes of your phone screen. Your brain loves down-time, even five minutes of do-nothing makes your memory better, your attention clearer and your ability to daydream nicely enhanced.
• When our minds wander unbidden, they tend to drag down our mood because minds tend to zone in on unresolved problems which tend to generate anxiety. So if you find that this rhythm-disrupting time is making you feel glum or anxious, then that’s the time to do stuff like go for a hike or swim, or phone that cousin you haven’t seen for years, or go buy that seed-incubating kit in the garden centre, ready for the spring.
• Read stuff that you wouldn’t normally read: buy yourself a nice poetry book, or a book of birds, or a book about astronomy or fish or knitting or tai-chi, or yoga. Or just research them online.
• Take some exercise – don’t get absorbed too completely into the couch. Remember Flann O’Brien – being half-couch is much worse than being half-bicycle.
• If you find yourself drinking a lot of alcohol, remember this: alcohol is superficially a cheerfulness-provoker, but pharmacologically it is actually a depressant. It only makes you cheerful because it releases inhibition and that has its limits as anyone who has had a beery face roaring nose-to-nose into yours will attest.
• Ah, then there is covid… What to say? Maybe you are having to isolate on your own in a small room. Maybe you are sick. Maybe a relative – a son, daughter, sister, brother – hasn’t been able to come home. Maybe you are feeling lonely at the prospect. Maybe there is tension among the people you want to see because of different perception of risk. Maybe some aren’t vaccinated…. And so on.

I can’t give you any slick prescriptions here. Maybe just one suggestion: there are relatively few bad events that don’t have some sort of opportunity buried somewhere in their midst. But you have to ferret them out, find the challenge rather than the threat or the disappointment. Often harsh realities like covid means that this challenge has to be inside yourself, not in the outside world.

Here is my challenge to you for the next two weeks. If you are feeling apprehensive or down about some aspect of this period, sniff out a challenge for yourself. Dare yourself to speak with that person without getting upset, dare yourself to enjoy that party drinking only non-alcoholic beer or wine, dare yourself to spend a day where you just do very little, dare yourself to sit with your anxiety and if not befriend it, then maybe just watch it.

But if you are lucky enough not to have any such thoughts about the next two weeks, just do this – love your  rhythm changes!

See you in January. I’m not a member of any religion, but it feels somehow right to wish that you – all my colleagues in this incredible university and Global Brain Health Institute  – today feel alive and challenged and a little bit blessed.

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