Sharjah UAE: “When someone wants to get fit, we go to the gym. When someone wants to get mentally fit, where does one go?”It was a question for clinical psychologist and author, Dr Julie Smith, during the “Mind the Gap: When Mental Health Meets Real Life” session, moderated by Omar Al Duri at the Intellectual Hall of the Expo Centre Sharjah.
“From the very beginning of sharing the educational stuff online, I’ve often made that analogy between physical health and mental health,” Dr Julie said on Day 3 of the 44th edition of the Sharjah International Book Fair (SIBF), here.
Dr Julie has over 10 million followers across her social media platforms, thanks to her relatable online content on mental health-related matters. Her Instagram posts, for instance, show easy-to-understand explanations on mental health conditions without the usual mumbo-jumbo.
“In lots of places across the world, we’ve only just started to think about mental health in a way, and only just started to be able to do a consultation around it. And it was often a very taboo subject.”The author of “Why Has No One Told Me This Before” has often mentioned that mental health is no different from physical health, but when one wants to look after the former, there’s a sense of shame or embarrassment attached to it.
“Looking after your mind had this shame attached to it, or embarrassment, and perhaps made it more difficult to then seek the help we needed, or get the education that would help us to improve it,” Dr Julie, who is based in England, said.
“So, part of the whole journey that I’ve been on in sort of putting education out there really started with conversation around ‘why not treat your brain and your mind with the same respect that you treat the rest of your physical body?’ “Because when you do, you’re looking after your health in its entirety. You can’t separate body and mind.
“They are intrinsically entwined, and influence each other all the time. So, if you look after your body, but you don’t also look after mind, you’re kind of only doing part of the job.” In a fast-paced world, the modern society has a term for the impact of “hustle culture” on mental health: Burnout. How do we deal with it?“Sometimes, dealing with something like high stress or burnout, it can be about making small changes to your daily life. A small, easy change.
“It’s something that we do every day, so that the impact (of practicing good mental health habits) accumulates over time,” she said, adding that the opposite is also true – how accumulated stress would do much more damage than anticipated.
Moderator, Omar, hopped in on this topic: “You mentioned the hustle culture, and you spoke about creating habits to slow down. Can you share with us a couple that are the basics, which are sometimes really hard to do, in helping people having to stay in shape, so to speak?” Dr Julie said in recent years, employees have been expected to do multiple tasks rather than just to complete tasks that are within their job scope.
“Since email came into the equation, you used to go into your office job, and you would check the mail at the beginning of the day. And then you would get on with the job that you were employed to do.
“Now, they’re expected to be checking mail all day, while they’re also doing the job they’re employed to do.
“So what happens is then, let’s say you have 20 minutes until your next meeting. Instead of allowing that in-between moment to become potentially a moment of recuperation, whether that be sitting still, making tea, talking to a colleague, all of those things are putting something back into the account that’s sort of reinvesting in yourself.
“It doesn’t take long to feel slightly rested or ready for the next thing. But what we’ve done is we’ve filled all those in-between moments with more stress, so we check email instead. And all you’re doing is really triggering your stress response… you haven’t got time to address it yet.
“So, I think one of those habits is about reclaiming some of those in-between moments that we used to have before we all started talking about burnout, and understand their value… it doesn’t take long to feel recuperated and replenished and ready to go again.
“When you add in those in-between moments, use them wisely, it can really make a big difference.” Dr Julie, meanwhile, warned that emotional block can lead to consequences that show up not just mentally but also physically.
“A lot of people, when they experience any kind of discomfort or any kind of emotion, the instinct, because it’s uncomfortable, is to push it away and avoid it and block it out.
“So a lot of people say they don’t even notice that they have felt something like shame. They just notice that as soon as they get home, their head is in the fridge looking for chocolate and, you know, something that they don’t otherwise want to be eating.
“What that is, is blocking before you have a chance to feel the feeling and ask yourself what it’s about. A lot of this process is about being able to notice the feeling and not judge yourself for the fact that you have the feeling, but instead see it as potential information.
“Information that’s not necessarily fact, because sometimes it gets it wrong, because our emotional state is influenced by a number of things, which means it can’t always be factual.
“So let’s say I feel really, really anxious, but I can’t think of why because I haven’t been too anxious about it. And then I think, oh, actually I only had four cups of coffee this morning, and so the caffeine has given me heart palpitations and mimicked all these anxiety symptoms.
“But it could be that my feelings are influenced by that, and not necessarily, you know, the thing that I’m about to do is making me anxious. So the fact that emotions are influenced by so many things means we have to question them first and allow ourselves to feel it, and kind of let go of judgment about the fact that we are human beings.
“We are built in this way to feel both pleasurable and really uncomfortable painful emotions, but they are there to help us if we read them in the right way and allow ourselves to experience them without judging ourselves and pushing it away.”Dr Julie also has a word of advice on improving “self-talk”, especially people who are highly critical of themselves, which could lead to unnecessary anxiety.
“I’m working with people who are, you know, incredibly high achievers, who are so, so highly self-critical that it just infiltrates everything they do.
“A lot of people who are that way hold on to that self-criticism because they think that it’s the source of all their drive and success, and they think that if they’re not really hard on themselves that they will lose that drive and they won’t achieve anything.
“A lot of that work is sort of working on that misconception and learning that actually you can achieve from a place of contentment with yourself. So you can be enough but also recognise that you could be more.
“When you’re doing it in that way, all you miss out on is probably the depression and anxiety that comes with it, and the constant self-loathing that comes with that self-criticism. But the thing is, self-criticism and the tendency for self-criticism to be self-critical doesn’t just start overnight, so it doesn’t end overnight either. It’s a lifetime of habit that you’ve built up over time.
“So it’s not going to disappear. What we do is we sort of allow that to be there, but we train ourselves to develop a new pattern of relating to ourselves that we can then bring in.”After the talk wrapped up, Dr Julie took time to have an autograph and meet the fans session.
Dr Julie is a mother of three and has a new book “Open When”, in which she also openly shares about her initial struggles with her early breast cancer diagnosis.
