Emma Hepburn - A Toolkit for Modern Life

Modern life is busy. We are all trying to find the seemingly impossible balance of work and home keeping other people happy, searching for our own happiness, looking after our finances, looking after children, searching for body positivity, juggling to-do lists, trying to slow down. It all requires scheduling, messaging, updating, bullet-listing all with the background noise of technology that promises time-saving while often creating more demand, alerting you to WhatsApp messages, Facebook and Instagram updates. Its a bleeping, buzzing world of notifications, where everybody looks like theyve got it more together than you.

In reality, we are all juggling life, with balls dropping and curveballs being thrown when we least expect it. None of us ever gets it right all the time, and we constantly fluctuate between feeling on top of life and feeling like life is on top of us. Im not promising you will find the magical balance in this book, but I am hoping you will find ways to look after one of the most important aspects in your life: your mind.

Your mind is at the centre of your story watching, planning, responding, remembering, developing, interacting and creating as you go along. Looking after your mind might not be the whole story, but it is crucial to your story and you need to nurture it. This book will help you to develop a personal toolkit to look after your mind, to navigate your world, your story and whatever modern life throws at you.

Debunking myths

The mind is synonymous with mental health, so looking after your mind is also about looking after your mental health. To do this, we need to bust some of the myths that surround mental health. Firstly, we simply need to recognize that we all have mental health that needs looking after.

We need to shift away from the concept that mental health is something that other people have, and that we only need to think about reactively when it goes wrong. Mental health is something that we all have and need to look after proactively. We need to understand that, just like physical health, mental health is changeable and can vary throughout life. It sometimes needs extra care, and given the right (or wrong) mix of situations and person, anyones mental health can suffer. Rather than seeing this as a flaw, we need to understand the contributing factors and know how we can help or seek help. We need to recognize that mental health is not all in the brain it is fundamentally linked to our bodies, as well as the environment in which we live. Its about learning the signs that our mental health is deteriorating so we can take action to help as best we can.

The mental health jam jar

We all have a mental health jam jar that gets filled with our vulnerabilities (strawberries) and stressors (raspberries). Everybodys vulnerabilities will be at different levels and their stressors will change throughout life. This analogy has been used to describe genetic vulnerabilities by professor and genetic counsellor Jehannine Austin, but as a psychologist I like to consider a range of vulnerabilities including biological, social, cognitive, environmental and life experiences. We all have a certain limit, and if these stressors exceed our jam-jar level, it triggers mental health difficulties. We can increase the space in our jar by learning and using coping strategies, such as social support, good sleep and exercise.

This concept shows that everyone has mental health to consider and limits to that mental health. Secondly, it demonstrates that anyones mental health can suffer, depending on whats going on in life. Thirdly, it considers peoples background and experience, which can help explain why some people are more vulnerable than others to mental health difficulties. What I like most about this concept is that it is a hopeful model, as it shows that we have the ability to increase our resilience through managing stressors (if possible) and using coping strategies. This book focuses on looking after your mind, by helping increase your jars space and by managing the raspberries.

But what is a mind?

Well, this question is debated and not always clear, so Ill explain how I understand it. The mind is where you experience your internal and external world and who you are. Its where you hear your thoughts and where you perceive, feel, understand, remember and view yourself, the world and your place in it. Its also how you interact with the world. Its constructed by your brain, but its not just your brain.

I see the mind as a three-piece band consisting of your brain, body and environment. Its a finely tuned band that takes you through life, playing different harmonies, each being required for the full song to sound correct. So to speak about your brain without your body or environment would be to leave out two-thirds of the band: its Destiny without her Child. (Yes, Beyonc or your brain is fantastic, but the songs are incomplete without the other members.)

Lets break this down further, to show how these elements together form your mind. Your brain controls and regulates your physical functions, and is responsible for cognition that allows you to navigate the world: thoughts, memories, planning, organizing, attention, decision-making. It is also where you understand emotions, which you require for a host of functions. Inside your brain are billions of neurons with links to other neurons, communicating with each other through electrical impulses along super-highways at top speed. These neurons enable your brain to be an expert communicator that understands and shapes your world and how you respond to it. But your brain doesnt communicate only with itself; it communicates with your body and also takes feedback from your body. And on this two-way highway, your body affects your brain and mind, and vice versa. For example, how we think and feel affects our experience of pain: our beliefs about medicine affect how effective they are; chronic stress is linked to lowered immune systems and a range of illnesses; physical exercise can be effective in treating mental health.

Even more remarkably, your body and brain are also closely interlinked with your environment. The world shapes your brain, and therefore mind, and your brain shapes how you see your environment. You perceive it based on what you know about it so far, your experiences. As we are social beings, the people in your environment also influence your brain. Your caregiver as you grow up influences how you respond to the environment and helps shape your beliefs and behaviours. We constantly influence each others brains through life our brains react to what we think other people are experiencing. We imagine and, therefore, feel their pain. Our environment is so linked to how our brain and body function that we cannot think about the mind without taking into account the environment in which that mind exists.