Natural mental health (part one)

Introduction

My preferred way to meditate is to walk, but then walking is the most common and natural activity of the human species, it is what we evolved to do.

The basic elements occur naturally too, one following from another. First by focusing on the breath, it dictates an open upright posture, and balance comes from knowing that the centre of the body resides in the diaphragm along with the breath. In motion the focus shifts when the eyes are allowed to rise naturally to an open horizon; not a point of constant attention, but the place they come back to again and again as you let-go of distracting emotions and thoughts - from a past which is gone (behind you), and a future that is unknowable (beyond the horizon). With the eyes to the horizon and with good posture, then the feet will start to follow the contours of the ground and as if by magic, a ‘bodyscan’ occurs all on its own, as the right muscles are stretched, and then relaxed, along with stressful feelings and thoughts. A ‘mantra’ can be found in the pace and rhythm of the stride, but it must be flexible enough to change in an instance, for walking consistently and repetitively will soon narrow the horizon and an open future.

A connectedness to the world around us, of others and things, should be our moment to moment pre-occupation. We cannot see others as they are, if we are preoccupied with ourselves. The origins of spirituality or religious experience may lie with making others, and or other things, rather than one’s ‘self’ the central focus of our lives, allowing for transcendent experiences – a going beyond our usually limited perception of others. Equally, in the past there must have been a time when we were all very effective meditators. In some sense it must be a natural state, for it is hard to imagine our hunter-gatherer ancestors being able to survive without such skills. Think of hunting; of long hours on one’s feet, of the constant gentle movements needed to pick up a trail, to track and stalk, feel movement in the air, the physical coordination, the ability to navigate, feel the sudden stress of real danger, but be able to let go when it passes, the need for so much stillness, and the quick flowing response. And afterwards, to squat for a while under a tree, within the only real temple there is - not enclosed by the buttressing of branches but open to the vaulted sky beyond. And later still, the making of fire, the focus of community and our collective narrative.

8,34  20.7.2016 (photo by Nick Hewling)

The brain and body are so intimately connected it makes little sense to separate them when conceptualising mental wellbeing. Indeed the process of mental mapping which creates enduring neural pathways in the brain, and imposes habits of behaviour, evolved from the sense data coming from all our five senses as we move and grow in a landscape. The appropriate ‘treatment’ for mental distress may well be a physical one. When in the presence of someone who is ‘psychotic’, how often do we understand the content of their words? Better to pay attention to the body; the tone of voice, facial expressions of emotion, gestures and body movement. What would a physiotherapist see observing a client in their own territory away from the clinic or hospital? Suppose on encountering someone for the first time you ignore their apparent mental problems, offer just physical relaxation techniques, enforce a regular but limited sleep pattern, strictly control their diet and everything else they put in their bodies, and wait. Introduce mindfulness techniques for better anxiety and stress management - for greater mental awareness. After a week or so you may well be left with someone with enduring communication problems, a blocked ability to empathise and a limited ‘theory of mind’, but visible, through their nonverbal behaviour. Reintroduce one of the most powerful communication tools of all, touch. Allow the mentally distressed to learn, or more often relearn to be intimate with others. And you teach them to play again, to gain ‘balance’ (physical coordination) and the ability to ‘navigate’ (in space and time) in that social landscape of others. But all this would of course require staff willing and able to model and demonstrate natural and desired forms of behaviour.

A cold but awake body is physically and mentally stressed, warmth is relaxation - too hot and you are anxious. The mind and body are always on a positive feedback loop! Health in body and mind are the same thing. The source of health lies in natural environments – where only the unhealthy or threatening is ugly. We evolved to be outside and on our feet all day, with our eyes coming to rest on the horizon, catching the sun. Depression is entombing oneself all day, with a slumped body posture and nothing but artificial light, consuming more calories than you use up. It is about having a fixed territory, being stuck in one place and one time, and defending it in both a mental and physical sense. Mental wellbeing is about being happy with movement, change and uncertainty. It is not a sign of progress that the modern world is able to offer mental healthcare, rather it has become necessary since we started transforming our natural habits and ways of living. Anxiety and the heightened awareness that goes with it, is the normal response to perceived danger - the natural reaction is to freeze (the predator notices first the moving object), take flight or in extreme situations, fight. In the absence of real danger, anxiety should rapidly fall away. It is normal to fear the unknown, ‘outsiders’ or ‘strangers’. Anxiety is part way on the continuum from happiness or joy (loss of self-consciousness) to intense fear. A misplaced fear of others in the modern world, or the inability to attribute fear to the right people (or human artefacts) is what makes others appear as permanent strangers, outsiders or simply mad.

Most communication is nonverbal and unconscious, but with training can be consciously observed and a conscious nonverbal response given. But the meaning of any communication is the message received. You can only be conscious of a tiny fraction of what your brain is doing in any one moment, including thoughts and emotions. There are severe limits to what any one individual can objectify. In a sense you can only ‘know’ your own character by what you put into your body, and by the kind of people you spend your time with! The best diet for physical and mental health is probably still a pre-agricultural one, certainly the absence of refined sugars, cultivated and grounded grains, dairy products and domesticated animal meat. An inability to navigate with sight, sound, touch, smell and taste, is a fundamental element of what some call psychosis. A lack of balance, from not being able to rest the eyes on the horizon and feel the natural contours below one’s feet due to the modern built environment, shows in the long term mental as well as physical ‘crippling’ of the body.

History Seen Through the Wrong End of the Telescope

We are a social species and everyone’s greatest natural urge is to belong.

The natural mind has a nonverbal purpose in life, it notices signals, may or may not accept them as cues to action or as indicators of how others intend to act - though not necessarily how they are thinking; it allows us to decide whether others are comfortable, being honest with themselves or us. Verbal pronouncements are often just an explanation that satisfies the speaker and not us - they occur after the fact, and are not a cue to action.

Happiness or joy, is our baseline or default emotional state, the point to which we return when experiencing comfort and any stressors have been dealt with. Not being focused on joy, not constantly letting go in order to returning to it, is the measure of how far we are from nature. It is the lack of self-consciousness first experienced in childhood play. Nonetheless, joy still has to be found or remade every day.

Once upon a time our biological ‘social brain’ had an equivalence in culture, a ‘collective mind’ of shared and sharable information, the distance between the two now is one measure of how far we are from nature. Much of what we call nurture in the modern world, is a partially successful attempt at learning to suppress natural instincts. The most successful in society (the most mentally and physically healthy) are those who manage to resist or let go of such learning.

If we could learn mentally healthy behaviour without ever understanding its meaning, or indeed being conscious of learning it – would it matter? For there really is only one mental health problem – chronic stress (physical as well as mental) caused by our learnt inability to behave naturally around others, leading to cognitive and emotional isolation. The entire spectrum of phenomena observed and listed by psychiatry under its numerous categories can be seen as an expression of this basic truth.

A social model of mental health however needs to be set within and be consistent with a broader model of socio-cultural evolution. The rules of Darwinian evolution by natural selection hold - individual behaviour (action) is the subject (not personal meanings or explanation) and we should always look first at adaptation in specific environments (social situations). Situations change rapidly, within them there is always individual variation and selection from minute to minute, where a ‘personality’ only persists in so far as an individual acts today to try and reproduce their world as it was yesterday - a collection of routines, habits and addictions (skills learnt through repeated practice) which will be daily frustrated to the extent that they fail to be flexible in the face of change. The winners (those who forever return to the human default emotion - happiness) are those who can learn new (better) habits and allow existing ones to whither through lack of use. Such learning is socially neuroscientific insofar as an individual’s mental maps (made up of established, reinforced and discrete neural pathways) can add new connections imitated from other brains, and let go of existing habits, slowly allowing them to become dormant. Change usually comes uninvited, but we are pattern making machines. However, the healthy (successful) are those who are most willing to observe and adopt new habits (of thinking and emotional response through action) in new situations. The level of an ‘outcome’ for anyone in mental distress is directly proportional to their ability to undertake new learning.