Whether it's a disorder or a perfectly natural response to one of life’s stressful events, like losing a job or someone important, one of the hardest parts about experiencing these troubling parts of life is we can’t turn them off. Many of those aches and pains we have when we go to bed will be there waiting for us when we awake (if we’re even allowed to sleep at all). It’s as though these problems have become a part of us, like the color of our eyes and skin. If you’re like me and you want some control over your thoughts and feelings, my experiences may show you some ways of achieving more of just that.

What other people seem to commonly misunderstand is it’s exhausting just to have the thought-processes we do, such as when we wonder “What the hell is wrong with me?” and “Why do I feel this way?” We have a full-time job of attempting to understand, explain, and work on our respective problems. Even when psychologically healthy people take on too much work, their lives can temporarily suffer. For us that can be far less temporary - that can be daily life for years and years. When people get tired, we usually do less. When the mentally ill wake up, we tend to wake up tired.

For me, those problems with doing less in daily life could be seen everywhere. The evidence was with growing collections of objects in my apartment, like a perpetually large pile of dirty dishes in my sink, scattered laundry I neglected to do, and mail I rarely felt like bothering to open. The evidence was in my behavior. I perpetually put off exercise until tomorrow. I regularly showed up late or in called in sick for the jobs I worked. It was evident in my spending countless hours on television programs and video games simply trying to avoid feeling what I tended to feel. I would skip meals because I didn’t feel like going to the store to buy what I needed to prepare a meal. If I had gone to the store, sometimes I wouldn’t eat because I didn’t feel like cooking or doing something as simple as preparing a sandwich.

When we suspect there’s something very different about the way our mind works and we seek solutions, we can often look for the big solutions. We’ll look at what disorder we might have, what kind of medication there is, or who there is to blame from our childhood. Sometimes, we guess right. Some of our problems are generally best addressed through medication, psychotherapy, and all those other big solutions. Other times, however, we miss the little reasons for why we feel the way we do. The little reasons that add to becoming a big reason of their own when we’re experiencing psychological problems.

We miss how we may think more with the right hemisphere of our brain. This part of our brain is responsible for negative moods. When we go for walks, exercise, and participate in other activities that require full body movements, we force our brain to use both right and left hemispheres to coordinating all that movement. When we make greater use of our left hemisphere, the part of our brain responsible for positive moods, we tend to feel better. This happens because we’re turning on the part of our brain best at helping us feel good.

We miss how profoundly we can be affected by simple vitamin and nutrient deficiencies. A huge culprit for feelings of sadness is vitamin D deficiency. Vitamin D is the vitamin our bodies produce when we’re exposed to sunlight. Receiving too little causes feelings of emptiness and meaninglessness. When we don’t get enough vitamin D, our bodies make us feel worse to signal that somethings wrong. All too many people think the cause of this bad feeling is we think is what’s wrong with us, such as our mental illness. In actuality, it’s not a part of our crisis. It’s just our body trying to tell us to go outside for 20-30 minutes.

Another culprit is lacking the vitamins and nutrients from vegetables. Mental illness is a perpetual strain. It’s like exercising a muscle, overworking it, and then being forced to continue working it despite how tired and worn out it is. Nonetheless, our bodies are capable of repairing some of the damage these stresses cause. Sometimes, we can even become psychologically stronger as a result of the strains our mental problems put on us. However, this doesn’t happen automatically. Our bodies need resources to repair what’s being strained and a huge chunk of the resources it uses to do this are the vitamins and nutrients we get from eating vegetables.

Overall, that’s how I’ve made the bulk of my progress so far with my mental problems. I made it through exercise and improving my diet. As a result of progress in these areas of my life, it's become easier and easier to understand and do more about my problems. Although I still can’t quite turn off how prone I am to negative moods and depressive thinking, I’m been able to make them something less dominating, intrusive, and interfering in my life. I’ve been able to take something loud I can’t turn off and lower the volume. By working on some little improvements in your daily life, I think you can too!