Magnus Ljadas Blog

This post is about my relationship with my brain. My very special relationship with my very special brain.

For quite some time the brain was thought of as nothing more than a radiator for the heart–some kind of fancy heat pipe system to cool the blood. It’s true, without a hat in cold weather you loose body heat quickly; but now we know the brain plays a more important role than being a mere heat-exchanger. This doughy blob of fatty goo called brain, with its 100 gad-zillion or so grey and white brain cells, is the most amazing thing nature’s devised.

Most of the time me and my brain cooperates happily and we can be quite productive. We’re not perfect (who cares), but I know we’ve done great stuff together. I owe everything I know to my brain. My brain is dear to me, and I like it for what it is. But sometimes my brain paralyses me and descends me into a dark hole from where I have little or no access to my mind. In this hole I can’t think nor feel normally. In the darkness of this hole my mind finds joy only in figuring out different ways to end itself, and its host: ME. Sometimes my brain gives me limited access to its resources, leaving me in a somewhat sub-functional state, without access to vitality and creativity. Then I feel rightfully boring and dull. Sub-human. And people complain.

From a neuroscientific perspective there’s no distinction between brain and mind and self. Your brain is really YOU. From my personal therapeutic perspective, I find it useful to think about my brain as something separate from ME. That I can look at my mind from a meta level. After all; main lesson from Cognitive Behavior Therapy is “you’re not your thoughts, nor your feelings.” So I like to think of my brain as a devise. Something very useful, essential, and delicate. Something that requires care and attention to work properly. For me, as you’ll see, all this is a rather new way of thinking.

Perhaps my genes and/or my environment made me susceptible to this condition. Perhaps I simply didn’t treat my brain with as much care as it deserved. There was a time when I was determined to succeed with whatever I did; and for a while I was successful. I felt invincible. I absorbed problems around me like a sponge and I wanted to put things right. Fix things. I adopted them as my own. I didn’t notice my mindset was very close to what ancient Greeks would call “hubris.” When I had my first real setbacks, I blamed myself, and tried to work harder. Praise I got washed away quickly, but blame stuck more permanently. I exposed myself to stress without taking time to recover.  I stopped doing physical exercise. I gave my brain no slack. I thought I was just being ambitious. I thought I was doing the right thing. Not.

Then it happened, now five years ago: Whack! One morning I could not transport myself from bed to kitchen. Nor could I continue to work on the software I was supposed to build from scratch to production within seven weeks. Something was broken. Lost. Indeed, I saw it coming, but I didn’t expect the fall to be so hard. My brain’s way of saying: Stop man, gimme a break! So I met the doctor and the doctor prescribed rest, pills, and hooked me up with a therapist. I recovered and got back to work. Did my relationship with my brain change? Did I start to treat my brain any differently? No, not at all. I blamed my brain for being weak and inferior. A year later or so I found myself falling back into the hole, lying in bed incapacitated to think or feel–except feel bad about myself. Another therapist, more pills, and back to work. I was stumbling. And so a year ago, the big one hit me. What the hell. The problem solver in me just kept getting increasingly frustrated because it could not identify the point of failure. OK, I was under stress, yes, I f**ked up at work, yes, I got some not-so-encouraging-feedback, yes. Yikes. So what!? In a world where half of the population is starving and don’t have access to a toilet, how can I be obliged to feel the way I do? Why don’t I just shape up? I have more than enough don’t I… I was beating my brain. Constantly.

As far as I’ve understood, depression (like most mental illnesses) is the result of imbalances in the brain–signaling substances like serotonin, dopamine, noradrenaline … and physical connections between neurons, synapses, receptors, neurotransmitters, and other stuff that makes up the nervous system. Causes to these imbalances are more or less unknown, even to science. Although science know a whole lot more than it did just decades ago, we still know too little. It’s obvious when you start looking for treatments for depression; myriads of pills, therapies, things that could be labeled new age treatments and pure hocus-pocus–what an industry! So far my treatments have been a mix of pills and therapy. There are many pills out there and I’ve only tested a couple of them. The ones I’ve tested did help me when I was at my lowest points, but prolonged use made me drowsy and passive. Helpful but blunt tools. Like a gentle smack with a sledgehammer–great for disrupting a depression, but not without its side effects. Therapy can be great I think. I believe communication is a vital part of recovering from depression. What the depressed mind wishes the most, is to hide from the world, preferably in a dark hole. My therapists have been wise, and helped me see alternatives to what my depressed mind has suggested.

I was laid off last summer. Due to recession apparently. Being laid off like this made me angry and loathful and bitter for a while, but it slowly dawned on me that the only way out of my unhappiness was the unconditional surrender of my ego–to fully let go. Although painful, I think now the separation was all for the better–I had to break some bad old patterns. This pause has been precious to me. I’ve had time to contemplate, learn to bake sourdough bread, play harmonica, goof around with my wonderful girls, read, write, watch horror movies at noon on a Wednesday, feed birds, program my own programs, experiment with cooking, make my own blueberry ice-cream, and I’ve grown confident that I get better and better at controlling my condition. As of today I’m off pills, actively improving my physical condition (swimming mostly); learning more about the brain (a fascinating subject) and depression (out of necessity); trying to practice mindfulness (swimming again); eating, breathing and sleeping right; and reconnecting with the world.

I dare to say these things because I know I’m not alone–far from it. Over a lifetime, one of five falls into depression, all according to statistics. For good and bad, I’ve been straight forward with my depression and in return people have been straight forward with me, and let me in on their own personal experiences. I’m grateful for that, because when suspended in darkness, it helps an awful hell of a lot to know you’re not alone.

Much love.