An important blog post from Pyllon Racing’s Graham Connolly on Mental Health, and taking responsibility for ‘fixing the machine.’ Please share your comments below if you have your own views on mental well-being.

I can’t fix you. I can’t make you better. I can’t even help you. Only you can do that. If you choose to. What I can do is share with you some of the opinions, thoughts and realisations that have helped me to fix myself and make me happier and healthier. I’ve added links to some of the references that have given me insight to myself and shaped my new perspective. I hope they help. If you do nothing else today, click on the last 2. Everyone should have a little Randy and Baz in their lives. 

But why should you listen to me? Well the truth is that’s really going to come down to blind faith on your behalf. I could tell you all about the metal health problems and subsequent breakdown I had. I could paint you a picture of me before I had “issues” and after to demonstrate the relative success I’ve had, how far I’ve come, and how different my life is now.  I could tell you that solving problems and fixing things has been my job for over 20 years and I’m not too bad at it. I could tell you the story about Kinder Eggs from my childhood. I could tell you whatever I want.  However, the truth of it is that it could all be embellished, and I could just be a skilled storyteller. It could all just be a creation and I could be writing this for no other reason than website traffic and social media kudos. So, I’m going to ask you to have faith and stick with me. Have faith that the things I’m going to write about have changed my life, the lives of those around me and resonated deeply with many of the people I’ve discussed them with so far. Or so I’m told. They’ve worked for me and they seem to have helped some other people along the way, so maybe they could help you too. Maybe. Anyway, enough of the sales pitch where I seemingly belittle my position while not so covertly selling myself to you. Let us move on to the good bits. The reason you’re here. One little caveat before we do move on. I’m not a shrink. I have no background in psychology or counselling. From an academic perspective I have no idea what I’m talking about.  But when I talk about mental health and psychology I talk in certain terms. I talk as though the things I’m saying are fact and that’s because they are for me. They’re what I’ve experienced digging myself out of the hole. The things I’ll finally go on to talk about are what I’ve found were wrong in my mind and with my beliefs so for me they are fact. They may not work for you, and you may disagree with some of them, but if they at least raise your awareness and get you pondering and talking about your metal health then my work here is done. Onwards!

“There are two people who can make water and air…….me and God.”

When I was a teenager my job was to look after distillation plants that make clean water. Them and literally a whole raft (machinery raft) of other equipment. In my 20s my job was to manage and maintain this equipment. In my early 30s it was to make air, and then I got my seat at the big table.  I started managing the maintenance of nuclear reactors. It wouldn’t take a genius to figure out what I do but without specifically mentioning it I think it’s safe to say, I’ve spent my adult life living and working on one of the most complex machines on the planet. This, in my hugely bias opinion, has made me slightly above average at fixing things, at solving problems, and it leads me nicely to my analogy for improving and looking after your mental health. 

Like it or not you are a machine. You have pumps and filters and valves and pipework and wiring and programming. You’re a machine. Simples. Unfortunately, machines sometimes break or don’t work very efficiently. Sometimes they need a few tweaks here and there and other times they need striped down and rebuilt completely. So how do you fix a machine and more importantly, what the hell has it got to do with mental health!? Well, fixing or improving the running efficiency of a machine is no different to fixing or improving yourself but you’ve gotta know the process. There are rules to be followed if you want to become your very own mental health, diagnostic technician. There is a process that needs to be understood and without it you’re just staring at something you don’t understand wondering what is wrong with it. 

Rule number 1: You’ve got to know, or at least think it’s broken. 

You can’t fix it if you don’t know or think it’s broken. I was fine. Like so many people who I now ask, “are you ok?”, I was fine. I didn’t sleep very well, I had a bit of a temper, I wasn’t a big people person and I was a bit down sometimes, but I was fine. I was just a busy guy who had a lot of stuff I needed to do each day but that was life and it was normal. And I genuinely believed that. Right up until the point I literally couldn’t function anymore. Right up until the point I was planning where to put my car off the road as a means of escape from my life and I periodically began to collapse in floods of tears unable to breath. I wasn’t fine, and I was a million miles away from normal. Whatever that’s meant to look like? Over a period of time I had slowly but steadily, day by day, edged into a state of anxiety and depression. A full night of sleep was somewhere between 4-5 hours at best and always interrupted. I went from fit of rage to fit of rage all day, every day, triggered by almost anything and everything. Except for my brother, who I felt comfortable with sitting in quiet misery, I had pushed away or segregated myself from pretty much everyone I had a relationship with. People and relationships had become an inefficient drain on my valuable resources. My brain was running at maximum capacity and it had made all the efficiency saving cuts it could. I was miserable and I hated my life. Except for the sense of achievement and satisfaction I got from running long distances and cool places (alone), I hated my life and to a varying degree everyone in it. I was living in a deep, dark hole and I was completely oblivious to the fact. I had no idea the machine was broken. I was fine. My life was just a bit shit but there was nothing I could do about it. 

Like a machine that had gradually degraded over time to the point it was going to fail catastrophically, I had slowly but steadily got to a similar point. It had happened so slowly I hadn’t notice. It was like grass growing or putting on weight. But how could I be so very bonkers and have no idea? It was easy actually. It happens slowly and you lie to yourself all the time. At least your brain lies to you without you knowing it. It’s a protection mechanism that helps to stop you feeling crap about yourself and it can justify pretty much anything. It’s called cognitive dissonance and it’s robbing you of the opportunity to take ownership and learn from your mistakes and shortcomings. Why own your failings and weaknesses when you can quite easily blame everyone else or a situation that you had no control over? Don’t sleep very well? That’s because you’re so busy with the stuff you need to do. Everyone else is lazy and incompetent and it’s all down to you. Lose your temper? That’s because everyone is a lazy idiot and their poor work ethic and stupidity constantly makes your life harder. Don’t have many friends anymore and feel deeply uncomfortable around people? That’s because they’re constantly bugging you and trying to waste your valuable time doing stupid stuff that isn’t important. Miserable and hate your life? No wonder! You’re surrounded by needy, incompetent people who constantly want something from you or always seem to make your life more difficult. Nothing is your fault…….EVER! You are capable of thinking and believing pretty much anything rather than facing up to the truth that sometimes you mess up, sometimes you just aren’t good enough, sometimes you’re in the wrong, sometimes you need help, sometimes your way isn’t the only way. Now the frequency and degree with which you lie to yourself varies from person to person. We’re all unique like a beautiful snowflake after all. However, if something is important enough to you, if you’re angry, disappointed, stressed or embarrassed enough, in that moment your brain is capable of telling you fairy stories rather than letting you be hurt by having to face up to an altered version of your self-image. Cognitive dissonance. It’s everywhere and you’re doing it a lot. House is a mess? Partner is lazy. Not as good as you’d like to be at your chosen sport? You lost the genetic lottery. It’s easier for everyone else. They were born with more talent. Cognitive dissonance. It’s not your fault. It’s so dangerous to get into this way of thinking because if you’ve never made a mistake you’ve nothing to learn.

My life sucked, I wasn’t happy, I couldn’t sleep, and I was pretty much constantly stressed and angry. It wasn’t my fault though because everyone else was causing it and this was just what my life had become. This was my lot and it was normal. I just had to suck it up and get on with it. Endure. You can see how I got so far down the hole. As far as I was concerned my machine was fine. Why fix it if it isn’t broken right?

So, the moral of the story. If you’re unhappy, stressed, not sleeping, anxious, depressed or you just don’t feel that good maybe it’s not everyone else’s fault? Maybe that’s not just the way life is? Maybe over time the machine has slowly degraded and now it’s not working that well? Maybe your beliefs need a little bit of adjustment? There are loads of different reasons for the symptoms I’ve listed above and I’m no head doctor, but maybe some of what I’ve said applies to you? If it does you’ve got a problem now because now you’ve realised your machine might be broken. You now have a responsibility to fix it or try and make it work a little better. Ownership and accountability. Totally sucks man. How about we just stick with making excuses and blaming everyone and everything else for our problems? Be SOOO much easier! One more time…….ownership!

Rule number 2: You’ve got to understand how it should be working.

You can’t fix a machine unless you know how it works and what it should be doing. I’ve witnessed this a lot over the years. People trying to fix things when they don’t know what the component parts are or what they do. They don’t know how the machine should be performing. It’s common sense if you think about it. How do you change a car wheel if you don’t know what a wheel nut is? How do you open a jam jar if you don’t understand that the lid twists? For me this was the best part. Geeking out! In order to understand a machine, you need to put the time in researching and learning. Your brain is no different. Ultimately your goal is self-awareness and emotional intelligence. You want to develop a level of awareness of what you think and feel about your thoughts and feelings. Read that one again because it’s frickin’ huge! I could talk about this all day as this was a watershed realisation in my life. One of the major things that separate us as a species from all the others on the planet is our ability to think introspectively. We can examine our thoughts and feelings and describe them. That driver cut me up. I’m angry. I’m starting a new job and meeting lots of new people. I’m nervous. I’m running a big race. I’m really nervous. I spent a lovely evening with family and friends. I feel happy, connected and accepted. We do this from a very young age without even thinking about it. How many times a day does your sentence start with “I think” or “I feel”? Probably quite a few. The turning point in my life was coming to the realisation that I could learn about how my brain works, and in turn, understand WHY I think and feel the way I do. Once I understood why I was thinking and feeling the way I did, where the thoughts and feelings were coming from, I then had the basis to start identifying what was reasonable and unreasonable. Which thoughts were healthy and unhealthy. I had the basis to start examining what I thought and felt about my thoughts and feelings because I now understood their origin. Angry AF because you need to redo something someone else has done? You could have an unreasonable belief wired into your brain that everyone should be as competent at a task as you and everyone should care as much as you do about doing things properly. Angry AF that driver cut you up? Your brain feels attacked and dominated; you feel like your space has been invaded. You could have an unrealistic belief that everyone should be a courteous, competent driver and when this is not the case anger is a completely reasonable response. I could fill a phone book with examples here but I’m sure you get the idea. It’s all about your 2 brains. Learn about them. 

Rule number 3: You’ve got to identify how it is actually working. 

So, you’ve realised the machine has a problem and you’ve spent some time learning how it works. Now it’s time to try and figure out what is broken or how you could make it run a little more efficiently in order to increase its reliability. This part for me was tough and the best part of advice I can dole out here is be kind to yourself and cut yourself some slack. In order to identify where your thoughts, feelings and actions may be unhealthy you need to be able to cut through the stories you tell yourself. You need to be able to identify when cognitive dissonance is giving you a pass for being a douche bag. You need to learn how to take ownership and be accountable for your thoughts, feelings and actions. From here on in it could be a pretty rough ride, at least to start with. There’s a real possibility this part could involve a lot of admitting you’re wrong, saying sorry and you could have to put your hand up to having acted like a bit of a dick in the past. For me I had to admit to myself and those around me that I had indeed been acting like a huge dick for quite a while and that I’d caused some harm. It was horrible. Ownership and accountability can be really tough but without them we are destined to never learn from our mistakes, repeatedly make the same mistakes and we will not progress or improve. Every time we lie to ourselves or rationalise and justify our dickish behaviour we rob ourselves of the opportunity to improve. It’s like having a rubbish race and in your head blaming it on your family and work commitments getting in the way of training when really you should just have got to bed earlier and bought yourself an alarm clock. However, remember my earlier advice; be kind to yourself and cut yourself some slack. No one is perfect, people make mistakes, to error is human. If your machine hasn’t been working properly but you’ve not known about it there’s not a huge amount you could have done about it. All you can do now is accept the damage is in the past and work as hard as you can to fix the machine and make things right again. Unless you’re Marty McFly you need to acknowledge your past thoughts, feelings and action, accept them and move on working towards improvement. This is totally different from justifying to yourself it wasn’t your fault. 

Guilt and remorse are powerful feelings and they have the potential to take up a lot of your precious energy. You need to make sure they don’t become a stick to beat yourself with. You can’t change the past and you’re going to need all your energy to sort your wonky machine out for your sake and those around you. Admitting your shortcomings but not beating yourself up about them is tough and it takes a bit of practice. You need to find a balance between taking ownership so you can learn, improve and accepting that it’s ok to have flaws and make mistakes. This balance is super important as at the other end of the scale it is possible to own too much. To hold yourself too accountable, and that can be just as damaging to your mental health. You’re going to mess up, you’re going to come up short, sometimes you’re going to be wrong, sometimes you’re going to act like a dick. All of this is fine as long as you own it and put in the work to keep moving forwards to improve. You’re not perfect and that’s perfectly fine. So, with a sense of acceptance towards yourself it’s time for a period of introspective reflection. How important are the things that annoy you and is your reaction to them reasonable? If you’ve come up short in something just how committed have you really been? Are the issues that are causing that relationship with someone to be so strained just as one sided as you’ve been telling yourself? Has the amount of work you’ve put into something justified what you expected to get out of it? Is that criticism completely unjustified? Is everyone really out to get you and are your problems always someone else’s fault? It’s not normal to be angry, sad, stressed, upset or insecure most of the time. It’s not normal to be unable to sleep or to be constantly uncomfortable around other people. A lot of the time it can be down to how we see the world and our place in it. How we interpret the situations we find ourselves in and our reaction to them. A lot of the time the answer to our problems is within. We just need to be brave enough to be accountable. With as much acceptance and compassion as we can muster, we need to be honest with ourselves and commit towards moving forward and improving. 

Rule number 4. You’ve got to put the time and effort into fixing it or devise a plan how to manage the defect.

 It’s one of the smartest things I’ve ever heard him say. Unsurprisingly, it was with reference to running, but there’s a broad spectrum of situations it can be applied to. I believe fixing or looking after your mental health is one of them.

“If you want to become a better runner then choose to be a better runner. It’s simple. Surround yourself with likeminded people that want to succeed and are willing to push you as they push themselves. It’s nice to run with friends now and then, but if you want to do well, don’t sacrifice your training to satisfy their need for attention. Be grateful for what you have and enjoy the time with friends and family.”

I could deconstruct this paragraph piece by piece and talk about how all of it applies to mental health. However, we’ve been here for some time, I’m conscious this is getting a little wordy, and we still have some ground to cover! So, I’ll concentrate on what I think to be the most important part. “If you want to be a better runner then choose to be a better runner.” If you want to feel better and be happier then choose to. At some point everything begins with a choice. We’re back to ownership and accountability here. I know I keep saying that but I strongly believe most of us have so much more influence over our life and our situation than we realize.

You’ve now realized your machine isn’t performing at its best or is outright broken. You have a level of understanding of how it’s constructed and how it works. You’ve identified how it’s actually working and what’s wrong with it. Now you need to choose to fix it or give it the slight tune up it needs. You’ve partially made this choice by carrying out the three previous steps but now you need to fully commit to the hard work of carrying out the repair. It might seem obvious to move on to this stage and get it fixed, but I’ve witnessed countless times people getting to this point and not having the drive, commitment, ownership or work ethic to do the hard work and get the job done. Sometimes the repair isn’t their priority, or the job seems too onerous once they’ve identified the scope of the work. Sometimes they don’t think they have the manpower or resources. There’s a myriad of excuses and sometime the machine remains broken when it could be repaired. You need to choose to fix it and commit to that choice. I’m a little hypocritical here as I made the choice at pretty much rock bottom. I made the choice after 24 hours of being chaperoned and escorted from somewhere in the North Sea to a doctor’s office 198 miles away. It is a little hypocritical but the point of this isn’t to demonstrate that I did everything correctly but to give you the benefit of my hard-earned, mistake-laden experience. It’s only a little hypocritical because at some point, eventually, I did make the choice. At some point I chose to listen, reflect and accept. At some point I began to invest time and effort into myself. At some point I started to work on fixing my problems. For me there isn’t a clearly identified point when this choice was made because I wasn’t aware of the journey I was on at the time but it was made. I know this because I’m sat at my kitchen table at 5am, in a house full of people I love dearly, and with a bit of a wobbly chin I can tell you I’m happy. I’m truly happy. And I believe you can be too. Get it done!

The short version. Being miserable and unfulfilled isn’t normal. Realize something isn’t right and acknowledge it. Invest time in yourself learning about your brain, how it works and human nature. Once you understand how these things work invest time in yourself objectively analyzing your thoughts, feelings and actions and figure out what could be improved on. Once you have an idea of what is wrong, commit to rewiring your thoughts and feelings, or at least how you react to your thoughts and feelings. If you’ve read this and you believe you can fix yourself get it done. If you don’t think you have the power to change your life maybe have a wee Google of fixed and growth mindsets. That’s a whole different blog!

Congratulations. You’ve made the first steps on your journey towards self-awareness, ownership, accountability and objectivity. And who knows? Maybe even happiness and fulfillment. 

Top 10 tips for not being a bit of a dick. 

1. Read. Learn. Reflect. Discuss. This isn’t like changing a car tyre. It’s a lifelong job once you’ve made the fix. It’ll require a lot of tweaking and maintaining along the way and there’s always room for more improvement. 

2. Learn to actively relax. Learn to do nothing. Learn to just be. We’re moving so fast nowadays it’s important to take a time out now and again and let the brain be empty. I do this a few different ways, but my favourite is in the shower. Each time I go for a shower just before I get out, I take a couple of minutes to stand in the warm water with my eyes closed. I consciously let my mind empty. It’s my daily, mental pit stop. 

3. Look at the life you have and think about the life you want to have. Draw some circles on a piece of paper and write the things that make up your life. Family, job, hobby. All that stuff. Assign a percentage to each indicating how much of your time and energy each takes up. Now do the same thing again but this time write the percentage you’d like to be the case. Don’t be afraid to add or subtract some circles. Maybe you need to add some stuff to your life or take some stuff away. Once you’ve done this you now have a visual representation of where you see your life now and where you want to see it go in the future. 

4. Learn to be selfish. Don’t be sacred or feel guilty about taking time for yourself. Ultimately, it’s in everyone best interests if you’re happy, balanced and fulfilled. Less is more. If you need to spend 4 hours at the weekend eating and jogging in the dark and the rain to process and keep yourself balanced, then do it. If you’re not happy and fulfilled, then chances are you’re going to be a bit shit. 

5. Learn to say NO. We’re hardwired to please. It helped keep us alive when we were on the menu for dinosaurs. It’s not necessarily a bad thing but sometimes it can lead us to take on too much. To try to please and prove ourselves too much. It happens with friends, family and work. It’s hard to say no but if something isn’t your responsibility, isn’t in your best interests or isn’t reasonable, be brave, say no. Just because you’re the best person for the job it doesn’t necessarily mean you should be doing it. If you try to be everything to everyone all the time, chances are you’re once again going to be a bit shit after a while. 

6. Learn to say YES. Give people and experiences a chance. Try stuff. Try people. Be brave. You’ll learn a lot about yourself and you could even meet some pretty cool dudes. If you approach people and experiences with an open mind then you’ve put yourself in a position to make decisions about them from an informed position. Don’t make prejudice decisions based on fear or worry. This will rob you of living your life. There is no failure, only opportunity and learning. I could write a list the length of my arm of amazing people I’ve come to know through running because I was openminded enough to give them a chance, and brave enough to put myself out there by opening myself up when I was scared and REALLY didn’t want to. 

7. Stop worrying about “they” think. Wait and hear this! “They” don’t exist. That faceless, silent, judgmental hoard who are analysing your every action and discussing your every flaw, only exist in your head. This is your dinosaur, survival brain in action again. I must prove myself and be accepted by the pack or I’ll be alone and eventually get eaten alive. The people who care about you don’t care if you come up short now and again. The bulk of the rest of the world doesn’t care about your shit because they’re dealing with their own. If someone does judge you or point out your flaws, so what? They’re an asshole and it’s unreasonable to believe you can keep everyone happy. Especially assholes. Some people might not think much of you or even like you. It’s fine and you need to make your peace with it. They aren’t watching, they don’t care, they don’t exist outside of you head. 

8. Give up the illusion of control. I’m not vouching for nihilism here, but your life is a minutely short sliver of light between two vast darkness’s with billions of complex, moving parts which you have almost no control over. Life is just going to bounce off you every day and you’ve no way of stopping it. The only control you really have is how you react to it. Accept each situation as it comes to you and do the best to work with what you have. That’s it. All you can do. Over 99% of the things you experience in your life won’t be important to you the moment you realise you’re going to die. This may happen halfway through your life; this may happen 5 seconds before. Nothing provides context to your life like your death. 

9. You’re not a time traveller. This ties in with the illusion of control in number 8. Only Marty McFly and Doctor Strange can change the things they regret and control their future. The rest of us can only live in the present, accept our shortcomings, learn from them, and use this newfound knowledge and experience to try to shape the future we’d like to have. Living in the past or future due to regret or anxiety is a toxic state and it will rob you of the days of your life one at a time. 

10. Wear sunscreen.