Mind the gaps in your mind. Dealing with low mood. Personal notes. Mind, Part II

Pre-introduction

When I was a little boy, I often looked up at the sky at night; I dreamed that one day I would understand the principles behind the works of our universe. I attempted to build a simple telescope instrument, but I was clumsy. I didn't have appropriate tools to construct a proper one; from my primitive prototype, I could only see reflected featureless blobs in its eyepiece. Eventually, my family bought me a couple of books about astronomy and a tiny telescope to keep me happy. When I got older, I saved myself some money to acquire a better instrument. I also joined an astronomy club, which was a fantastic way to meet up with others with similar interests. The opportunity allowed me to travel independently to different places across Poland and visit large scientific faculties dedicated to radio telescopy.

During my innocent hobby, I discovered a plethora of nebulous objects, distant galaxies, moons around other planets, spots on the sun, comets, craters on the moon, ice caps on Mars, rings around Saturn and a permanent red spot on Jupiter. These moments made me shiver with awe and made my life more pleasant.

One day, I picked a book called 'Stardust' by John and Mary Gribbin. The history of our universe influenced me so much that I knew that I would eventually want to study more. Yet, I was not successful at school. For a while, I became miserable, and my initial fascination with the natural world and inspiration rotted away with frustration. Inside, I began to feel defeated, hurt and angry. Fast forward a few years, I moved countries. Initially, I wrapped myself with work, but I found my way back to do a degree in natural sciences followed by a doctorate in experimental physics.

Yet, the bitter episodes in my life became the fodder of inspiration and motivation. I began to stitch together a golem of personal and scientific understanding of how we process information inside our heads. With time, I came to accept the concept that the way we experience our natural world and its beauty depends on our perception. If the system processing these experiences is under stress, our fascination with nature may suffer as a result. Therefore, I decided to educate myself in how we think, feel and behave. Today, I am only at the perimeters of the thicket of this fascinating forest of knowledge.

Introduction

In this part of the post, I would like to put some thoughts on the sources of low mood as I have experienced it. I will start drawing the knowledge that we covered in part 1. I will outline some strategies and methods to challenge and overcome my blue states in the next part. I hope some of these ideas might enlighten a stranger out there as an educational exercise to paint a better picture of an individual who has been learning to deal with low moods with various levels of success. I noted that it is a journey that can vary between individuals, and we react to circumstances differently. We should all respect that and be civil about it.

Throughout my experience, I added a simple rule to my philosophical toolbox, which was probably somewhat influenced by Benjamin Disraeli, that goes like "expect the worst, hope for the best." I try to be as much of a pessimist as an optimist, but my mind constantly threads with more caution, so I tend to plan for 'A', but think of 'B', 'C', ... 'X', 'Y', 'Z'... 'X_1', 'Y_1', 'Z_1' etc. as possible outcomes 😱, which sometimes can drive me a bit mad.

For as long as I remember, I have believed that adaptable emotional wellbeing is one of the fundamental pillars supporting a platform hosting our faculty of learned skills. This system tackles daily tasks and challenges. Our ability to understand to supervise personal emotions and our reactions to the feelings of others can benefit us significantly in the long term. Still, it sometimes may work against us if we start to overthink. Therefore, I always tried to find that sweet spot or some 'goldilocks' configuration to make my mind operate well in various circumstances. What I can say today is: it is not an easy task.

I began writing this piece in 2019, tearing bits out or changing some of the facets of my message entirely. As years have passed, I still find that talking about low mood and depression can be taboo. Not surprisingly, I imagine that few of us would want to expose ourselves to say that there might be something wrong with how we behave and think; we have an automatic defence mechanism may try to protect us from talking about our core feelings. But I also find it perplexing that we often blame ourselves when things go out of hand, even in situations when it was not our fault in the first place. Nonetheless, there can be several reasons we want to keep our thoughts to ourselves. I can think of a few examples that I observed or experienced:

• a few know how to approach the subject with enough context or wisdom;
• the others can be on a different stage of their journey, and a few might not be even aware that they are on any path;
• others might not be ready or feel obliged to take a heavy burden of responsibility, and sometimes helping others can be an extremely energetically draining and stressful experience;
• finally, some might resist talking about it in the open from fear of being criticised, judged or even exploited*.

I experienced a few ways in which others can exploit or deceive us; a common one consists of a blueprint where a person or an organisation claims to provide a service or a product bundle that aims to deliver us from a broad set of issues. The schematics can contain a clause that promises to improve our relationships and guarantee great career advancement for an 'X' amount of money all packed to 'y' days of intense life-changing bootcamp. Some of these organisations can be a highly aggressive system for intricate sales, as I found out myself.

A colleague invited me to an introductory course in London that promised to help me break away from inner fears and become more successful (whaterver that means). I didn't decline because I believed I was attending a meetup where people share their experiences overcoming personal challenges. I didn't realise what I was getting myself into until later; I thought I would learn something new.

When I arrived at the venue, everyone around me was intensely friendly. When people are too cordial, a small internal diode lights up inside my head, warning me that something might be off. We sat down. The presentations began, and strangers began sharing their very intimate stories. A rush of oxytocin, endorphins, dopamine, epinephrine or whatnot made my body tingle but slightly numb. A part of my mind whispered, "Hey! These people share stories of how they suffer and how much it hurt them. We have already something in common!" But then a second warning diode inside my head lit up. The "coping mechanism cetre" in my brain tried to convince me that everything was going okay. Unfortunately, that agent was stubborn and as arrogant as Anatoly Dyatlov; a recalcitrant character from an adaptation of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster story told by HBO mini-series.

The initial presentations strategically and surgically harpooned any newcomer's centre of emotions and pulled them in closer towards signing to the expensive course. It took me about another five minutes to realise it was a well-orchestrated sales pitch conducted by a well-versed army of acolytes who shared the most personal stories to form a rapport with newbies. The kindness of volunteers wrapped themselves like tentacles around a body of naive prey. Each passing minute the air was thicker, and I jittered psychologically, thinking how to get out of the situation. Every passing moment made it harder to say 'no'... but I refused to sign up.

When I exited the building, I was euphoric, thinking, 'I am so glad to be out of there.' Sadly, many vulnerable folks join up hoping for a life-changing experience; instead, they get sucked in putting themselves against stress against steep financial obligations that can push one to feel a lot worse at the end. Perhaps, some stay quiet to save face. On the other hand, those who stay on with the programme for long probably learn the trade and run it themselves; it is a lucrative business. I won't reveal the organisation's name because I am certain that their lawyers would not leave my family and me alone; I am not a hero. But you should be aware that such predatory organisations exist, and you can stumble upon one when you feel the most vulnerable.

I don't see shortcuts when dealing with low mood episodes; the underlying wirings are bio-chemical. We need time to exercise new routines to deal with various stressful situations to gain that "muscle" strength. Recidivism to the old routines is common. I understood that the process could take a long and sometimes dull and unattractive grind, which includes many intermediate steps of trial and error that can influence the mood itself. However, continuous education can establish a psychological framework that lays the foundations of well-known grit and hope. But there is another challenge that many of us have to face; we might have to manage our 'naive' optimistic thinking*.

* that is trying to avoid being positive on the surface and neglecting to address a surmounting set of issues that can crawl underneath.

I recall my childhood memories of my rural community back then. A boy or a man suffering from a low mood could not express themselves; they would be considered weak or strange. Expressing one's troubling feelings with others was often quickly smothered. Encouragement to follow a workable solution was a bourgeoisie luxury. Instead my community belived that a boy should strive to be an idealistic 'He-Man' with a dull mind but a healthy body. If a forced stoic attitude didn't work its magic, a low mood episode could alienate one from the community, workplace, or family. The unpredictability of this fragile emotional landscape of interactions between the individual and others makes low mood or depression subjects challenging to address and discuss. I find these observations to be entirely natural, however.

Thinking about humans as biochemical entities that are a product of their environment (Event driven behaviour) may sound tedious; that picture developed stronger as I walked into my 30s, however. Now I begin to understand what Oscar Wilde meant by writing the following line: "The advantage of the emotions is that they lead us astray, and the advantage of science is that it is not emotional." [1]. In other words, our emotions can sometimes obstruct the real concepts, while the plain scientific explanation can be unromantic and dull.

A living being in our universe strives to minimise its commitment of mental (if it has a complex nervous system) and physical effort. Like any other entity, we inherit chemical and biological drives that make us biased towards selfish rather than otherish behaviour. Of course, we can act selflessly but with a lower frequency, which is likely to happen when our energy bar is close to being full when we are content. It is also most likely to happen between genetically related entities* (regarding the work of W. D. Hamilton).

* Thinking of strangers who were generous and kind in their aid in the past, perhaps a random kind of kindness also has a psychological influence.

In general, unless we benefit from any challenge that we undertake, if it doesn't aid our relatives or us in attaining better chances of survival, social ranking, or psychological gratification, why would it make any sense of getting involved in helping others? Why waste our limited resources such as time and energy? Perhaps that is why we might hear a cranky professor crudely utter: ' Be a man and get some guts!' rather than 'Hey buddy, I have a list of some useful resources that I found useful over my years of personal struggle. Let me hear the high level of your story then I can at least give a few pointers on where to start, but be ready to make your own mistakes. If you want, I can tell you about some of my experiences. Hopefully, you can learn something new to pick yourself up after any setback. Don't worry; it is perfectly human to do so; it just takes time to master. And remember wisdom may take longer to crystallise for some and less for others.' The first crude approach is easy to implement and deploy. That's why it is frequent, and the latter is an ideal to which only some of us would like to aspire. Why? Like in economic theory that deals with various assets, wisdom is also valuable, bit it is scarce.

Let's recall part 1 of these series (reference), where we briefly touched on the adaptive role of quick heuristics versus long and expensive decision-making. With that model in our mind, the above fictional response should not surprise us. When we are focused on our daily tasks, especially when we are stressed, we commonly snark at each another because such reaction is quick and energetically cheap. In some, this can be a default response strategy. However, when our minds become less burdened with stressors, we gain a more forward-thinking perspective and start to be kinder to each another.

Therefore, when we struggle and look for help, we may find ourselves occasionally ignored, painfully rejected, devalued or exploited by individuals in our surroundings. Besides, we expect way too much from our bio-chiselled machinery that has baked-in instructions that make default choices to conserve a higher energetic output of our brains. Sometimes we are more likely to find comfort among our relatives. Nonetheless, the winning effect of our more selfish nature is the foundation of the following proverb: 'A friend in need is a friend indeed.'

If you are interested in the conversation on the topic of altruism and selfishness, that is a more formal way that I present, then check this article. It is a fairly accessible review, and its references for more detail for you to explore.

I may sound cynical in my writing about human nature, but I am careful not to paint a portrait of our behaviour through an emotional lens. I only seek basic understanding drawn from personal experience. However, it takes me an awful amount of time and energy to understand and penetrate through various fascinating thinking layers that yield a generalised knowledge explaining unhappiness.

Many of us often struggle to fully quantify our problems, whether they are subjectively small or big. Naturally, we are half-blind to the inner mechanisms that are buried behind many layers of abstraction. As I mentioned before, we are wired that way to benefit our survival in this quirky terrestrial habitat, although there is stress related behaviour that not strictly adaptive, for example, ritualistic behavioural patterns. Nonetheless, we posses partial ability to discover and become aware of our internal hidden behavioural influences and that makes us very remarkable creatures.

I hold a naive view that we might not be ultimately doomed, and perhaps our technological and scientific progress from the past few hundreds of years might progressively aid us, especially in the field of statistics and computation. We may become less burdened with excessive manual labour and devote some of our time to others when they seek help. Yet our attention is increasingly sucked into various online nonsense that diverts our attention and impedes us from building a collection of practical knowledge shared by the brilliant minds on this planet.

It appears that we have been trying to build more humane societies with more altruistic bias, and it seems that we have been increasingly acting to aid cooperation and information sharing. But sadly, that has often been achieved at the expense of someone else's misery; and I am highly sceptical that we will ever be able to balance the societal scales to reach an equilibrium where everyone is content.

However, I get the impression that I am still a bit of a naive optimist. Our governing approaches are not 'perfect', but we can only improve systems that are not ideal. On the individual level, we fight our inner pre-programmed set of instructions, biases, or own experiences that make our behaviour uneven. On the social level, the systems themselves can often aid the exploitation of our biases that erode our collective trust in governance and affect our wellbeing. But I sincerely hope we continue to do better than in our historical past as we learn to introspect our past mistakes.

By setting aside our biological and societal constraints, it is generally difficult to influence other people to change their thinking or behaviour. Instead, we all know it can be more feasible and less complex to battle our private emotions that alter our future behaviour and decisionmaking. As the first course of action, we can work to recognise our biases, which is a good starting point. In this way overcoming low mood or depression can be effective if we focus our efforts on ourselves rather than the environment and people around us. Helping others in need can help us find but if we peg our internal wellbeing to external factors and we fail, any setback in that sphere can propel us deeper into rotten state. These are the thoughts I would like to expand further.

Questions, definitions and further discussion

I often ponder a few questions when I go for long walks. Is internal sadness a sign of personal weakness or vulnerability? How do we recognise a difference between a short spike in distress and an ongoing episode of rotten mood that mutates into depression? Or, in other words, how can I set alarm bells around my mind to chime when depression is slowly approaching and ignore temporary changes in circumstances that can be false-positive indicators?

Depression is not the same as an interim episode of horrible and gut-wrenching feeling brought by a temporary stressor. A transient awful mood can last for a few days to two weeks. Beyond that time, the wretched state of spirit morphs into a depressive episode; formally, we call it a depressive mental disorder. Depression can bring various other psychological conditions or amplify them, such as low self-esteem and a loss of interest in activities that we usually found pleasurable in the past. We might distance ourselves from others, have low energy, and experience migraines (I had silent migraines and lost my vision for a brief moment). Some of us endure pains without a clear cause. Depressive episodes may sporadically come and go separated after years of healthy wellbeing. Unchecked or untreated mild depression can grow in strength.

Major depressive disorder can buckle one's personal life and working experience, inhibit learning, interrupt sleep, and impact eating patterns resulting in bad wellbeing. About 2-8 % of people with major depression take their own lives.

According to the World Health Organisation, depression affects more than 300 million people [2] and about 800 000 die globally by suicide every year. Two thousand one hundred ninety-one people die every day, probably 4-5 times larger than the number of individuals living in my childhood village. I find this number daunting and deeply disturbing. The suicide-related death rate has increased by 18% worldwide during the 2005-2015 interval. It is a clear indicator of a worldwide degradation of mental health. Despite the global departure from poverty, ease in human exploitation but fierce global competition for a finite pool of resources can facilitate this trend.

Low mood in my life rarely stopped me from doing things. My gloomy spirit had the effect of piling myself with work*. Still, the constant emotional jittering eroded my emotional wellbeing, performance, enjoyment of the precious passing moments, personal relationships, self-perception and body image. Nonetheless, I have learned to recognise these predicaments, and I have been working to understand them through introspection.

* many escape from our troubling wellbing issues in one way or another.

But how can I reflect and see if I am in a low mood episode or depressive state? In a notebook, I usually try to record or score my mood from 1-10, one representing a extremely poor state and ten an excellent state. If I score low for more than a few days, I try to budge it up. I rarely achieve one or ten but aim to gravitate around seven. This way, I have enough distance to the lowest state, which gives me time to act. And not being ten gives me some padding for an occasional emotional treat.

From experience, a low mood or mild depressive state can be akin to a low-intensity toothache. It can be transient and disappear, or one might learn to ignore it with time. The deeper depressive state is akin to a severe tooth infection that will pin you to bed and will make you forget about your fear of going to the dentist. I will share with you my experience.

I suffered from a non-crippling low mood for as long as I can remember; probably that goes back to my pre-teen years. It was not until I was doing my undergraduate degree, back in 2007, that I got to a stage where I temporarily lost administrative control of my body and got overwhelmed by the stress response. I knew then that my state of mind was a product of a long term pessimistic approach to life and generalised anxiety. Despite my best efforts and rigorous schedule, my emotional bucket filled up to the maximum. I began to fear that I might drop out and go back to my previous blue-collar life in a kitchen, which I wanted to transition from and just improve my quality of life. At the same time, my relationship with my long term partner began to crumble. I started having more intense anxiety attacks that led to intense intrusive negative thoughts.

Over the next few months, I put on weight due to overeating shortly after facing my stressors. I kept deluding myself and staggered my negative thoughts. Eventually, I embraced the soviet ideology by smudging all negativity with layers of naive optimism.

After a lasting period of low mood, one early morning, my human muscles refused to listen to my conscious commands. Despite my efforts, I could not drag myself out of bed. I felt paralysed lying in my bed. My mind slipped into a dark pool of extremely unpleasant thinking. Shortly afterwards, I managed to find some emotional strength and called one of my close friends. Luckily, he helped me out to see a general medical practitioner. At that point, I still didn't seek therapy; instead, I opted for an easy option of getting a prescription of anti-depressants assuming this might be a reasonable fix to my psychosomatic problems.

Later that week, I contacted my director of studies. I explained that I got into a nasty rut and could hardly make progress. Thankfully, I got all the extra support I needed, and the world did not end. Luckily I was open about my needs; therefore, I could move forward.

That was the first time I began to be aware of my fears and acknowledge the potency and magnitude of fluctuations in my nervous system. Until recently, I attributed negative connotations to these experiences and kept viewing them with shame and a belief that I am weak. There is no shame in being vulnerable; the only shame is to miss a realisation that one can only get resilient with time. Nowadays, I am addressing my vulnerabilities and moving on to become a more flexible living being.

When I look back at my undergraduate experience, these issues seem insignificant compared to my current confrontations, but they mattered a world to me at that time. When I skim through various online articles, older generations often scald young people for their general deficiency in dealing with stress. Millennials are frequent targets. The critics blame this group for its lack of gratitude and excessive complaining. I agree that complaining rarely solves many things, but it can often set things in motion and push for change. Lament holds little value, but unbalanced external criticism without constructive guidance is equally useless. The faults often lie in individual inexperience. Therefore, I find it generally more beneficial to dismiss various toxic rambles or malignant provocations that became dominant in the media. It is better to turn our heads in a direction that would make our lives less burdened from the nonsense. But I digress.

I find low mood and depression subjects of personal curiosity. However, a person who goes through the ordeal might think otherwise. From personal experience, a depressive episode aided me to restructure, challenge, and alter my perception; thus, some intense mood episodes enabled me to seek and pursue alterative interests in life. The reflections influenced me to pursue natural sciences to learn critical thinking, fundamentals of mathematical logic and sources of thinking biases. Unfortunately, the scientific principles I learned about are not popular in the general public sphere. The Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) subjects opened doors for me to software engineering in a pursuit to harness information and its structures to build tools for future research. Working in the industry, at the same time, gives me a valuable experience that I can write about and share with you today.

What can influence a depressive state?

Low mood or depression, as I understand on a basic level, could result from a multitude of underlying factors - the list can be exhaustive, and I can't fully cover everything here. Let me write some of the main drivers drawn from my personal life.

1. Environmental forces can mould the mind with a long-lasting impact.

One night, I watched "The King" movie directed by David Michôd [3]. Thibault de Montalembert, the actor who played the French King Charles VI, said the following words: "The great movements in history so frequently find their origin in the minutia of the family...". That sentence resonated in my head for a while, and I think it is almost central to what I will write in this section.

Alike historical decisions that prime the minds of Queens and Kings, our personal choices result from the pressures of close relatives, advisors and the physical environment. Therefore I think a few individuals would scald me if I claim that the most significant influence on one's mental wellbeing can come from the group of people that guide us into adulthood. Our long developmental journeys involve connections with our families, teachers, neighbours, work colleagues, mentors, if we are lucky to have them, and environmental societies. The people with the highest frequency of interaction mould our minds through spoken words and unspoken behaviours. We often keep mimicking others without conscious awareness for years. Some habits germinate at the onset of our adulthood and grow their roots stronger in our minds, and sometimes wreak havoc in the later stages of our lives.

Mental and physical abuse is what I had to learn to deal with quite early in my life. My father, for example, was the first person who had a powerful and lasting detrimental influence on my mental wellbeing. His sporadic alcohol binging ended up in deeply unpleasant situations. This behaviour was quite pervasive in my small provincial Polish Catholic community. Some men acted like children who tried to act as adult men. Whispers and gossips slowly spread through the societal ether while instances of displaced aggression sometimes crept onto school premises. I was an avid reader of horror books at a time; one of them was 'IT' by Stephen King, so my childhood experience reminded me of a fictional town called Derry terrorised by a predatory and monstrous projection: "Pennywise the Dancing Clown." The only difference was the villains spreading fear were some adult men. In my mind, they were clowns who didn't bother with wearing fancy makeup, at least to the church.

I neither blame my father nor excuse his behaviour. He had an unpleasant upbringing himself and an impulsive father. To his defence, I can say that he didn't have the intellectual capacity to break out from his compulsions and break the chain of abuse for once. He was oblivious to how much psychological damage he was inflicting on my family. After the divorce from my mother, I began talking with him, but he never appeared to see himself as the source of any issues and blamed my mother's family, which at first I found perplexing. It took me years before I began to learn about the fundamentals of human cognition. Cognitive biases define affinity to think in a particular way and influence our actions. They can also pave the fundamentals of our arrogance and ignorance.

Over time I developed another view and realised that due to the minute forces of evolution, men grew to beat each other up given our social nature and the tendency for hierarchical ordering. The larger size of males compared to females is another tell-tale of that.

Fortunately, thanks to social progress and the emergence of social services to protect its members from our animalistic escalations, males have to think twice before fighting. Sadly, hidden away behind the walls of their own homes, some of the male muscular resources still end up on their wives and kids.

I understand that my personal view can be an oversimplification. Still, by relating to other primates, such as baboons, we can note that they are explicitly aggressive towards females to keep them under control. Therefore, it may be suggestive that domestic violence is one of the primitive controlling strategies developed early by nature. I don't know for sure, but we might have ended up with this ancient artefact that remains in our genetic and cultural forcing mechanisms.

When my father took his own life, that event set a destructive emotional ripple through my psychological ether. After that episode, every time I encountered a moment of hardship, I often doubted my coping abilities and feared that my father's genes are at work. That irrational reasoning constantly kept me rotten and immersed in a low mood state. I kept trying to break free from these internal reflections, however. And it was only recently I learned to recognise them as a product of my biased thinking. I will write about some valuable strategies for dealing with such intrusive thoughts in the last part of this essay.

My relationship with the rest of my family oscillated between being better or worse over the past few years. The history and lack of stronger bonds have pulled us apart. I still love my family; separated by miles of a foreign land, it pains me I can't see them more often. My past also makes me wary of going back to my childhood roots.

Let's finish this section with a bit of humor. I always find comedy to be the best cure for the troubling mind. However, we should be mindful that there are people that might not share the same enthusiasm with us and that is fine with us because we are so cool. Anyway, the following picture perfectly depicts the relationship of our state of mind with our families.

2. Schooling & culture

We spend a significant amount of time in school, hoping that it can arm us with mental tools to solve problems we face to face, shape our confidence and mould us into productive members of our society, well, at least on paper. For me, schooling had the opposite effect to what it should accomplish. At least in my case.

Education, I initially believed, was the most valuable venture I pursued. I invested a lot of time chasing various vanity titles, hoping to earn respect. The experience was sometimes very disappointing, especially at the beginning. During my early years of secondary education in rural Poland, I dealt with a few awful educators who promoted their authority with their browbeat attitude. I had little control over my school choices because I was a mediocre student. Feeling stuck eroded my confidence, direction and self-image. Facing neurotic teachers was disheartening, and regenerating my inner hope always cost me a lot of effort. That was especially hard when I was called an 'idiot' in front of a class of 40 other hormone-packed pre-adolescent strangers.

During more trying times, I wished I just vanished from the face of the earth or made it to the moon for just a day to enjoy the view from there and watch our beautiful blue planet. ' No one is ever satisfied where he is' wrote Antoine de Saint-Exupéry. Occasionally, I shifted into a state of temporal displacement and froze up all my feelings to protect myself from feeling worse. I knew these people had emotional problems; I feared the consequences if I stood up for myself. On the other hand, I didn't want to walk that toxic road, so I ate up all the unpleasantries and carried on.

I met the fruits of hoarded domestic abuse and neglect at school - edgy teenagers. Some picked on me because I enjoyed reading books during class breaks; that was enough to warrant unwanted attention. To protect me from perpetual nagging, I quickly realised that I had to fight back. I always sought a non-violent way out of a conflict by releasing the tension with humour. Still, reasoning with individuals of low emotional intelligence often ended up in skirmish nonetheless. Negotiation was harder to achieve when the perpetrators wanted to impress others to increase their social ranking or get accepted into specific groups. Sadly in my cohort, a couple of new students were beaten by an inch from death by older students. The teachers were aware of these happenings but didn't stop the perpetrators; some were teachers' kids. I was just lucky to end up with broken lips, chipped teeth, a displaced nose and bruises around my eyes. These experiences helped me peek into our elementary nature and sparked my interest in social animal behaviour.

To alleviate the daily grind of educational camp, I made a handful of friends that got sucked into a similar bog of experiences. We could count on each other's company, call each other stupid nicknames, fight back our perpetrators and laugh off the ridiculousness of everyday life together. But I didn't spend time blaming everyone around me; I often played that inane social game in the best way I could and promised myself some revenge one day. And the retaliation, as I later decided, was to try to build a strong foundation of character and achieve some sort of success on my terms. I just didn't realise it would be so hard in practice, but I am just too stubborn or blind with my conviction to give up. Besides, I knew at the time that I had to stop the urge to prove these people wrong, so I moved into the idea of establishing myself that I could flake off to a better life regardless of the obstacles I met on my way. Now I hope I can pass the words of encouragement to others.

An additional source of my profound misery and emotional unease that troubled me as a pre-teen and some of my teenage years was compulsory Catholic religious education and mandatory attendance in various related rituals. I never had issues with people following their own beliefs and traditions, but I always had trouble with forced dogma. I was not too fond of that, but I stayed quiet as I didn't want to be a social outcast. I think I was either too recalcitrant or poorly dealt with compartmentalisation to take all religious learnings fully onboard. I sucked it all, but I was still terrified by some passages that made me shiver internally, for example:

Anyone who beats their male or female slave with a rod must be punished if the slave dies as a direct result, but they are not to be punished if the slave recovers after a day or two since the slave is their property. Exodus 21:20-21

Although, we didn't touch certain parts of the bible, such passages terrified me.

Further, some provincial religious educators repeated an ignorant mantra that disobedience to follow religious rituals would result in divine intervention, sickness of one's family members or condemnation of one's soul to everlasting torture in depths of hell after death. When the threats of afterlife tortures ceased to activate our little imaginations, the educators turned to a strategy of lowering our grades. It was probably a more pragmatic form of punishment because parents would have a perfect excuse to beat us up. In summary, I learned that "God" not only works in mysterious ways, but these ways include bullying, mental trickery and physical abuse. I came to realise one thing: when you are in distress and need of God, the only miracle you will experience is his* complete lack of response.

* we were told that God is a male which to me it didn't make sense because if you are an omnipotent being then sex is irrelevant.

It terrifies me further that there are other places on this planet where people use religious dogma as a convenient excuse for more virulent and deadly compliance systems. But I digress again.

A final nail to the coffin of my faith arrived when I was between ten and eleven years old. I experienced an event that had a wrecking effect on my trust towards our spiritual shepherds, and it sent me on a rollercoaster of mood changes. I learned about a child's death in our neighbouring community. I didn't know the family personally, but I could imagine the level of grief one can endure in such a situation. The news pierced my heart, and when it bled, I learned the parish priest refused to give the family a proper funeral ceremony because the family could not afford the full-service costs. A good part of the story was the community retaliated. The response brought my faith back in people. Still, my childish "soul" began to decay, and I began to believe that humans could be the most advanced opportunistic animals.

I tread with caution regarding faith and religious institutions because I didn't want to experience a punch in the face as some get highly emotional about the topic. Yet, I still believe that ' I'd rather die on my feet than experience my life on my knees.'

Luckily, I don't have any spiritual drive to hurt others. From my point of view, I am happy to live in a community where we all try to agree on a common social contract to minimise stepping on each other toes. I am glad that people in my vicinity also think that.

Once I decided to quit school, I set off to the UK. I experienced a sense of relief that I could leave some of my past behind. At first, I missed my country enormously and often recalled my best memories with a heavy heart. Today, I had learnt to shelve my history, keep it as a reference and instead be content with the present and plan for a better future.

These experiences proved that the closest people and environment could significantly impact one's wellbeing. How one chooses to act in response to various forms of abuse can have a profound emotional impact that creeps in later stages of one's life.

3. Conscious or unconscious inability to develop effective coping mental strategies and self-preserving behavioural patterns against various external and internal events. In short, "lack of relevant experience or cognitive capacity."

We probably agree that life can be a continuous train of challenges imposed by others and the environment. Other human beings can be ruthless; some may be more forgiving and give you pointers that direct you from pitfalls. Without the wealth of societal support, rules and mutual collaboration, the utopian bubble can burst fast, and we descent to act by our raw, animalistic impulses. Occasionally we pursue unimaginable barbaric acts recorded in the annals of historical writings; these can make even Shakespearean drama seem somewhat optimistic in comparison.

I admit I get slightly weary when I skim through history, listen to the current world events, browse the web and reflect on daily observations. But perhaps I regularly forget that the probabilities of some reported events in various news articles are relatively low. However, they carry a heavy psychological load that distorts my perspective. By understanding science, I remind myself that our implicit selfish drives still help us survive through semi-automatic means, like breathing. Nonetheless, few sources of wisdom can help us combat daily concerns, such as literature and online communities of learners. Alas, we still likely see this privilege more accessible in the highly developed parts of the world.

A common mistake I used to make in the past was to assume that other people could act as rational agents or act with good intentions when I acted civilly. I expected reciprocity, kindness or validation for my efforts for working well due to some morally invisible contract. I see that happen often, I can't deny it, but I tend to ignore the possibility of someone trying to exploit my naive way of thinking - my grandmother used to warn me against trusting other people. Still, I couldn't help it, and I held a belief that good things would come to me with time. Eventually, I got punished for my naivety; when personal attacks arrived, I was stunned and could not counteract them. Instead, I developed unhelpful habits hindering my long-term personal development. For example, being unable to control these situations usually led me to belittle myself internally and abuse my self-esteem, eroding my mood. Learning more about my shortcomings was an important stepping stone to becoming more resilient. Now I am developing more effective coping mechanisms to build better foundations for my assertiveness.

Developing effective mental strategies is challenging and sometimes take years to accomplish. They require being completely honest with themselves, require discipline, and often involve: an external encouragement or an inspirational event; mentoring; an experience of a devastating failure; tolerance to rebounding from blockers; development of non-destructive mental schemas that prepares us to deal with uncertainty and ever-changing context. Meanwhile, our frugal internal processes oppose our will and try to reduce our well-intended conscious and expensive mental efforts (refer to section From sensory system to decision making in part 1). We often fall short of seeing the complete picture of our cognitive faculty, and only recently have we uncovered more details in this field.

4. Cognitive biases

Another reason we might turn into an alley of low mood or slip into depression is our cognitive biases that result from our brains' information processing design. Cognitive biases result from incomplete mental calculations or first-order estimates in our decision-making (refer to section From sensory system to decision making in part 1). Our past experiences can influence the results of processing (refert to sections Varying perspective and pattern matching and Model Equivalence). For example, we often view all incoming information through an emotional lens or filters when we feel down. Pessimistic experiences can affect our current emotional state and amplify our sense of distress. We may mislabel neutral events and even distance ourselves from people due to our deceiving perception.

Naturally, we rank the passing life events along the negative and positive ends of the spectrum. Interestingly, the evolutionary process puts more weight on adverse events in our set of memories. This mental feature increases our survival chances by steering us away from harm's reach. However, the exact mechanism can also amplify our fears to irrational levels if we don't manage them ourselves. Therefore, spreading fear is a convenient manipulation tool, and some folks out there make that finding into very profitable businesses.

In summary, cognitive biases can help us survive but also help facilitate unhelpful ways of thinking that can rot down our moods. When we process information, recognising our natural biases can help us walk away from a path of crippling depression. I will come back to cognitive biases in more detail in another essay.

5. Biochemical/endocrine influences or physical damage

Our brains are fantastic at information processing. Yet, these cutting-edge organic devices can malfunction through internal drives or external influences. Restlessly, our brain computes decision choices based on external and internal contexts (From sensory system to decision making). But if something kicks the mechanism out of balance, the whole biochemical chain of processes or endocrine Tower of Babel crumbles. One example is hypothyroidism which results from the under-activity of our thyroid. My auntie suffered from it. Another example is my adrenal gland hyperactivity that makes me more anxious than someone in general.

In the past, I had agonising experiences from persistent and painful ear infections that lasted for about two years. I went to numerous doctors in the UK and Poland to pinpoint the underlying cause. Eventually, the condition has subdued, but I ended up with persistent tinnitus, to which I am trying to get used. I still hope that one day I will experience silence again. Physical failure of this kind can make one vulnerable to low mood. But in this context, low mood can be an impetus to take action.

Whatever the underlying cause of your ill health, I encourage you to avoid relying on self-diagnosis or information on the internet. Knowing more can often lead to escalation of anxiety when we begin to misdiagnose or attribute our feelings to an illness that may not be there. Self-education is extremely useful but doesn't undermine professionals who spend years training. They might not know all the answers straight away or make mistakes; they are humans, after all. However, they can be years ahead of you in terms of expertise or refer you to other professionals who can come with help. Please consult professionals if you can, and remember it is their job to help you.

The quality of professional help or support in mental wellbeing matters can vary and depend on the background of the person you are seeing. You might need to put in extra effort to find the right help. A quick chat with your medical practitioner can help, nonetheless. Moreover, I feel that today the level of support is excellent - well, at least in the UK. There are plenty of people, charities and private groups that you can outreach, network with or get advice. Although this may require a lot of extra effort, which might not be something one is likely to do during a low mood, the help is there for you to reach out. I found that during episodes of depression, it was vital for me to take action and seek support despite being embarrassed about it. I noticed that rebelling against my state of mind to break from melancholy was key to feeling better in the long term. I will return to this thought in the last blog post.

The first time I reached a health professional for advice on dealing with anxiety and low mood occurred after completing my doctorate. I had a feeling that I got into a dead-end in my career (many doctorates end up on low-mood train after the completion of their thesis). I had difficulty penetrating a competitive industry flooded with outstanding talent. So I worked odd jobs to get by. I met a mental health professional for my initial evaluation. After 15 minutes of revealing feelings that burdened me, the professional concluded that I was a chronic procrastinator and had no real problems to deal with, such as a mortgage. I was so disappointed with their inference that it took me another five years before seeking further help. I didn't hold back through procrastination, insteadit was hurt and disappointed inside and I had enought to talk about my feelings with anyone.

On my second re-approach, I got a referral for cognitive behavioural therapy. That finally helped me identify core sources of my continuous struggle with low mood and anxiety. My honest recommendation is to avoid waiting for five years, complain about the service you received and see someone else. Nonetheless, during these five years, I began reviewing the literature on the subject across psychology books cognitive sciences and understanding the core nature of distortions of our mind. So I guess something came out of it. Sometimes, if you can't find a good therapist, learn some fundamentals yourself.

6. Traumas and loss

Experiencing mental or physical trauma, including sudden loss of a close relative, a job, a friend, a sudden accident, abuse, a set of rejections, unexpected loss of physical ability, can impact our emotional state in the short and long term. Grief is a natural reaction to loss, and it helps us transition to new episodes of our lives or attracts the attention of people who might support us through the journey. Grief is not necessarily a sign of depression, but a prolonged lack of hope and associated low mood can grow into it.

At the time of occurrence, some things can grow into mountains, but let's not forget that these are natural emotional spikes in our life's journey, and we always have a choice in the way we react to these events. We need to go through these and engineer a plan to move away from a sad feelings. As before, we should seek assistance as much as possible, have hope, and let natural coping mechanisms do the rest.

7. Addictions

Whether we want to admit it or not, we are all prone to be addicted to a varying degree. Our brain's functionality depends on various neurotransmitters, such as dopamine, serotonin, and norepinephrine. For example, the neurotransmitter levels fluctuate based on environmental, genetic and epigenetic factors. I used to think that we had more control over our biological vehicles. But it appears that our underlying chemical and physical signatures often ignore our conscious part of the mind and steers to its course that later bubbles up into our conscious processing. I don't fully understand why some can't break their habits as quickly as others, so I suspect some people are prone to addictions due to genetic variability that dictates our dependency affinity.

I scratched the surface of addiction and underestimated the power of its influence in my youth. I spent five years in nicotine prison. It fascinated me that an underlying chemical cascade can completely re-wire one's way of thinking and can cause one to become very creative with making up a multitude of excuses to quit. Drawing choking and poisonous cigarette fumes into my lungs did not stop me from reaching for more cigarettes because of the adorable nicotine kick that came with it. I filtered out the pictures of deceased people or damaged organs on cigarette packs from my mental narrative. The craving for the next high was dominant.

I find the transition into and from depression to have a remarkable resemblance to the nicotine dependency cycle. Both changes surprise you after a couple of weeks, and both move you towards a mental state that can become difficult to escape past that point. However, I will touch on the subject in the future.

To deal with low mood, I would recommend anyone to work towards the elimination of any mood-altering substances. Nicotine and alcohol twist our state of mind, and we can only apply cognitive strategies after we eliminate them.

8. Wide World Web

I made the following drawing after I had spent some time on Twitter. It can be a great platform to stream current world events. However, it can also expose one to emotionally overwhelming human toxicity and can actaully make one to entangle onself with it and draw you in. I regret some things I said in the past, but one's mistakes can begin a journey.

We live in an era where we are more connected, and information delivery from across the world is cheaper and more voluminous. An American political commentator and author, Thomas Friedman, stated: "The world is Flat." And what he means by that is that the wrinkles in the information exchange routes that span the globe are shorter than ever. At the same time, the mounting distraction beams out from that virtual cerebrum to grab our attention. The number of applications competing for our time is endlessly growing. The most successful applications exploit and latch themselves to the core of our emotional needs and want. Many of them use our natural gregarious needs, quench the attention of our egos or facilitate us to abuse anonymously each other. It is an overwhelming and distasteful experience; for others, the virtual nexus is a new way of life. The increasing challenge to adapt to this virtual expanse is another phase in the natural selection process for the new generations to come to this world.

Being constantly connected to strangers from around the globe and is ready to interact on the virtual web can significantly impact one's cognitive system and mood itself. Learning to manage the time and knowing when to stop is a good practice not to feel overwhelmed. Being able to recognise when we need to disconnect is a valuable personal utility for long term wellbeing. It becomes crucial to realise that engineers architect online services to maximise their consumption and carry no explicitly recommended guideline of usage. Yet we are still learning that fact too slowly. The penalty we pay comes from the pouch of our time. But again, it takes time and effort to develop healthy habits of rationing our involvement and managing our interaction with technology. That is why we often succumb to it quickly and lag with strategies that would benefit us in the long term.

Nonetheless, I am fascinated by the existence of the virtual "world" and what it brings to us. It is a fantastic tool that helps us interact globally. I am immersed in the constant evolution of this super-organism, the growth in its complexity and the vastness of information it contains. But on the other hand, I am terrified and disgusted by the invisible content that builds underneath like a tumour.

9. Diet and lifestyle

The quality and variability of food that we ingest has paramount importance on our physical and mental health. A healthy balance of fruit, nuts, meats, and vegetables rewards our bio-systems. Unfortunately, we are not naturally pre-programmed to seek equilibrium. We are most likely to crave high sugar, protein and fat food from various sources because our brain will release a high dose of pleasure-invoking neurotransmitters to select and promote that specific food eating behaviour. Our brains are biased in this way. It will make us gobble up as much food as our body can process at a time. We store the excess in fat storage faculties - adipose tissue. Body fat will further reinforce our behaviour to consume more food. It can become a vicious cycle, and with time, we can become more apathetic and prone to mood swings.

Because food consumption is so tightly linked with our pleasure making centres in our brains, we can choose to combat episodes of grief, low mood, anger or other sources of neurological stress through eating. In the past, I used to eat more unhealthy amounts of sugary foods whenever I felt down or angry. Eventually, I decided to swap processed sugary stuff with apples, for example, to stop my weight from exploding out of control. Consuming large quantities of fruit may also be not ideal. Nonetheless, their bulk fills our stomachs faster, and it is unlikely that we will eat vast amounts of it.

Another quirky and embedded feature in our brain design involves our visual input, and through natural selection, we constantly judge people subconsciously around us based on their physical characteristics. Therefore, our frequent failures to control our eating habits can manifest themselves in discrimination in our social circles that can impact our self-esteem or alter our self-esteem. That, of course, can vary between different societies that employ various social rules.

Back in my country and on some occasions, I was called "fat" and various ugly profanities associated with it. These moments were infrequent but can leave an emotional tear. Anyhow, observing the young people's facial expressions and body language uttering those things was still remarkably interesting. I was intrigued by the peoples' anticipation of my response. I normally did not try to show signs of provocation. Instead, I worked out to smile and try to say with a bit of wisdom: "I understand. Yes, I am guilty of over-eating when I am anxious. My brain produces a gratifying buzz when I eat, and I find it hard to say no." That usually ends the conversations gracefully as the attacker can't find a gratifying emotional response from my side. I think life is too short to fight all the insanity out there, and I have better things to accomplish.

We can frequently hear a saying: "Don't judge a book by the cover." We can note that there a lot who are less bothered to open one. On the other hand, a few can read and talk exceptionally well but can't draw the lessons from their studies.

I learned to put less weight on other people's opinions about my body's shape and size. I still care about my body because I have to put up with it daily. A healthy body is like a maintained car. Although I have to admit - I struggle because the human body is so damn recalcitrant. We believe we don't have to spend countless hours in the gym or aim to become a super-human in terms of fitness. A few hours of walking or lightweight cycling a week should be plenty if you stick to it daily. I integrated walking and cycling into my day-to-day travelling work routine. This way, I end up to 5 hours a week exercising this way.

As I see it today, I find it doubly unfortunate that quite a few consumer food manufacturers engineer foodstuffs to exploit our nature to consume unhealthy food. A consumer is relieved from the burden of responsibility to make food at home. Still, a proportion of food manufacturing agglomerates free themselves from burdening responsibility to engineer better quality food unless a regulator intervenes and rolls out red tape. The manufacturers' regulations force them to unveil the sugar and fat they inject into the meals. Sometimes, that results in metrics on the eye-watering package. There is nothing unnatural or wrong in prospecting from turning people into consuming livestock; a lot of us in the herd is content with the presented choices, but to have the freedom of choice, one must have a range of suitable products in the first place at a competitive price. We knew for some time that prepared foodstuffs could be a convenience, but they are not always the healthiest alternative. Therefore creating a bit of a distance to the source of unhealthy food might be a good option.

10. Social status, social networks and work

I have been climbing the social ladder for some time. After years of personal experience, I can only say that the moment you start breathing, I urge anyone to start figuring out how to climb the social ropes and be assertive. Each move may indeed be a gruelling, long and different experience based on your character. Yet it can be gratifying once you get going. However, the bottom of the social order is a profoundly depressing experience that I would not want to try to repeat anytime soon.

Life at a higher level of social hierarchy may not involve less effort. Still, it gets easier when you focus on building wisdom and don't get sucked into a habit of chasing material goods as a sole drive to your satisfaction. You can use excess money to buy yourself some leisure time or save for the time when you reach the end of your economic shelf life - we all have one. I am not rich, but I work my way up to enjoy non-physical work, free myself during weekends and spend extra holidays reading and learning. I always wanted more freedom during my teenage years as I had various family caring duties, physical work, and education. Now I can fully appreciate the time when I can read books, meet friends, volunteer or do courses in fields unrelated to my main line of work. The improved way of living makes me happy.

I always have considered myself a moderately social and open creature, sometimes perhaps too honest, yet I grew reservations towards others. Still, I don't enjoy loneliness; luckily my general interest in people breaks my inertia to interact with others.

My initial assumption was that living in London would enable me to make many connections, given it has a high population density. After a few years, I finally realised that it is opposite experience to my youthful experience living in a small and insignificant village. For me, a sense of loneliness was quite surprising and very hard to get used to in a humongous city. Instead, I spend more time in contact with others electronically. Digital channels lack the necessary emotional dimensions and are short lived. However, their convenience and ease of use are the only reasons I keep using them; it perhaps creates a window of opportunity to explore further.

As a person who spent a lot of time in the lab and now spends looking at pixels of my monitor, I confess that I always wanted to connect with people more. A combination of career choices robbed me of the time I could have used to communicate with others. Now I realise that technical work pays the rent, but the work erodes, what I imagine, the core of being human and makes me miserable. I realise that balance is something we all should strive to, but how do we find it if the most of the world is biased?

11. Debt

When we think of debt our first thought is to associate it with finance. Debt can have many flavours, however. We can accrue liabilities in knowledge, healthcare, or mental wellbeing sectors. I am not financially wealthy, and because of that, I can't, in my pure conscience, tell you more on money matters. However, I can tell you from experience that if you are conscientious and fall into unmanageable debt, the situation can propel you into a deep state of depression.

Save enough for a rainy day and more. I save for a rainy year.

12. Extreme ambitions, blindness due to arrogance and complacency

One of my favourite stories as a kid, comes from Greek mythology about Icarus. Icarus and his father Daedalus set to escape from Crete. Daedalus constructs wings from feathers and wax for both to achieve the feat. Before they set off, Daedalus teaches his son about complacency and hubris. Then he warns him about flying high in the sky where the sun can melt the wax. Flying too low, Daedalus warns him again, makes wing feathers draw moisture from the sea-water and can become too heavy to fly. Icarus ignores their father's teachings, then he flies too close to the sun, which melts the wax destroying the wings, and so he drops into the sea and drowns.

Inspired by the story of Icarus I attempted to create some concept art myself, although it carries a slighly different message:

Knowing the limits of our bodies and intellect is something many of us discover through the experience of symbolic drowning. When I was young, I set myself to become a great scientist. I formed unrealistic expectations. I got blinded by my ambitions, and I sacrificed other facets of my life. I kept deluding myself until the draft of lies carried me above the clouds of reality. Then I dropped into a vast lake of sorrow that stretched below. Loss in science forced me to discover that it is not the only way to survive.

Many of us do repeat the mistakes of Icarus. We have blind spots and inherit limitations of the building blocks that nature has designed for us. We think we are unique. I will make it, no bad things can happen to me; a mantra, I believe, we all repeat in our heads at some stage of our lives. A lot of stories have bad endings, however (see survivorship bias in section 1). We don't hear them because of their forgotten echoes or ignore them because life is hard and we don't want to burden ourselves with more pessimism. Those who make it to the next round are lucky draws of blind evolution. Therefore we should respect and trust nature and hope the universal dice will not rob us of future gambles.

13. A combination of the above

Our state of mind will result from a combination of factors. In my experience, it is helpful to identify high impact but easy to fix elements and work our way up to resolve more complex issues. Further, it is beneficial to begin dealing with problems strategically early on, using methods backed up by an individual flexible plan. I will try to expand on this set of strategies in the next part.

Conclusions

The topic of low mood is broad, and we can rarely simplify it into an equation with a one-dimensional variable. The complexity of our emotions is fascinating, yet we know little and constantly remind ourselves that this is the case. Our gaps in knowledge, like human behaviour, can keep us busy looking for the right path for a long time. When we become honest about our shortcomings and start building a mental framework by attuning ourselves to our internal biases and overcoming external factors by refining our strategies, we can find hope to fight and make our suffering into the art of success.

In the next part of this work, I will write about various strategies that I found helpful throughout my life. I hope few can enjoy what I offer to share.

[1] The picture of Dorian Grey by Oscar Wildie

[2] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3941233/

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_King_(2019_film)