Getting a grip

A number of posts from complete strangers about their or others’ mental health keep popping into my LinkedIn feed prompted, partly I should guess, by that advert for failed therapy, Harry Wales. (I’ve decided to ditch the ‘Prince’ title. He’s lucky I’m not replacing it with P---ck. Yet.)

There are so many of these posts, that the ones that deserve genuine concern are drowned out by the ones that don’t do the authors any favours. Sorry, My Darlings, but if you feel the need to share such stuff with your potential employees, employers, clients and contractors, then those ‘potentials’ are going to evaporate faster than you can complain about Freddie Starr eating your hamster.

The more trivial Oh Woe Is Me posts clog up my feed almost as much as the ones about climate change, global warming, carbon emissions, offsetting, polar bear extinctions and melting glaciers. The surfeit of these gives new life to an old cliché: if you say it long enough, loud enough and often enough, people will stop listening. Or, people will get anxious about the end of the world happening before they’ve finished decorating their bathroom and start posting about their mental health. It follows that anyone who’s obsessed with Greta Thunberg is two snowflakes short of an iceberg.

What did you say? I should stop banging on about mental health in my blog? Good point, except it’s not. This particular blog is about to offer some hints and tips for coping with everyday stresses and strains, most of which are nothing compared with what previous generations had to deal with. And deal with them they did. Stoically. With humour. And they were no more miserable than we are today with all our creature comforts and safety nets. My first blog of the new regime wasn’t so much about my mental health as my innate narkiness and belligerence. And the now-defunct blog is off-limits (conveniently so).

So here are my coping strategies, aka Twelve Steps to Getting a Grip:

1. Blog. But not too well, otherwise I’ll get narky and belligerent through jealousy.

2. Drink gin or wine. Not on their own, and I don’t mean both together or adding a mixer. I mean in good company. Choose wisely.

3. Drink chamomile tea. This you can enjoy on your own. It contains apigenin, an antioxidant that binds to certain receptors in your brain that promotes relaxation, sleepiness and reduces insomnia. And while drinking this tea, you’re not drinking caffeine, which can make anxiety worse and of course it keeps you awake. But then while drinking chamomile, you’re not availing yourself of the benefits of gin or wine. You do the maths.

4. Pamper yourself. If you look better, you feel better. My fave is painting my toenails because it’s quick, easy and the transformation lasts for ages. Sometimes I spend time on my hair with curling tongs and half-a-dozen styling products. Takes longer, not guaranteed to look any better when I’ve finished or, if it does, it only lasts a short while. But when it does work, sign me up for a Vogue cover shoot!

5. Retail therapy. There was a lady on the telly the other day who, distraught about the cost-of-living crisis, was collecting her lot from a foodbank. She’d obviously tried to dull her pain with my coping strategies 3 and 4 – a knock-out manicure and a year’s supply of Estée Lauder makeup.

6. Eat chocolate. It releases serotonin, a neurotransmitter known as a natural mood stabiliser that helps reduce depression and regulate anxiety. But eating chocolate makes you fat, which makes you depressed, so …

7. Go for a walk to generate endorphins, a hormone that reduces stress, especially if you take videos on your phone of dangerous driving to post later on Facebook.

8. Continuing the theme, post something provocative but true on Twitter, such as “The West Cumbria Coalmine is good for the environment,” then guffaw at the rabid reaction of the eco-nuts who give us fact-finding environmentalists a bad name.

9. Deep breathing exercises, preferably nowhere near a glue pot.

10. Burn the Guardian or use it as toilet paper, but not while burning it.

11. Cuddle a cat, a dog or any furry friend, but hurry as they might go extinct any second because of climate change.

12. Tidy something – a wardrobe or a book shelf, for example. Last week I did both after a wine-fest with my neighbour. This week I found Dickens in my trousers and Hardy under my skirt.

Some will disagree with my stiff-upper-lip approach, including (per Shakespeare’s Macbeth) Malcolm, son of King Duncan whom Macbeth murdered. In Act IV scene 3, Malcolm is talking to Macduff, the Thane of Fife. They’ve just heard that Macbeth has wiped out Macduff’s entire family.  Malcolm says:

“What, man! Ne'er pull your hat upon your brows; 

Give sorrow words: the grief that does not speak 

Whispers the o'er-fraught heart and bids it break.”

Others will approve of my approach, like my idol Elkie Brooks, who had a hit with a Carole Bayer Sager / Peter Allen anthem, Don’t Cry Out Loud, which does what it says on the tin:

“But Baby can't be broken 'cause you see

She had the finest teacher, that's me.

We don't cry out loud. Keep it inside

Leam how to hide your feelings, fly high and proud”.

The difference between these two examples is the degree of severity of the situations. Macduff’s family has just been murdered, whereas Baby’s clown of a lover has scarpered. Poor old Macduff is entitled to wear his heart on his sleeve and (spoiler alert) he goes on to kill Macbeth and chop his head off. In real life, Malcolm kills Macbeth, but Shakespeare was never one to let the facts get in the way of a drama. Just like the BBC.

As for Baby, she got a grip.