A breakdown of life when well vs unwell

Reading Time: 9 minutes

Life can be said to be duality, and the idea is to seek balance between the dualities that exist. A positive life as a conscious being can be split into an inner focus and an outer focus. That is focusing on yourself, and focusing on things outside yourself.

Inner focus can be ;

• Experiencing peace and acceptance
• Pleasurable enjoyment
• Relaxation
• Loving yourself and maintaining your health
• Finding yourself ( self analysis and discovery )
• Improving yourself – Knowledge/Wisdom
• Challenging yourself

Outer focus can be ;

• Building and maintaining something
• Helping others with their self care
• Taking care of the environment
• Passing down what you’ve gained to others
• Giving love to others
• Mutually beneficial competition

Any of your conscious actions in life can also be categorised into either productivity, socialising, movement, distraction or relaxation.

Having a variety of all these things in life gives you satisfaction, and a health person has a varied life, filled with different aspects that are valuable to them.

One of the first things that happens naturally when you’re chronically ill, is that you stop focusing on things outside yourself. You start to only focus on yourself, your symptoms and managing them. It’s like an alarm going off all the time, it’s hard to focus on anything else.

The problem that arises with only focusing on yourself, is that your life becomes very unbalanced over time. Focusing on yourself for a short period of time is very ideal, and something you should do when you’re low or vulnerable and you need to gather yourself together after a difficult situation or acute illness or injury. But constantly focusing on yourself is a recipe for more suffering.

The issue with focusing outside yourself when you’re ill is that you likely don’t have the energy to do it. Or rather, you don’t have the energy to do what you used to do, and society makes it hard to adapt, people don’t understand and you feel like a burden. But focusing outside yourself might simply be reading someone else’s comment, and giving them a short reply, or briefly meeting up with a support group once a month, instead of your previous weekly weekend meetups with friends, doing activities for hours.

Basically it means pacing your outer focus just as much as your inner focus needs pacing. Pouring all your energy into focusing on yourself, will likely rob you of a lot out of life without you even realising it. After years and years, you might end up isolated and alone. It’s not your fault though, it’s the illness at fault, or the situation. Nobody really lays this out to you when you realise you’re chronically ill, everyone expects you to solve your own problems. So you delve deeper and deeper into self care, hoping you can recover enough to go out again. Except you never recover, you get stuck, or worse you keep sinking, and you keep struggling by yourself.

One of the reasons that lead you to focus more and more on yourself, is that if you work, that likely takes up a lot of the outer focus you have spare in your life. The thing is, if your work is something you don’t value, then that outer focus obviously also tends to be something you don’t value either ( unless you have a rare interaction with a really friendly customer ). So it’s not really a great balance, and it’s already hard enough to just work whilst chronically ill unless you have an accommodating job, it’s not like you have the time and energy to be spending it outside of selfcare.

So far I’ve talked about inner and outer focus in a positive scope. There’s also obviously ways to be negative and focus on yourself and outside yourself.

Negative inner focus might be ;

• Worrying thoughts
• Anxious thoughts
• Stress
• Self-doubt
• Self-destructive behaviour ( addictions to drugs / alcohol )
• Self-harm
• Over indulgence ( overeating or excessive behaviour)

Negative outer focus might be ;

• Arguments
• Constantly reading negative news
• Scrolling the internet without a purpose
• Excessive distraction
• Being obsessive over someone
• Seeking out or triggering drama

These negatives foci are something everyone falls into at some point, the vices of life, things that cause suffering. They all take up a more of your energy than you might realise, energy that is precious to you if you’re chronically ill, and that you learn over time to cut out of your life if you’re lucky.

Limiting them is easier said than done. It’s like diet or exercise, everyone knows what’s bad and good, but they can’t help but be tied to their habits or situation. It might takes years of hard work to undo the damage of some of the negative aspects of your focus.

Depression is a system of negative thought that you can naturally get trapped in. You lose enjoyment, motivation and you’re acutely aware of all the negative things in your life and outside your life. Your focus becomes more and more negative. Sometimes you don’t even feel negative, you feel nothing, and that feels worse, because usually feeling sad triggers some self-care in you.

When you cry, you tend to pity yourself, like you realise that this thing pushed you far enough to cry, and that release of emotion, lets you feel better. In a way, the act of crying, channels the negative out of you and lets you latch onto a ladder upwards instead.

When you feel nothing, and feel empty, there’s no energy to channel anywhere. You are stuck in a deep well, and it’s filling up with water. You can start to drown and gasp for air, you don’t have the energy to escape or the ability to, and no one is helping you.

The thing with depression is, that it’s a perspective, and it’s one you can eventually escape with luck. Depression isn’t reality, it’s one view of reality, that isn’t a very useful view for a person who wants to get something positive out of life. In many cases, depression is unavoidable, how can you not be depressed if you suffer every day, no wonder your brain is depriving you of energy, emotion and motivation. If you want to escape depression, you need help so keep trying to seek help. You also need to understand yourself, and what’s causing your depression. For some people, this might be very obvious, and there might be no real solution other than time will heal you, for others, they’ll have no clue as to why they feel nothing anymore, in fact if they look at their life, they have  nearly everything they should want, they should appreciate life, yet they don’t, something is missing.

Enjoyment, motivation, meaning, where does it come from? You start to connect with the idea that there is no meaning to anything, no greater meaning, and thus you can’t find your enjoyment and motivation to do anything, because you can’t find a meaning for it to be worth generating. The thing is, you can’t just generate meaning from nothing, meaning is a metaphysical concept, like an idea, you don’t create meaning, you find it, and it finds you. You don’t create any idea from nothing, other things inspire you to find and develop an idea, you build it out of a metaphysical material and it’s the same for meaning.

You might ask yourself, why should you find any meanings, what’s the point, what’s the meaning behind meaning. This is a trap, there’s no need to justify trying to find meaning, it’s simply part of life. You need water, food, a safe environment, sleep and connections with other living beings, you also need meaning and values. The difference is that you can survive without meaning and values for much longer than you can survive without water. The issue with meanings, is that the smarter you are, the more complex and demanding a meaning you require. It’s why people with intelligence tend to succumb to depression the most, after all ignorance is bliss.

Where and how do you find meaning. Start by becoming more aware, of yourself and what’s outside yourself. What are you drawn to? Does anything at all stir you, negatively or positively?  You can eventually start to work out where you might find meaning, and hopefully in that process, eventually find motivation and enjoyment again. Engage in positive foci, not negatives ones, whether it feels pointless to or not. Faking it till you make it, can be a double edged sword, it can cause you to lose hope if it lasts too long, it can make you feel inauthentic. I would say, try to embrace humour the most, it tends to maintain itself even when a person is depressed. Obviously it can feel hollow sometimes, but at least it’s something, if you’re going to mindlessly scroll something, it might as well be humorous and not worry generating.

It’s a case of priorities in the end, and whilst self-care is the most important factor in managing chronic illness, it’s a mistake to not at least spend a small amount of time on your outer focus.