I spend a lot of time thinking about myself — The Healthy Life — Medium

Not in that "self-absorbed, self-obsessed, self-judgement" kind of way, more in a "self-absorbed, self-obsessed, self-judgement" kind of way; let me explain.

My brain works a little differently than most people’s. My body doesn't balance chemicals like serotonin, norepinephrine and dopamine well and as a result I get “sick”, my label for my particular mix of anxiety, depression and general mental health issues.

Most people who know me wouldn't notice the difference between “sick” me and “healthy” me; after 19 years of living with it, you become really good at covering over the symptoms and carrying on. You’d never really never see my real reaction to the smallest piece of criticism, or the anxiety I have over tiny problems or my complete lack of motivation to keep going.

From time to time my life and health swings between what 94% of Australians experience (i.e. normal), and a random assortment of distractibility, irritability, tiredness, lethargy and irrational anxiety which at it’s worst has lasted months, and at best is several days, it’s been a factor in a failed marriage, and caused me to go down into some dark places. From the outside it gets labelled “inattention to detail”, “poor time-management“ or a “lack of focus”, something I've heard from every boss, every teacher my entire life; but from the inside its just, well it's nothing, literally nothing. I call it “autopilotism”. I hit autopilot and I coast, relying on routine and habit to get by.

When I'm sick I struggle to maintain focus on what I need to, I get distracted (small dopamine hits from social media are the worst), I need to fight to get out of bed, my closest relationships suffer and at my worst I struggle to maintain composure in “normal” situations, I get overwhelmed, I fixate on negative outcomes, and tend to hit, well, autopilot.

For the longest time, and despite studying a B. Psych at University, I treated it like the weather; the symptoms would come and go, with little reason or catalyst, but then I started to connect the dots. For once upon a time, I was a big guy (somewhere over 130kg at my “worst”) I sat in front of a computer for 50hrs a week and ate junk, literally junk. Then I decided I'd had enough.

I became a gym rat, and then I noticed that the lows weren't so low, and what would've seemed insurmountable before was merely a minor obstruction; but what was more revelatory was if I didn't keep to my 3-4 hours a week. After a few days off I start to feel down. A week off and little issues become big dramas. More than a week? Well my ability to handle even the smallest stressors becomes, lets say, a challenge.

[exercise and depression interlude]

I began to look further; every year when the new FIFA video game came out, I'd buy it, play it obsessively for a few weeks and pull a few late nights. Then like clockwork less than a week later I was looking down a shallow hole of despair and anxiety.

Sleep, it seems, is a massive part of my behavioural defense mechanism.

[sleep and depression interlude]

The more and more I looked at what changed in my life from week to week, the more I saw patterns emerging. Not just with triggers but also tell-tale symptoms; lack of motivation to eat, drops in desire to enjoy time with my wife (which is utterly irrational), hesitancy to spend time with even my closest friends. All these markers popped up time and again, and patterns emerged.

I started to be able to predict “episodes" based on the previous two or three weeks. Skip the gym, pull a late night, the hole started to appear and clouds started to form. Destroy myself for an hour at the gym, get some sunlight and enjoy time with my wife and the hole started to disappear and problems that seemed insurmountable started magically have obvious and rational solutions.

I got better after seeing feedback. I’m not well, but I am better than I was.

The idea of the quantified self is starting to gain traction. With the advent of cheaper hardware and more connected electronics it's become easy to build platforms like Zeo, 23 and Me, Withings, Runkeeper or FitBit, and while they all are great for tracking our physical self, no-one seemed to crack the mental self, at least not what I need.

Connect fitness, weather, food, sleep, even where you were on Foursquare and what you've talked about on Twitter or Facebook could indicated behavioral changes. Everyone's pattern may be different, but I'm sure everyone has one. A behavioural fingerprint that can be tracked, improved and analysed.

So far, no-one's built the tool to help self-actualisation through cognitive feedback. The patterns I stumbled across should be easier to see, it should be simple to connect the dots of behaviors, attitudes and actions and see its flow on effects to mental health. And that's what I'm building. I call it Maslow (after Abraham Maslow noted modern psychologist who talked about about self-actualisation, happiness and cognitive therapies). It’s going to help people like me build their behavioural fingerprint using quantifiable data gathered from regular “check-ins“ and their social graph, and then it’s going to help them to use that information to get better.

The only problem, how does someone who struggles to maintain focus maintain enough focus to build a tool to help him maintain focus.