So, You Can't Seem to Function Today

And yet you still have to live

Photo by Max Harlynking on Unsplash

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I know I wrote an entire book on this topic, but honestly, I feel like some truths need to be preached to us over and over again. The gospel, foremost, but there are other truths. And for some of us, we need to hear certain truths about how to survive and move when we’re in a funk, when we feel like we can’t function. And as many pastors like to say, I’m preaching to myself here. So once more into the breach.

It would be nice of mental health challenges were predictable. In my experience, they are not. Or at least, not entirely. Yes, eating right and getting good sleep, sunshine, and exercise can help, but it’s still the case that sometimes a random curtain falls and the action of your life comes to a standstill. You’re left collecting pieces, ruminating in the dark about the world beyond the veil which you can only access in whispers, and those whispers mostly tell you that you are Falling Beyond, Neglecting Someone, Failing at Life, or otherwise letting people and yourself and God down. The play goes on without you and you’re trapped behind stage wordlessly going over lines that no longer make sense. As I’ve written about before, I love the way John Berryman describes how easy it is to get triggered into rumination: “Starts again always in Henry's ears / the little cough somewhere, an odour, a chime.” Because that’s how it works. You can be walking along and hear someone cough and the curtain falls for you. Or you smell an odour, or hear a chime. The stupidest, trivialist little things can send your mind reeling. And what began as a good day or at least a nice day is all of a sudden spiraling out of your control. Very dark. The hounds of depression, rumination, anxiety, or memories hunting you down until you spend every waking moment running from them. And the worst of it is, the farther you run, the farther you get from reality and the people who need you and who love you.

When you find yourself stuck behind a curtain, or stuck in bed, or trapped behind stage, or running from the dark hounds, what resources do you have? How can you pull it together to become the kind of virtuous person others need you to be? How can you achieve some semblance of functionality to keep moving and acting with the agency God’s given you? How do you not surrender to despair?

The first thing I want to say is that you may feel like you have no resources. That’s okay. You do, but it’s perfectly okay to feel like you are out of resources. One of the mistakes you can make is in arguing with your feelings and trying to force yourself to feel a certain way. If you feel at your wits end, then feel that. But don’t act like it. Let your actions change your feelings. They will change, over time.

The resource I always turn to first is prayer, but even the good of prayer can become a problem for someone with OCD. Prayer can become compulsive. I can pray and pray and pray, and feel like if I pray harder or more authentically or with the right words then I will be freed of my condemnation and guilt. When the reality is that I was always already freed of my condemnation and guilt by Christ’s finished work on the cross. Everything else is an emotion from a psychological condition with a biological, genetic, environmental, and behavioral reality. Prayer is still a powerful resource and we ought to turn to Christ for help first, but in our crying out for help, we must trust that Christ will fulfill his promises to bring all things together for our good and act. Not just lie there wait for the curtain to lift.

Which brings me to my second resource, movement. Despair loves to suck us into ourselves, into a spiral of hopelessness and shame and then confirm our shame when we fail to meet others’ expectations because we are stuck. In my experience despair can’t live too long or too loud if we move and act. Even if it’s just doing the daily necessities. Shopping, cooking, going for walks, reading, caring for pets, calling friends, praying for loved ones. Acting. Exercising our God-given agency. Despair is the enemy of agency. So when we exercise our agency we push back against despair. Which doesn’t necessarily mean the curtain lifts or the hounds retreat. Many a time I have had to act while scared, act while anxious. Which is, in fact, part of the definition of courage. Risking suffering for a greater good despite fear. Not when it’s easy, but when it’s difficult. That’s what makes it a virtue. Which is why in On Getting Out of Bed I called getting out of bed an act of courage, a virtue.

The third resource is another virtue, hope. Naturally, when you are in despair or depression or anxiety, hope is difficult to muster, but I believe it is possible and necessary. Ground your hope in Christ’s promises to care for you and to love you and never leave you. Ground your hope in all the times you have gone through similar difficult days and come through. And let that hope drive you to act, to not surrender. Remember specific times of God’s faithfulness in your life and anchor yourself to them. “If you are the God who saved me then, I know you are a God who can save me today.”

Fourth, there are a number of tools I have learned from Cognitive Behavioral Therapy which I have found to be helpful in resisting anxious or obsessive thoughts in particular. For example, anxiety grows the more you try to distract yourself from it and hide from it. So avoiding what is making you anxious is only making the monster in the closet bigger. On the other hand, ruminating on thoughts also makes them bigger. It signals to your brain that this is a “threat” because you are focusing on it. So the trick, I have found, is to learn to accept thoughts as thoughts and to allow them to be there and then to move on. And to do the same thing with feelings. This takes practice. And it’s not intended to be used for every anxiety (for example, if you are anxious about not finishing your paper because you are procrastinating, you shouldn’t just “let the thoughts be there,” you should take action and write the stupid paper). But when you have identified anxious or obsessive thoughts that are not based in here-and-now evidence (what I-CBT calls “reasonable doubts”) and instead are focused on “obsessive doubts” based in “what ifs” and possibilities, then practicing identifying those thoughts as just thoughts and feelings and not doing anything to try to fix them or argue with them or make them go away is remarkably effective.

In Philippians 4:6-7, Paul commands us: ^“do not be anxious about anything, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God. And the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus.” We should always make our requests known to God when we are anxious, but when we have identified an anxiety as obsessive or irrational, one way I think Christ Jesus can guard our heart is by helping us allow those thoughts to go, by not arguing with them or forcing them out of our minds, or persuading them away, but letting them be. And what we will discover, in my experience, is that our internal alarms will soon learn to turn off on their own.

Let me say a few more things. I just gave a list of four resources as if you could just access these tools and snap out of it. As if the hounds would be called off, the curtain lifted, and you could reenter the play like nothing happened. But in my experience that’s rarely how any of this works. Maybe you’re stronger than me. Some of you undoubtedly are. But for some of us these resources are tools for crawling toward wellness over days or weeks. On our better days it may only take a couple hours or less. But when you get stuck, it can take tremendous effort and the work of the Holy Spirit and family members and friends to get unstuck again, to become functional. And I guess I want to normalize that. I don’t want to be okay with that. What I want for you is the same thing I want for me: that every time you have a bad episode it gets shorter and easier to get out of, and you learn from it and grow stronger in Christ. But I also want to say that there will be bad days. Pretending there won’t help anything. There’s grace for those days, just as there is grace for all our days.