Forget the world crises and Focus on your own.

If there is a word for 2023, it would be crisis.

Mental health crisis

Climate crisis

Economic crisis

Energy crisis

Affordability crisis

You get the idea.  They have been very unwelcome guests that have intruded on almost all aspects of our lives.

And no wonder.  Crisis is a word that provokes and captures the attention.  Lately, it has also been a word that generates anxiety and guilt because somehow we are expected to immediately put aside whatever we are doing to focus on...

The crisis over here!                Or here!

And it works.  As a psychiatrist, whenever I read about the mental health crisis, I can get caught up in hours of never-ending thought loops of how I am going to fix these problems.  A patient of mine who works in merchandising for a large big-box store was telling me how his superiors make him feel responsible for the global supply chain crisis.  What crushing, dizzying pressure to be under.

But here is an escape route:  The realization that worrying about them is a complete waste of time when you can not do anything about them.  That worrying about them actually distracts you from being an effective person in the areas you can control.

So the world is in crisis.   Can I ask you to disengage with that for a moment?  Close your computer, turn off your cell phone and sit comfortably someplace private and peaceful?

Take a moment to let the claws of whatever crisis-you-have-been-made-to-feel-is-your-problem (but isn't) release its hold on your brain and body.  I hope you feel lighter, freer.  Savour this.  The clean feeling that comes with recognizing what is not your problem.

When you are ready, please continue:

How are you doing? Are you in crisis too?

Thinking about this might seem too big of a task.  Your crisis may feel like a never-ending list of to dos, or like one big slab of impenetrable rock.  For me, it feels like a hundred serpents in a house on fire.

Take a moment to realize how complex and confusing Your Crisis might be.  Unlike the crises covered in the news, Your Crisis deserves the most valuable resource there is: your time and attention.

Can you notice how often you brush aside your own difficulties because you are made to feel they are not important enough? Or big enough? Can you notice how you see others who have it worse and how this makes you feel guilty for your own struggles?

Let the world be in crisis.  What is most important is that you do not take that on. Do not take on what is not yours.

My deepest empathy and love to those of you in personal crises of your own.  My deepest admiration for your perseverance and efforts to do your best in a world where that no longer seems to matter.  Please take the time every moment of every day to remind yourself and others that it does matter.

My deepest hope that you have the wisdom of seeing your crisis with compassion and to challenge what is no longer working for you.  If there is any silver lining to crisis, it is that it will challenge old ways of thinking and make you consider solutions that you previously thought were not possible.  My deepest wish that you can make the necessary changes to save yourself.  It takes tremendous courage to do this.

I realized I was in a crisis of my own.  It was exacerbated by a nihilism that was presented to me every time I turned on my phone to see the news headlines on the main screen.  I have since blocked these reports, because only then could I see my crisis for what it was: having all my emotional reserves spent on work and being a parent, that I had none for myself, let alone world events.  Certainly I hope to be able to do more as a global citizen one day.  But I have concluded that any hope I have in improving the world’s problems, is to first tend to my own.