Here’s an Easy Way to Tell if Your Mental Health Is Slipping

Use a “totem” to catch your funk before it’s too late.

How closely do you monitor your mental health? Do you realize when everything's great and you’re on top of the world? How about when you’ve slipped into a seasonal depression induced funk?

With funks in mind, how long does it take you to realize you’re struggling? Do you notice it on your own or does it take someone close to you to call it out?

There is no one size fits all approach to mental health, but the earlier we catch our struggling state, the sooner we can get ourselves back on track.

With the aid of an indicator, AKA — Totem, you’ll be able to identify your slipping mental health in the early stages before it spirals out of control, sparing you and those close to you from mental health induced turbulence.

Why you need a mental health early warning indicator

Has a partner ever called you out for being unusually irritable?

Has your boss ever hit you with, “Are you doing okay? You seem off.”

Have you stepped out of character and blown up on a front line worker over a petty reason?

If so, in those moments chances are high that your mental health was already suffering for quite some time.

We all experience mental health peaks and valleys. Maybe our mental health occasionally suffers from work-related stress. Others may struggle with seasonal depression. Regardless, even the most level-headed have their highest of highs and lowest of lows.

But what if we could prevent the lowest of lows? What if we could catch our mental health struggles long before things turned ugly?

By having a mental health totem this is entirely possible.

Borrowing the totem concept from the movie Inception, we can identify the early onset of our mental health slipping before it’s called out by others or becomes embarrassingly evident. This is an exceptionally useful tool that can keep the valleys in life from becoming too deep and destructive.

In the next section, I will cover the concept of totems as made famous in Inception. If you’re already familiar, feel free to skip to the section that follows: What is a mental health totem?

Inception and the use of totems

Inception is based on a fictional technology that allows people to enter the dreams of others, planting the seed of an idea that ultimately manifests in real life. The dangers arise within the dream state, where the lines between dream and real life are blurred.

In the movie when you die within a dream you wake up in real life. However, if you go deeper within the dream state, you risk entering “limbo,” best described as a blank slate of subconsciousness. It’s a world where you can create anything you want, including memories and an entire life that feels real.

Years within limbo equate to mere minutes or hours of sleep in the real world. This creates a problem when you actually wake up. It becomes difficult to know if you’re still dreaming or if you’re awake; and since death within a dream wakes you up, the temptation to off yourself in real life in order to “wake up” is very real.

How does one determine if they’re dreaming or awake?

Enter — Totems

The characters in Inception use a deeply personal object, referred to as a totem, to identify if they’re in real life or a dream state.

A totem works because when in a dream state, the person’s subconscious you’ve entered can’t accurately replicate your personal, intimately known totem. Your totem will feel or act differently, tipping you off to being within a dream.

However, when you’re awake your totem will look, feel and behave as only you know it, confirming that you are indeed awake. When you know you’re awake, you know that death is real and permanent, thus there’s no need to wake yourself up by way of death.

If you’ve never watched the movie this is admittedly confusing, but the point is a character’s totem in Inception identifies their current state. This concept can be adopted into our lives as we monitor the state of our mental health.

What is a mental health totem?

A totem is something consistent in your life that suffers when your mental health begins to slip. It’s an early warning indicator signaling the need to check in with the status of your mental health.

Much like their use in Inception, if the consistency of your mental health totem is off, you need to take notice of your state of mind.

However, unlike the movie a mental health totem is an action (often in the form of a task) instead of an object. An action is necessary because when our mental health begins to slip, there’s typically an action in our lives that begins to go with it.

To better understand, think of the last time you felt mildly depressed. What were some of the actions or tasks of daily life that felt unusually difficult to do?

Whether it’s depression, anxiety or other struggles, when our mental health begins to suffer areas of our life tend to flash red. These early warning indicators are precisely where we can find our mental health totem.

How to choose a totem

A mental health totem needs to satisfy three key variables:

• Consistent
• Unique to you
• Simple in nature but challenging to do when your mental health slips

For example, my totem used to be making the bed first thing in the morning. When my mental health was doing well, this task was never a problem. However, when my mental health began to suffer, making the bed felt like too much to ask of me. This served me well as a totem because it satisfied all three key variables:

• It was consistent, something I was responsible for each day.
• It was unique to me because I was either living alone or, now married, the last one out of bed in the morning.
• When I’ve struggled with my mental health in the past, taking 30-seconds to make the bed in the morning feels like such a challenge that I either put it off or neglect doing it entirely.

Recently my totem changed due to my wife’s new work schedule. Now that she works 3 12-hour shifts each week, I’m not the one making the bed every morning.

Enter — a new totem.

A new habit of mine has been to do at least one, 2-minute plank per day. This also satisfies the three key variables nicely:

• It’s consistent, something I can do at the same time each day given my work from home schedule.
• It’s unique to me, nobody can do a plank for me.
• It becomes a bear to do when my mental health isn’t in the best state, either punting it to later in the day or not doing it at all.

My examples provide one final lesson to remember: your totem both can and likely will change with time. You’ll periodically want to check to make sure your mental health totem is still valid, and if it’s not you’ll need to choose a new one.

Now it’s your turn, reflect on the times when your mental health has slipped. What consistent, unique to you, simple task becomes challenging to keep? Herein lies your totem.

This past week I completed a 2-minute plank a whopping two times.

Yep, my mental health isn’t in the best of places at the moment thanks to Seasonal Affective Disorder.

But having a mental health totem has immensely improved how deep my low points get. Instead of being oblivious to the fact that I’m not doing well, I now communicate with my wife about my struggling mental health so we can be on the same page.

What’s awesome is she has a mental health totem of her own and also communicates her struggles with me.

While this story isn’t meant to provide guidance on how to bounce back from mental health pitfalls, I can say that being able to openly communicate your struggles in the early stages plays a significant role in the betterment of your mental health.

If you have a history of venturing into the depths of mental health lows, I hope a totem prevents you from going so deep the next time around.

Remember, it’s okay to not be okay, but it’s not okay to do nothing about it.

Might as well get ahead of the next time you’re not okay and do something about it now.

So with that, what’s your totem?

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