So, you’ve read the title and now you are wondering what this guy is up to. Maybe he has flipped his lid. The whole goal of all of this is to take our bad situation and make it a good situation. We start at one point and we work on building up from there. We build towards the good. So, now this guy is wanting to put a cap on how good we can get? This had better be good, because so far it doesn’t make sense to me…
This edition may take on a little different feel then some of the others have. We are going to dive into my mind and try and make sense out of something I have been thinking about for a while. This one has baffled me as I try and wrap my head around everything that has taken place over the last year and a half since I asked for help.
Rolling around in my mind is the fact that as we feel better, is there a level or other branch of us being good, that stretches more to the “too good” side. I understand there will always be bad moments which creep into our lives and the idea is to work towards a better us. A good us. During this process of basically finding the right balance, is there a point where the pendulum swings to the “too good” side of our balance.
At this very moment, I feel I have reached a level of good balance. My bad days are significantly less and my good days are significantly more. I feel my pendulum is swinging back and forth, but less severe and more even strokes. I am still having some bad days, but I think some of these bad days I’m feeling are more along the lines of “normal” bad days. The bad days we have living life. I feel I am parked more in the good side of things. I feel my days are more balanced and I don’t swing back and forth so wildly at this very moment.
Using less words to describe how I feel would be: I feel like I am reaping the rewards of all of my hard work and it is paying off by how I feel day-to-day. So where does this “too good” idea come into play? Well let’s step inside my mind and I will try my best to show you what I mean. Or maybe I should say, “Come on in, but proceed with caution!”😁
Here goes…
At the beginning of all of this, I found myself in a really dark place in my life. I finally admitted to myself and to others that I needed help. I couldn’t do whatever-this-is on my own anymore. I decided to leave the old ways of doing things in the dust. At least this was the idea floating around in my mind. I wanted to help myself feel better or help myself get better.
It has been hard work which I haven’t always allowed myself to see. Not everything progresses with super noticeable leaps and bounds. Some of the progression through this has been taking very small steps. The results do not appear as big on the grand scope of things.
Sometimes, these small progressions have been very frustrating to me because the progression is so small, still a progression absolutely needed in all of this, but sometimes I can’t actually see what is always taking place. So I get frustrated and feel like I’m going nowhere. I feel like I am doing all of this for nothing.
Eventually, all of this work I am doing for myself starts to move the needle off of bad. I begin to feel better. Sometimes this better feeling is short lived, but it is nice to see better for a change. At first I would feel better for a short time and go back to feeling bad again. So far, at that particular time, the pendulum swung heavily to the bad side of my feelings. But the good was starting to make an appearance.
So here we go, I start to feel better. I like the feeling of good, however small and short lasting it is, I know I like it. It begins to grow. I feel better and better and then I really start to feel good. It feels like a sustainable good. I like it.
These good feelings seemed to always come up about the time we where going to do something social. A lot of times it came up when we would be going to spend times with our families. Whether it be vacations, birthdays, or holidays. Sometimes it would pop up when I would be around friends for a night.
Alright. I have now reached the point where I may need you to bear with me for a moment or two while I try and put my thoughts into readable sentences. I’m going to try my best, but the things in this brain of mine sometimes get lost in translation.
These times I described above would find me feeling pretty good. I didn’t feel good during all of these interactions, but typically I would be feeling better. I would get into situations where I was going to have to be social. So I would do my best.
I would enter the situation feeling good and then the “too good” would kick in. This “too good” feeling seemed to be fueled from another fuel source that I couldn’t always tap into. At least I couldn’t tap into yet. I would go from good to feeling amazing. And I would try and ride the amazing feeling out.
I would find myself being “on” most of the time. I felt like I needed to be “on”, but sometimes it felt like I didn’t have control of this particular function of my brain. Basically, I would rock-out the situation. I felt like I was doing good. It felt like other people thought and saw me doing good. It was a great feeling showing people how different and good I was feeling. It felt like I was showing them I would be OK. That I could get through everything bothering me.
I wasn’t always so much convinced. I did feel good, but sometimes I felt like I was on automatic during these moments. It would become exhausting.
I know, or at least I feel like I know, that after feeling so bad for so long, every feeling of good would be or could be heightened. I was enjoying feeling the good, but I had spent so long in the bad that I couldn’t yet regulate the good. So, whether consciously or not, I would fire at a pretty high level of good. At least when there was someone around.
I wasn’t sitting around planning how I would feel around people. It really felt like it would happen automatically. There were times I would feel happy about the way I felt, but I wouldn’t feel joy in how I felt. What I mean is: “happy” is the at the moment feeling. “Joy” is more the long term effect and the underlying emotion the “happy” feeling would bring on. I would sometimes feel happy, but it wouldn’t translate over to joy.
At first, I had no idea. All I knew is I felt great. I felt great, but why was it exhausting? I can feel “happy”, but it was proving to be a chore to reach “joy”. Hmmm…
So I would think about it. This is what I do when I have down time. I think. Sometimes I have a lot of down time so I think a lot. I would find myself sitting at home looking at a blank TV screen. I was in my mind. These moments of feeling emotionally elated and happy, but not feeling joy, and also feeling exhausted didn’t make sense.
Here is the other side of this. I found after experiencing these moments, I would crash. I would typically swing back to a bad feeling and sometimes would find myself spending a day or two mostly in bed. It was like I spent so much energy feeling good that I no longer had any threshold to keep me out of feeling bad. Any bit of cushion I felt I had, would be gone and I would reenter the depressed part of my brain.
I would think about this. How does this factor into the big picture of getting my mental health strengthened and getting me to a more consistent good place? So I would think about it.
Now, my thoughts while thinking about all of this weren’t always great. Initially, I was extremely new to all of this. I was learning ways to help myself, but these methods take a bit of time to take hold and grow roots to hold them in place and also to grow in my life. I was still swinging towards the dark side of my experience and I wasn’t yet used to any feeling of good.
This “not yet being used to feeling good” aspect was the key. At least this is what I have come up with while thinking about it. Am I anywhere close to how you maybe have felt? Some of this, for me, goes down the road of feeling like I am on an island sometimes and my brain is whackier then someone else’s.
Stick with me. I’m getting there.
I feel like I had been feeling so bad for so long, that any feeling of good was almost too much for me to handle at first. I didn’t know where to cap it. I went all-in on dumping my energy into feeling good that it would eventually leave me feeling drained and not feeling good anymore. I would feel bad. Sometimes I would feel really bad.
Was I really that bad? Or did I swing from being bad for so long to a heightened sense of feeling good, which I wasn’t used to, and then when I would drain my energy, I felt like I was really bad again. Was this a real feeling or really just a feeling you have when you swing so heavily from one side to the other?
A lot of “I thinks” going on, but I warned you this edition might play out differently than the other blog posts I’ve done.
This has been so frustrating to me. Feeling it frustrates me. Trying to do better frustrates me. Trying to think about it and make some level of sense out of all of this, frustrates me.
Why can’t I feel good more? Why do I have to work so hard to feel good? Why do I feel so good and all of a sudden it is gone?
During this time, I would hesitate to answer the question when people asked me, “How am I doing?”. There was a time period where I would answer “good” and then everything seemed to crash around me. I began to hesitate saying I was good even when I really was feeling good. It almost felt like when I said I was good, it spoke some level of confidence into the game that I then needed to be checked and I would crash back to the bad.
I am at a spot today where I can honestly answer that I feel good. I have more confidence in saying it now. Why more confidence all of a sudden? I feel I have reached a better balance. With reaching this balance, I don’t have to expend the same high amount of energy I was expending before. Before, I would feel good and I had to show everyone how on I was. Now, I feel like there is a more evenness about it. I stay in the good much longer now and spend less and less time in the bad.
I do still have bad moments, I expect to always have bad moments, but they do not make me crash from the good like they used to. It has to be some level of balance I feel I have found. It has taken a long time to know where to put my energy and how much to put into a particular feeling.
The idea of feeling “too good”, to me, comes from those moments when we don’t know how to control the energy and the swings that occur when we deplete all of our energy on feeling good. “Too good” had a not real vibe about it. This heightened level of good was almost too much. It is a level of good we cannot sustain for very long. We aren’t made for that having-to-feel-constantly-on extreme of feeling good. We need to find a balance between the extreme highs and the extreme lows. I would exhaust myself from feeling “too good” and crash to “too bad”.
No way this dramatic swing of emotions is good for me. I had to change how I went about things. I had to learn ways, for myself, that would keep me more in the good and when I wasn’t good, would not have to go through such a drastic drop into the bad anymore. I had to figure out my balance and with this balance, I can sustain the good much longer.
There really is no cap to how good you can feel. The “too good” is a level of good that is way out of balance and we cannot sustain it. I hope we can feel as good as we possibly can, but at a level we can sustain. At first, any level of good, whether it is sustainable or not, is very welcome. It is way better than the alternative we have been feeling for so long.
The “too good” isn’t a bad place, necessarily, at first, because it feels good to feel good, but if this good feeling is quickly exhausting you, maybe it’s time to take another look. Feeling good isn’t supposed to be exhausting. Feeling good is supposed to…well…feel good. To get out of the level of “too good” we need to keep practicing. Sometimes we need to change the way we are doing things up a little. Experiment with what works.
My definition of “too good” is this: A feeling of good that quickly leads to exhaustion and a crash back to the bad. A level of good which is not sustainable. This is what I am getting at. Does it make sense? Think about it for yourself as I may not have explained it exactly how you have felt everything on your journey.
Again, this has been a big topic swirling in my brain and I wanted to get it out there in writing. It allows me to think more about it, and what all of this means to my life. It helps me to write it out, but also this is a way for me to gauge a little what others may be thinking about this train of thought.
What is “too good”? Is there such a thing? Our goal is to feel as good as we can get so is there a level of “too good”? I think the answer can be both yes and no. I say this as I don’t want anyone, including myself, to feel like the good life is unattainable. It is very attainable, but just watch how you feel when you start feeling better. Does it swing to a level that is hard to sustain and leads to exhaustion. If so, maybe an adjustment is needed. Maybe not, if you are happy where you are then ride it out as far as you can!
We all have to determine how we feel about all of this for ourselves.
I, personally, as all of this plays out in my life, feel for me that there is a level of “too good”. “Too good” doesn’t play well with me because I hate the thought of the almost predicted crash which goes along with it. I can dial down the level of energy I put into it and try and be more “just me”. I don’t need to always be on. I just want to be at a level of good where I can be myself. The feeling I have of “too good” takes me above being myself. It is not me. I need to be more comfortable with me and learning a balance away from the “too good” is taking me more to who I really want to be.
For me, this is what it is all about. I need to find the appropriate levels of everything which allow me to be me. Allow me to be the real me and not some dude putting on a show for everyone so they feel I am OK. The putting-on-a-show me is another form of a mask. One I want to remove. My goal in all of this is to just be me and find a me I like.
I am doing way better at this and I am happy, right now, with the me I see.
We all can get there. All of this work we are putting into ourselves will get us to where we want to be. The level of being happy with who you are again. We may need to turn the knobs up and down for a while until we find the right balance, but it is worth it. I like feeling like me again! I want you to feel the same way!
You got this! I got this! We got this! Let’s keep walking this journey together!
I hope you have a great day!
Jason
A website I started. This blog and a podcast, amongst some other stuff, live here. Check it out!
Jason Kehl’s Basement Of Jams: Rocking Mental Health
Feel free to jump over to Facebook and join the group I’ve started. It is a place where everyone can contribute to strengthening each others mental health and a place to lift each other up:
Jason Kehl’s Basement Of Jams: Rocking Mental Health
www.facebook.com/groups/rockingmentalhealth
I’ve also started a podcast in hopes that my desire to spread mental health awareness can reach more people.
Jason Kehl’s Basement Of Jams: Rocking Mental Health
https://rockingmentalhealth.buzzsprout.com/
Also on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google, Amazon Music, and Pandora
Please check it out and feel free to share it as well.
Rocking Mental Health: The Blog- Let's Walk Together 