10 Personal Sanity Hygiene Rules

How to stay sane when everyone around you is going crazy

Earlier this week I said “Woke is not dead. It went crazy on steroids.” And that about sums it up. We are dealing with a world and people around us whose behavior we no longer recognize. Friends, who now plop a dildo onto their forehead to protest ICE. Yes. That is a thing. I do not understand it. Nor do I want to. We have gone from pussy hats to dickheads…

We all have friends who can look at objective data and interpret something completely fabricated out of it. We have arrived at the point in our human evolution where people define the outcome before seeing any evidence and once the evidence shows up, they do impressive mental acrobatics to match the evidence to the previously defined outcome.

They never change their mind.

They are not just settled, they are carved in stone. We all need to make our brains resilient to this type of paralysis and keep our thought processes pliable.

How do you stay sane in a world like this? How do you keep your brain and with that your humanity intact? You need to learn to think for yourself. You need to stop performing for others. Here are some rules I recommend.

Have hobbies you can do by yourself

Do not rely solely on others for your free time. Have some hobbies you enjoy by yourself. Whether it is cooking, knitting, running, or drawing… have something on hand that you enjoy doing in solitude. Do it as often as you find the time. This will allow you to be comfortable in your own presence. It will help you develop a resilience against loneliness.

Get objective data, interpret it yourself

Never ever just read opinion pieces disguised as modern journalism. Interested in a story? Find the data yourself and put them on your mental table just like puzzle pieces. Form the picture yourself. How do you find all the puzzle pieces? Read from various authors and news articles. Research what you can via google or your AI of choice. Collect what you can via websites or from asking people questions. You may never find all of them, but you can find 70 to 80%. Be comfortable coming to personal conclusions based on limited data. Once a picture forms, you may already be close to the answer. This will help you build opinion based on data and not follow blindly what others are thinking.

Read articles or books without checking the author beforehand

Just read an article without knowing the political leaning of the author. Read tweets on X without checking who wrote it. Read a book without really researching the author beforehand. Judge by what you read. Just the other day I came across a horrible help book on perimenopause, just because I failed to see that the author was a self proclaimed “non-binary” woman. It became the most annoying thing I ever read. But I learned something new, new red flags to watch out for, new ways of how gender-queer folks declare that everything is worse for a woman of color. It is of course more interesting to blindly read a political book or even a novel and see if the author did their work well.

Don’t perform for others

This is hard, so many do it in so many ways. The use of qualifiers like “not all” or “of course I do not agree with everything that person said, but…” are dead give aways. Just stop. Do not feel to perform outrage or the need to distance yourself from whatever someone you typically like did. Like the Trump’s recent new racism trap by putting the heads of Michelle and Barack on monkey bodies, just do not proactively distance yourself from it. Why do you feel the need to do so? Why is it important to you that others see your reaction to it immediately? Stop performing on social media. Stop with the virtue signaling in any direction. What you are actually doing is the “monkey dance” routine where you immediately react to a trigger someone threw out there to test other people. It is a trap. Be your own person. Do not play somebody else’s game in this. “Not my circus, not my monkeys”, is sometimes the best answer.

Think in analogies

Practice this muscle. It will help you explain your own thoughts better. Just like a surgeon has to practice with a scalpel, we all who want to stay sane have to practice using our brain. Just like a marathon runner needs to do uncomfortable training practices like interval training and speed work, a person who wants to become a better thinker needs to apply new thinking methods like building analogies.

Reverse victim and offender

Normally I would not recommend to engage in DARVO: Deny Attack Reverse Victim and Offender. But this here is different. When you hear a case you often find yourself having performative or predefined emotions on this. In order to find out whether these are real emotions or an overreaction, just reverse the characteristics of offender and victim and see if your feelings change. I find a funny example of this the T-Shirt that instead of “Indians” states “Caucasians” displaying the head of a white guy instead of an Indian. If George Floyd was a white drug addict and died while being restrained by a black policeman would we feel the same? Always question your initial reaction to something the media tells you. You may be surprised by how often you only think you are feeling a certain way when in fact you do not.

Put yourself on trial

This is a hard one. Whenever you think you committed a thought crime, put yourself on trial. A thought crime could be something that may make you feel like you have shown some phobia of some sort you should not have or you have “ism”ed yourself into a bad position (sexism, racism, you name it). Put yourself on trial and become the worst best persecutor you can think of. I did that recently, when I felt I was being unfair towards immigrants and their non existent assimilation into mainstream culture. I do have a right to maintain the culture I was born in (or in my case chose to live in). I had to play this out in my head in the weirdest way until I was freed of all charges. But I was.

Allow yourself to disagree with friends

Allow yourself to disagree with friends. You are not friends, because you have the same opinions and same feelings on everything. It is ok to express differing opinions. It is not just ok, it is healthy. Give your friends permission to disagree with you, so you can talk through your differing thoughts. It will make you better friends, and if not, maybe you were not that great of friends to begin with.

Do not lie

If someone asks you a direct question. Answer directly with the truth. It is a simple concept. “Did you think the Obamas’ heads on monkey bodies is racist?” “It is clearly in bad taste. But I also do not want to pretend this is a bigger deal than that. Why can’t we just let it stand as what it is: a bad joke.” Also, do not ask people a question when you do not want to hear the answer. Do not ask how they like your new haircut, if all you do is fish for compliments.

Say no more often

Just say no more often. Say no, when you get an invite and you do not feel like going. Say no to the latest trends. Allow yourself not to comment on something everyone comments on. Say no to people that behave badly and disengage from them. Don’t answer the phone if it is a bad time to talk or don’t answer a text if you have nothing to say. Keep your personal space yours. Your time is also yours to manage. No is a powerful tool in your mental defense repertoire to keep your sanity.

Ok, friends of the darkness and nighttime entertainment, I have reached the time of the day where it is my wind down time to get ready for my work day tomorrow.

I have a glass of wine. A show. And my husband next to me.

This is how I like to end my day.

Thanks for listening to me.