Mekansm

A glowing jewel formed out of assorted parts that somehow fit together perfectly.

Impetus

This article was inspired by Dr. K’s video on Core Trauma¹ and his conversation with ThePrimeagen on the mechanism of burn out.²

The first video talks about how he conceptualizes Core Trauma (CT), how it’s not really trauma in the way we usually think about it. Trauma implies that you had a healthy mental foundation, then you have something happen to you, and now you feel broken or traumatized.

There is a sculpture analogy which I think illustrates this perfectly. With “regular” trauma, you’re a sculpture that had been properly sculpted from the ground up, but then a piece of you is broken off. Think Squidward’s beautiful sculpture with the baggy nose, but then the nose was broken off, the trauma.³

With CT, your sculpture had been formed crooked right from the get go.

It’s not that you have a healthy base and need some glue to patch things up, your internals had been wired differently as you were being shaped into a person. Imagine young kid who’s 3-4 years old who has been told that they are a burden and unwanted. That’s the level of “baked in”-ness we’re talking about. Dr. Gabor Maté’s book, “The Myth of Normal,” has great insight into this, detailing his own CT and how it manifests as ADHD and workaholism.⁴

At least that’s how I understood what he said, feel free to drop a comment and drop a different view.

It kind of sounds terrifying, right? The implication is that you’ve kind of been shat on by circumstance, given a terrible spawn. If you’ve been baked wrong, does that mean you’re cooked? It certainly felt that way to me after watching the video, I felt heavy and hopeless. I’m not saying I have CT, not self-diagnosing, I’m saying that I can empathize with how devastating it feels.

However, when Dr. K points to something, almost always he points to a way out.

Which feeds into why I wanted to write this article, a thought popped up into my head, “He always talks about mechanics, mechanism, or whatever, what the hell does he mean by them?” This is where the second video comes in, where he had a conversation with ThePrimeagen about his story of redemption. Dr. K mapped Prime’s experience of burn out and redeeming himself to the science of burn out, step-by-step.

This was eye-opening for me.

Mainly, he mentioned how “checking out” or mentally distancing oneself from whatever is burning you out is a crucial step in getting out of burn out. That we frequently are looking towards, “how do we jump back in immediately?”, even while we’re in the midst of feeling burned out. He explains that giving space for yourself to breathe is part of how you get out of burn out. This helped alleviate some of the guilt and shame that I was feeling about taking it slow for some time after burning out from work.

This idea of mechanism and doing things in sequence resonated with me. How it wouldn’t work if you did them out of order, like a magic spell that won’t activate when you chant incorrectly.

Jumping back to the CT video, he also laid out the sequential steps you can take to heal from CT. It’s an involved process, but I’ve somewhat stumbled into it by accident and what he described on the first video matched my experience 1-to-1. There was a period of a couple months when I’d stopped watching HealthyGamer altogether because I’d lost faith. I had tried a lot of the stuff they were talking about, yoga, Kapalbhati, Ajna Chakra, Kaya Shtiram, Oum chanting, you name it. And yet, I wasn’t getting any better, nor feeling any better. I still had a lot of trouble with regulating my emotions, finding any motivation to do stuff, living on auto-pilot.

Despite that, getting into therapy after coaching, doing Open Heart meditation, and stumbling into doing things sequentially has helped me a lot, even if I didn’t realize that was what I was doing a couple months back. I’m having fun writing now! Past Me™ would’ve had trouble even just getting out of bed, would largely be shame/guilt-driven, and was significantly less happy.

In this article, I want to explore that sequence of healing, behavioral shift, and moving in the “right” direction that’s worked for me. Hopefully you can then use it to chart your own course.

Mechanism

Disclaimer

Not a doctor, see a licensed mental health professional if you’re struggling.

In the Trauma Module of Dr. K’s Guide to Mental Health,⁵ he laid out the areas to tackle, to heal from trauma,

1. Autonomic Nervous System (ANS),
2. Emotions,
3. Cognition,
4. Behavioral.

In that specific order. It doesn’t work when you do it out of sequence. Been there, done that. I think it was largely why I wasn’t feeling improvements to my overall mood. I only saw positive ticks to my overall happiness, motivation, and behavioral change after I unwittingly shifted to targetting the ANS first and foremost.

This really clicked for me when I retrospectively looked back at the work that I’d been doing over the past couple months,

• Once you deactivate the sympathetic response (fight/flight/freeze/fawn), your reactivity decreases,
• Once your reactivity decreases and your emotions calm down, your motivation will start to bubble up,
• Once your motivation floats to the surface, your cognition will change,
• Once your cognition changes, your narrative changes,
• Once your narrative changes, your behaviour changes.

And this is exactly what I’ve been reflecting on time and time again, even to this day. The cycle simply gets shorter and shorter. Looking back, it was a real come and see moment for me. I can’t emphasize enough how it felt like stumbling into a gold mine by accident.

You might be asking, “what does that practically mean?”

Good question, I’m glad you asked.

It means noticing the patterns that’s been running your life and grounding yourself within that moment.

It’s a practice, it takes a while to get used to. I’m guessing you might be thinking “Oh great, another one of these mindfulness/yoga hippies. I already know how this is going to turn out.” My mind was like that too, it kept convincing me that I already knew all the answers without giving it a shot. Even after doing it for a while, the mind still manages to trick me somehow. If yours is like that too, I’d say “hey, don’t knock it ‘til you’ve tried it.”

What does the noticing and grounding look like?

For me,

• Physiological patterns
  • My shoulders get bunched up when I get tense
  • It’s harder to breathe, my chest feels like there’s a ton of pressure
  • And I feel a pain in my solar plexus
  • I dub it the force of hurriednessΓäó
• Grounding techniques
  • The 5,4,3,2,1 somatosensory grounding technique
    • Name 5 things you can see
    • Name 4 things you can touch
    • Name 3 sounds you can hear
    • Name 2 scents you can smell
    • Name 1 thing you can taste
  • Relaxing into the the force of hurriednessΓäó
    • Open Heart meditation, which is quite powerful when done right
    • Although, you have to be careful to not fall into the trap of thinking your way into relaxing
  • Explore others
    • There are lots more out there like,
      • breathing into the feeling,
      • dunk your face in cold water,
    • Different stuff works for me depending on the severity of the anxiety
    • Try out stuff and see what works for you

Usually, when I do it right, my body will naturally start to relax, my breathing will grow deeper, my shoulders will release the tension, and my chest will ligthen. It takes a couple moments, but that’s exactly the point, we’re deactivating the sympathetic response after all and that takes time. Thoughts will then start to slow as you breathe deeper, there will be less black and white thinking, you’ll zoom out from the pain.

TL;DR

I wanted to write this article because it wasn’t obvious to me what Dr. K meant by the word mechanism and I wanted to share how tunneling down into the seemingly silly hang up had bore fruit for me. The conversation with ThePrimeagen about his story, Dr. K mapping out his journey to the science of burn out, combined with my personal experience helped me put all this together.

Writing this article reminds me again of this pithy phrase,

“Awareness is Control” — Dr. K

Essentially, self-healing boils down to,

• Notice when you’re in the midst of an activated sympathetic response, recognize your symptoms
• Name it, be familiar with your personal brand of anxiety, mine is the force of hurriednessΓäó
• Ground yourself with the grounding techniques mentioned above or research and find your own

There are tons more out there. For example, running really fast and tiring yourself out within 10 seconds, or Kapalbhati (Breath of Fire) also works; forceful, controlled exhalations in rapid succession that drop your $C{O}_2$ levels, suppressing the urge to breathe for a time which raises the $C{O}_2$ levels again, that your body naturally rebalances by breathing deeper.

What we want to do when we notice the activation of our sympathetic nervous system is to hyperactivate it, which will then trigger a parasympathetic response. The body is homeostatic, it wants to be in balance.

But again, not a doctor. I just read some cool articles on the web, watched a couple videos, and asked Gippity when I got curious enough to dive deeper. If you’re struggling, see a licensed mental health professional.

title lore drop

Title was inspired from my experience playing DotA as a support. Loved maining Dazzle, the Shadow Priest, he’s got this ability called Shallow Grave, an active skill which can imbue an ally with immortality for 5.0 seconds.

To me, it always felt like a giant middle finger to the enemy and almost always opens up opportunity to strike back and turn the tides.

Very satisfying.

Hopefully this has been helpful!

Let me know what you think in the comments, do you disagree? Have a differing opinion or experience?

I’d love to hear it.

Footnotes

1. ▶ HealthyGamerGG — How “Core Trauma” Is Affecting Your Every Decision ↩

2. ▶ HealthyGamerGG — Explaining Why Devs Burn Out So Often w/ @ThePrimeTimeagen ↩

3. ▶ SpongeBob SquarePants Official — That Time Squidward Taught SpongeBob Art ↩

4. ▶ Dr. Gabor Maté — The Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness, and Healing in a Toxic Culture ↩

5. 🌐 HG — Dr. K’s Guide to Mental Health ↩