Tag: Awareness

LIVING IN AMERICA IN MY 20’SOMETHINGS

LIVING IN AMERICA IN MY 20’SOMETHINGS

by Kirsten Rossouw ♥ 0 Leave a Comment

Mind Over Matter Psych Talks | Season 1 Episode 15 | Written Reflection

I spent my last morning in North Carolina the way I handle most endings: quickly, and with my guard half raised. I have always been an efficient goodbye person. Quick exit, minimal ceremony, spare everyone the slow motion ache of watching someone leave. I built that habit as a kid, moved between towns and schools often enough that packing up a life stopped feeling like loss and started feeling like routine. When you learn young that you might have to leave a place without warning, you get good at building a new life fast and getting out of the old one faster.

What I did not understand until my final two weeks in the States is that being efficient at goodbyes is not the same thing as being at peace with them. There is a particular kind of coping that looks like resilience from the outside and functions like avoidance from the inside, sidestepping discomfort instead of moving through it, and psychology has a specific name for it: experiential avoidance. It is a completely functional strategy in the short term. The problem is that avoided feelings do not disappear, they wait, and mine had apparently been waiting a long time. I felt it in my body before I understood it in my head, which is usually how this works: tight shoulders, a low locked in tension that had nothing to do with normal tiredness. A breathwork session meant to loosen something specific instead handed me something obvious in hindsight. I had never actually learned how to let go of anything. I had just gotten remarkably good at leaving before the letting go had to happen.

I arrived at twenty one with what I would now generously call an unresolved relationship with my own family history, and a quiet hope that distance might do some of that sorting for me. I had just finished a psychology degree, which mostly meant I understood how much I still did not understand about myself. The plan was simple on paper: do the programme, see the country, come home and deal with things properly. Life seldom follows the plan written on paper, and mine did not either.

What actually shaped me was the experience itself, in ways four years of lectures never quite managed. The first real shift showed up around individualism, a concept I had studied clinically long before I felt it personally. I grew up in a fairly collectivist frame, where decisions get filtered through family expectation before they get filtered through personal preference. That is not a flaw in collectivist upbringings, it is simply how they are built, and there is real value in a life organised around interdependence rather than independence. But America gave me something I had not been offered before: permission to ask what I actually wanted, separate from anyone else’s expectations. The developmental term for that process is individuation, the gradual work of building a self distinct from one’s family of origin, and it is supposed to unfold slowly across adolescence rather than land all at once in your twenties. Mine got delayed and then compressed into a handful of years on a different continent, mostly out of necessity rather than design.

The useful psychoeducational point here is that individualism and collectivism are not opposites you have to choose between forever. Geert Hofstede mapped this exact tension decades ago as a single cultural dimension, individualism on one end and collectivism on the other, and most people who move between cultures eventually settle somewhere in the middle of it rather than fully on one side. Acculturation researchers have a name for the healthiest place to land: integration, keeping meaningful parts of the original culture while fully taking on parts of the new one, instead of trading one for the other. I did not know that framework existed while I was living it, but it names what eventually happened to me accurately. I did not stop being someone shaped by a collectivist upbringing. I became someone who could hold both frames at once and choose deliberately which one served a given moment, family loyalty in one context, personal agency in another, rather than defaulting permanently to either.

Then came the harder lesson, wrapped in a work ethic I had heard about my whole life but never actually lived inside. The belief that effort reliably produces mobility is not universally true, and the American dream carries real, well documented limits and inequities that deserve saying plainly. But in that specific window, for me, it functioned often enough as advertised to shift my sense of my own ceiling in a way that stuck. Albert Bandura had a term for exactly that shift: self efficacy, a person’s belief in their own capacity to produce an outcome through their own action. Watching effort translate into a visible result over and over recalibrates that belief in a way reading about it never could.

It is also worth naming the other side of that work culture honestly, because it deserves more than a highlight reel. American hustle culture has a cutthroat edge that can quietly reorganise a person’s sense of self around output. When effort keeps getting rewarded, it becomes very easy to let your worth as a person become contingent on how much you produce, a pattern psychologists sometimes describe as contingent self worth. I felt that pull too, not just the empowering version of hard work but the exhausting version, the one where rest starts to feel like falling behind. Anyone chasing a similar experience abroad is worth warning about that edge specifically, because the same culture that will teach you real self efficacy can also teach you to measure yourself only in output, and that lesson is much harder to unlearn afterward.

Communication style reprogrammed me in its own way too. I came from a culture where opinions get softened or buried in the name of politeness and hierarchy, a pattern communication researchers sort under high context, where meaning depends heavily on tone, status and what is left unsaid. What I found instead sat firmly under low context: people said the actual thing, argued the actual point, and moved on without the residue of resentment I had been trained to expect from disagreement. It fit a part of my personality that had been there underneath the socialisation the whole time, waiting for a culture that would let it out.

Living across several states, chasing seasonal work the way a lot of people on similar programmes do, taught me something closer to applied psychology than anything in a textbook. Adaptability is not a fixed trait, it behaves more like a trained capacity, and the useful concept here is the idea of a comfort zone with two edges rather than one. Stay too far inside it and nothing changes. Push too far outside it and the nervous system reads the situation as threat rather than challenge, which shuts down learning rather than supporting it. Growth tends to happen in the narrow band between those two, sometimes called the stretch zone, where a task is difficult enough to demand something new from you but not so overwhelming that it triggers full blown threat response. Every relocation asked something slightly harder of me, and every time I met that ask inside my stretch zone rather than my panic zone, the next relocation asked less of my courage and more of my competence.

But growth does not stay comfortable for long, and this is where the story stops being a tidy success arc. Somewhere between twenty five and twenty six, a different signal started interrupting the momentum. I had sacrificed pieces of myself along the way without fully tracking the cost, my relationship with food among them, my body simply not agreeing with a pace of life I had adapted to out of necessity rather than fit. Stress physiology has a word for that kind of debt: allostatic load, the cumulative wear a body takes on from repeatedly adapting to demand without enough recovery in between. Adaptability has a price. Part of growing up is learning to actually notice that price instead of treating your tolerance for it as a personality trait to be proud of.

There is a specific discomfort that shows up right before a person chooses growth over comfort, and it makes complete physiological sense even though it feels awful while it is happening. Once complacency sets in, it starts disguising itself as stability. You know the shape of your days, you know what to expect, and the moment you consider trading that for something less certain but more aligned, your nervous system treats the uncertainty itself as a threat. The body runs its own background check for this, a largely unconscious scan for safety or danger that arrives before conscious thought does, and the term for it in the polyvagal research is neuroception. Novelty and danger get filed in overlapping neural territory, which is exactly why leaving a stable but misaligned life can feel more frightening than staying in it. I felt that acutely once I asked myself a harder question than any I had asked in years: if you stripped away the currency, the job, the whole comfortable architecture of this particular life, what would actually be left of you? The answer, thankfully, was still someone with a psychology degree and an actual pull toward clinical work, buried under a few years of well paid distraction.

That question points at something worth naming directly for anyone reading this while sitting inside their own version of it. Money and meaning run on different systems entirely. Self determination theory, one of the more useful frameworks in motivational psychology, separates extrinsic motivation, working for an external reward like income, from intrinsic motivation, working because the activity itself feels meaningful and aligned with your values. Both can coexist for a while. But when the extrinsic side keeps getting fed while the intrinsic side goes quiet, it is possible to end up with a fuller bank account and an emptier sense of purpose at the same time, and that gap tends to widen rather than close on its own.

One more piece of this deserves naming honestly, because it changed the shape of everything else: access. The United States handed me a density of mental health infrastructure, therapy, wellness resources, platforms built specifically to make support easier to reach, that I had simply not grown up around. That access alone did not change me. But it gave me the tools to do the interior work I had been avoiding since childhood, and that is a different and far more durable thing than access on its own.

Looking back at the twenty one year old who landed here carrying more unresolved history than she knew what to do with, and the twenty eight year old getting ready to fly home, the real difference has very little to do with geography. It is that the version of me leaving finally knows how to sit inside a goodbye rather than engineering an exit around it, and knows how to hold both cultural frames she was raised between without needing to reject either one to feel whole in the other.

If there is a lesson bigger than my own timeline in any of this, it is probably this. Growth seldom happens where you expect it, doing the thing you originally set out to do. It tends to happen while you are technically busy doing something else entirely, chasing seasonal work, learning a new city’s rhythm, working out how to disagree with someone without flinching. If any part of this resonates, a few things are worth carrying forward regardless. Notice when efficiency at endings is doing the emotional work that grief actually needs to do instead. Treat adaptability as a skill with a cost, not a personality trait to wear as armour. And if you are building a life between two cultures rather than fully inside one, know that integration, holding both, is not indecision. Psychologically speaking, it is the healthiest outcome on offer.

Mind Over Matter.

Disclaimer: This article is for general psychoeducational and informational purposes only. It reflects personal experiences and perspectives and is not a substitute for individual counselling, psychological assessment, diagnosis, or treatment. Where personal experiences are shared, identifying details have been changed or omitted to protect privacy.

BODY IMAGE

BODY IMAGE

by Kirsten Rossouw ♥ 1 Comment

Mind Over Matter Psych Talks | Season 1 Episode 14 | Written Reflection

Some of what informs this piece comes from a long, honest conversation with a friend of mine, who was generous enough to walk me through how her own relationship with her body took shape over the years. What she described did not sound like a personal failing so much as a pattern, one I suspect a lot of people will recognise in some form. So instead of telling her story as her story, I want to pull that pattern apart and look at what it reveals about body image more broadly: what it is, why it takes hold so much more readily in girls and women, what feeds it, what it costs, and what actually helps.

Body image is the internal picture we carry of our own body, along with the thoughts and feelings attached to that picture. It is not the same thing as appearance itself. Two people can look objectively similar and hold entirely different relationships with what they see in the mirror. When that internal picture becomes persistently negative, psychologists call it body dissatisfaction, and it is one of the strongest known predictors of disordered eating later on.

Body image seldom forms through one dramatic event. More often it accumulates through a comment that was never meant to wound, then steadily gathers supporting evidence for itself over years. A stray remark from a classmate about a body that has not yet developed. A look. A silence where a compliment should have been. Each of these on its own is small. Stacked over a childhood and adolescence, they build something far heavier than the sum of its parts.

That accumulation also helps explain why this lands so much harder on girls, and the reasons deserve spelling out properly rather than being treated as a given. Puberty itself is timed differently and interpreted differently depending on gender. Girls typically enter puberty earlier than boys, at a developmental stage when they have had less time to build a stable sense of identity separate from how they are perceived. The physical changes of puberty for girls, increased body fat and rounder proportions, run directly against a cultural beauty standard that prizes thinness, which is not true in the same way for boys, whose pubertal changes, increased muscle and height, tend to move them closer to a culturally rewarded ideal rather than further from it.

Layered on top of that timing mismatch is what researchers call objectification theory, the idea that girls and women are socialised from a young age to view their own bodies partly from the outside, as objects to be evaluated by others, rather than purely as instruments for living in the world. This habit of self surveillance, constantly checking how one appears rather than simply existing in one’s body, is mentally exhausting on its own, and it is strongly linked to anxiety, shame and disordered eating.

Comparison adds another layer, and it starts working on children earlier than most people realise. A young girl will begin measuring her own body against whichever body in the room seems to be rewarded with attention, ease or approval, long before she is old enough to question the habit itself. Social comparison theory explains part of why this feels so automatic: humans are wired to evaluate themselves relative to others, especially in areas where objective standards do not exist, and appearance is one of the least objective standards there is. This comparison can take hold even in a girl who is, by every actual medical measure, perfectly healthy. That is the quiet cruelty built into comparison as a mechanism. It does not require anything to be medically wrong. It only requires a girl paying close attention to which bodies the world seems to prefer, and concluding, often incorrectly, that hers is not one of them.

A fuller picture also has to include where these lessons are actually learned. We tend to point at magazines, influencers and diet culture when we talk about where body image comes from, and all of that plays a genuine part. But the earliest and most persistent commentary a young person receives about their body usually comes from inside their own home, and this part of the picture is often left out entirely. In many households, and this shows up across a wide range of cultures, not just one, body commentary is treated as completely normal, even affectionate. Nicknames built around size. A relative asking, loudly and in front of everyone, whether you are eating enough, or eating too much. A well meaning suggestion that a child go on a diet, sometimes offered before that child is even old enough to understand what a diet is. Almost none of this is delivered with cruelty behind it. Most of it is delivered as care, phrased the only way a particular family or culture has ever learned to phrase it. But intention and impact are two separate things, and a body that gets discussed constantly by everyone around it starts to feel like it belongs to the room rather than to the person actually living in it.

There is also a cultural dimension to how emotion itself gets handled, and it matters more than it might seem at first glance. In households where composure is prized, where showing distress reads as disrespect or weakness rather than honesty, children absorb the lesson early that feelings are meant to be managed discreetly, ideally invisibly. When that becomes the operating rule for an entire household, the body often becomes the one place feelings are still permitted to surface, because everywhere else they have been asked to stay contained. This is sometimes described in psychology as emotional displacement, where distress that has no acceptable outlet gets rerouted into a domain that feels more controllable, such as eating, exercise or appearance. A young person who has been taught, directly or indirectly, that the quieter you are the more acceptable you are, does not stop feeling distress. She simply stops narrating it out loud, and starts routing it somewhere else instead.

Isolation tends to be the accelerant that turns ordinary insecurity into something far more serious, and there is a reason so many people trace a turning point back to a period of enforced separation, a pandemic, a house move, a friend group fracturing. Remove face to face connection, replace it with a curated scroll of everyone else’s highlight reel, and take away whatever physical outlet had previously been regulating mood and stress, and you have built close to a perfect storm. It is a particularly cruel irony that this often happens precisely when a young person’s body is also changing fastest, during the exact stretch of adolescence when hormones, growth and social comparison are already working overtime without any outside help.

This is the point in the cycle where things can shift into something that needs to be named honestly rather than softened. Disordered eating often develops as a cycle rather than a single behaviour: a period of restriction, followed by a period of loss of control around food, each one feeding the shame that fuels the next round. Clinicians sometimes call this the binge and restrict cycle, a self reinforcing loop rather than a simple choice. It can coexist with other forms of emotional pain, including depressive symptoms and, in more serious cases, thoughts of self harm. A dramatic home life or an obviously visible crisis is not required for it to take root. It can develop below the surface, almost invisibly, inside a young person who looks, from the outside, like she is coping perfectly well. That invisibility is precisely what makes it dangerous. The people closest to her, family, friends, even the young person herself, often do not recognise what is happening until it is already deeply established, partly because the signs are easy to miss from the outside, and partly because she has spent years being taught, implicitly, that this particular kind of struggle is not something you say out loud.

Recovery, from everything I have seen and heard, seldom comes from one clean intervention. It tends to come from accumulation, built up in the same slow, layered way the struggle itself was built. Honest conversation and community do a great deal of that work. Voices that actually name body image struggles instead of performing effortless confidence make isolation feel less total simply by existing, and a shared moment of vulnerability, where a struggling young woman realises she is not the only one in the room carrying something heavy, tends to do more to loosen shame’s grip than almost anything else. Media literacy plays its own part too: learning to recognise how images are edited, staged and selected does not undo a culture of comparison overnight, but it does give young people a framework for questioning what they are seeing rather than absorbing it uncritically. Families have a role that is just as practical, learning to separate care from commentary, to keep showing love without narrating a child’s body, a skill that can be learned and practised deliberately even in households where body talk has always been the norm. Approaches built around self compassion and intuitive eating help from another angle, aiming not to replace one set of rules about the body with another but to rebuild trust between a person and their own hunger, fullness and emotional signals, treating the body as something to listen to rather than something to manage. And for anyone already caught in a restrict and binge cycle or experiencing distressing thoughts about food, weight or self harm, self help strategies alone are not always enough. Reaching out to a psychologist, counsellor or eating disorder specialist is not a sign of failure. It is the same as seeing a doctor for anything else the body needs help recovering from.

Body image has no single culprit. It is built from early, often incidental comments, sharpened by a comparison culture that intensifies through adolescence, shaped by family and cultural norms around whose business a body is considered to be, and then frequently destabilised further by isolation of any kind. What helps tends to mirror what damages: community that makes isolation feel less total, honest conversation that treats a struggling body image as something worth naming early rather than outgrowing alone in silence, media that reflects a wider range of what a body is allowed to look like, and underneath all of it, real permission to take up space exactly as you already are. In practice that can be small: a parent choosing not to comment on a child’s plate, a friend admitting out loud that she has struggled too, someone asking how a person actually feels about their body rather than complimenting how it looks. Not one of these fixes everything alone, but each closes a gap where silence would otherwise take root, and together they are what turn speaking up eventually into something a person can actually do before reaching a crisis point alone.

Mind Over Matter.

Disclaimer: This article is for general psychoeducational and informational purposes only. It reflects personal experiences and perspectives and is not a substitute for individual counselling, psychological assessment, diagnosis, or treatment. Where personal experiences are shared, identifying details have been changed or omitted to protect privacy.

WEATHERING THE STORM

WEATHERING THE STORM

by Kirsten Rossouw ♥ 0 Leave a Comment

Mind Over Matter Psych Talks | Season 1 Episode 13 | Written Reflection

A few weeks before I was due to leave the United States, wrapping up a chapter that had felt like one blessing stacked on another, I found myself standing somewhere up in the Great Smoky Mountains, talking out loud to nobody in particular. Not quite praying, not quite journaling, just this unfiltered little monologue of gratitude, thanking whatever was listening for everything that had gone right. A home my partner and I had bought. A postgrad programme I’d already been accepted into. A job waiting on the other end. I was on a real high, the kind you don’t question too hard in the moment because it feels earned.

The next day, Hurricane Helene made landfall.

I want to be honest about the scale of what happened, because it matters more than my own small piece of it. Helene claimed the lives of well over two hundred people, more than half of them in North Carolina, the state I was living in at the time. Entire communities close to where I was staying were torn apart. I was lucky, undeniably lucky. We kept our power, our water, our roof. The worst of it, for us, was losing signal and Wi-Fi for a few days. But being that close to devastation, watching places I actually knew get flattened while my own street stayed standing, does something strange to a person. It doesn’t just scare you. It reorganises you a little.

What I want to talk about isn’t really the hurricane itself, though. It’s what it taught me, almost against my will, about storms in general, the literal kind that show up on a weather forecast and the kind that arrive with zero warning in the form of a diagnosis, a breakup, a layoff, a loss. Because once you strip away the specifics, weathering either kind of storm turns out to draw on the exact same internal muscle.

Before Helene actually hit, we had a small window to prepare, and most of the advice circulating was, understandably, physical. Stock supplies, secure your space, charge your devices, keep a backup power source, stay hydrated, eat properly, move your body to burn off some of the building tension. All necessary. But the part that barely got mentioned, the part that ended up mattering just as much once the actual chaos arrived, was mental preparation. Any storm, whether it’s rearranging your coastline or your entire sense of what your life was about to look like, demands a kind of resilience that no amount of bottled water can provide on its own.

The first thing losing connection did was strip away, almost by force, everything I didn’t actually need. Once the signal dropped, I found myself only chasing a connection for one reason, to check in with family. Not to doomscroll, not to see what the algorithm had decided was urgent that day. Just to hear that the people I loved were okay. There was a strange, uninvited relief in not knowing what else was happening in the wider world at that moment, missiles, headlines, the usual noise. For a few days, none of it could reach me, and instead of that feeling like deprivation, it felt like being handed something back.

There’s a particular kind of clarity that shows up when you’re forced to confront the limits of your own control. I’m someone who likes to feel like I’ve got a handle on things, who wants to walk into a room already knowing the plan. Helene took that completely off the table, and rather than that being purely frightening, part of it was oddly freeing. Once you cannot influence the outcome, once the only honest option left is to let what happens happen, something in you exhales. Not helplessness. More like permission. The energy you’d normally spend white-knuckling every variable gets to go somewhere else instead, toward the things you actually can shape.

For me, that meant returning, almost instinctively, to the handful of practices that had nothing to do with circumstance. Meditation. Deep breathing. Journaling. A bit of yoga on the living room floor. These weren’t grand gestures, they were small, stubborn acts of continuity, proof to myself that even with the outside world in freefall, there were still a few things that were unmistakably mine to hold onto. That’s worth remembering the next time a metaphorical storm hits too. Whatever your version of that grounding ritual is, protect it fiercely, especially when everything else feels like it’s up for grabs.

The other unexpected gift of those days was how quickly my housemates and I got shoved back toward basics. No signal meant no scrolling, no streaming, no easy digital escape hatch. So we played actual board games. We dug out an old Nintendo. We cooked, constantly, absurdly large amounts of food, because someone would get a mood and declare it was time to feed everybody, and honestly, there is nothing quite like a good potato curry to make a hurricane feel briefly survivable. We talked, properly, the kind of conversation that doesn’t happen when everyone’s half looking at a screen. It sounds almost too simple to say, but stripped of every distraction, what was left underneath was just people, choosing to show up for each other in a small shared space, and that turned out to be more than enough.

That’s really the heart of what got us through, and I think it’s the heart of getting through most storms, literal or otherwise. You focus on what remains within reach. You keep in communication with the people who matter. You build in enough structure that the day doesn’t collapse into formless dread, still getting up, still washing your face, still eating something that isn’t purely out of a packet, small proof to yourself that some sense of normal is still intact even while the world outside your walls is anything but. You lean into gratitude on purpose, not as a forced positivity exercise but as an active decision to notice what’s still standing rather than only what’s been lost. And you allow the fear to actually be there when it shows up, rather than pretending calm you don’t feel. I was scared, plainly, of losing things I hadn’t even gotten to enjoy yet. The home I hadn’t lived in properly. The programme I hadn’t started. The job I hadn’t begun. That fear was legitimate, and naming it out loud did more good than trying to talk myself out of feeling it.

Once the storm itself passed, physically, the real work started, and this is the part I think gets skipped over in most conversations about resilience, because everyone loves the story of getting through the crisis and nobody wants to sit with the slower, less dramatic aftermath. You assess the actual damage, honestly, without minimizing it or catastrophizing it. You ask what’s been taken and what still remains. You figure out, piece by piece, how to rebuild and how to return to some version of routine, knowing full well it might not look identical to the one you left behind. And underneath all of that sits the one question that actually determines how the whole experience gets carried forward: what did this teach me, and am I willing to let it change anything?

Because here’s the thing about storms, whichever kind you’re facing. The weather itself is not the part you get to choose. Your reaction is the only variable in the entire equation, and it’s the one thing worth putting real effort into. Allow yourself to feel whatever actually shows up rather than performing composure you don’t have. Practice real gratitude, not as decoration but as an honest accounting of what’s still good. Reframe the disruption, where you honestly can, as an opening rather than purely a loss, not because every storm secretly contains a silver lining, some don’t, but because the ones that do deserve to be noticed rather than missed while you’re still busy being afraid. Reach out for real support, professional or otherwise, when the weight of it is more than you can carry solo. And when you make it through, actually let yourself acknowledge that you did. Not with false bravado, just an honest nod to your own capacity to withstand something that could have broken you and didn’t.

I think about that mountain monologue often now, the one I gave a day before everything shifted, without having the faintest idea what was coming. There’s something almost funny about it in hindsight, standing up there thanking the universe for a plan I assumed was locked in, only for that same universe to immediately test whether I actually meant it. But I did mean it, and strangely, the storm didn’t undo any of that gratitude. If anything it sharpened it, stripped it down to something more honest than the version I had before, because gratitude that survives contact with uncertainty tends to mean a great deal more than gratitude that’s never been tested at all.

Storms end. Every single one of them, eventually, does. What doesn’t end, what actually stays with you long after the water recedes or the crisis resolves or the diagnosis stabilizes or the layoff turns into the next job, is whatever you built inside yourself while you were still standing in it. That’s the part worth investing in, before the next one arrives, because it always eventually does. Not to dread it. Just to be ready enough to meet it with something other than pure panic. A little patience, a little grit, a support system you’ve actually maintained rather than assumed would be there, and the quiet knowledge that whatever this particular storm takes from you, it cannot take the fact that you know, now, exactly what you’re capable of surviving.

Mind Over Matter.

Disclaimer: This article is for general psychoeducational and informational purposes only. It reflects personal experiences and perspectives and is not a substitute for individual counselling, psychological assessment, diagnosis, or treatment. Where personal experiences are shared, identifying details have been changed or omitted to protect privacy.

NEWS CONSUMPTION

NEWS CONSUMPTION

by Kirsten Rossouw ♥ 1 Comment

Mind Over Matter Psych Talks | Season 1 Episode 12 | Written Reflection

A friend of mine gave me one of the more clarifying answers I’ve gotten in a long time when I asked her, almost as a throwaway question, how much news she takes in on an average week. Her answer was close to none. Not out of avoidance dressed up as denial, and not because she’s uninformed in any broader sense. She’s raising a young son and made a deliberate, considered decision somewhere along the way to simply stop letting the news cycle into her house. Talking to her cracked something open for me, because most people I’d asked before her described the opposite: constant exposure, constant notifications, a kind of low-grade tether to their phone that they’d stopped noticing was even there.

What her answer actually revealed, once we kept talking, wasn’t apathy. It was a thought-through relationship with information, built after years of the opposite. She described being around fifteen when she first started encountering real, unfiltered footage online, back when social platforms had far fewer restrictions than they do now, graphic material with almost no context or warning attached, most of it about things happening in other countries and none of it anything a teenager should have been processing alone. Her parents had no idea what she was seeing. There was no conversation to help her make sense of it, because the adults in her life didn’t know there was anything to make sense of. She just felt sad, and scared, and kept scrolling anyway, because that’s what the algorithm is built to make you do.

That kind of early, unsupervised exposure isn’t rare. It’s closer to the default experience for an entire generation of American kids who grew up with a smartphone in one hand and no real media literacy education to go with it. And it tends to produce one of two outcomes down the line. Either the nervous system adapts and starts treating a certain baseline of dread as normal background noise, or a person eventually hits a wall and steps back entirely, the way she did. For her, that wall arrived during COVID, when the volume of information became impossible to sort through, competing claims about where the virus came from, what was safe, what wasn’t, layered under headlines built to alarm rather than clarify. The world had gone quiet in every literal sense, everyone stuck indoors with nothing else happening, so the news had nowhere else to put its attention except directly on the one thing already terrifying everyone. She stepped away then and never really stepped back.

There’s a term for what a lot of us have been doing instead of stepping away: doomscrolling, the compulsive, repetitive consumption of distressing news even when it’s actively making us feel worse. It’s not a character flaw. It’s closer to a design feature. Outlets and platforms are optimised for engagement, and nothing engages faster or more reliably than fear, outrage or grief. Headlines get built around emotive language on purpose, not because the underlying story requires it, but because a reader who’s already emotionally activated is a reader who clicks through. She put it plainly when I asked about it. If you’re already feeling a certain way about a person or an event, you’re far more likely to tune in and see how everyone else is reacting to it too. That’s not journalism responding to public interest. That’s public interest being manufactured on purpose.

In the American context specifically, this gets tangled up with something else, the near total collapse of any shared sense of a trustworthy source. Ask most people which outlet they actually trust and you’ll get a long pause before an honest answer, because the honest answer, for a lot of people, is nobody, fully. Media coverage here skews heavily toward whichever political current is driving the day’s attention, sometimes in ways that are almost comedic in hindsight, like the sustained, invasive scrutiny into whether Barack Obama’s birth certificate was real, treated with a seriousness that an urgent story happening on the other side of the world often never receives. The imbalance isn’t subtle. An assassination attempt on a major political figure can dominate every channel for a week straight, while an ongoing humanitarian catastrophe somewhere else barely registers as a passing headline. That’s not proportion. That’s a business model, and it teaches audiences, quietly and continuously, which lives and which crises are considered newsworthy.

There’s a psychological term for what happens to people who consume a heavy, sustained diet of this kind of coverage, sometimes called mean world syndrome, the tendency to overestimate how dangerous and hostile the world actually is because the version being fed to you is disproportionately built from its worst moments. Constant exposure to tragedy, conflict and threat, even from a physically safe distance, produces real physiological stress. It shows up as anxiety, low mood, a persistent hum of fear that has nowhere useful to go because most of what’s being reported sits entirely outside any individual viewer’s control. And sensationalised coverage doesn’t just distort how frightening the world feels. It actively reshapes how people understand each other. She also brought up how a movement like Black Lives Matter got reframed by parts of the media into something almost unrecognisable from its actual message, twisted into claims about which lives were supposedly being valued over others, until the resulting anger and division became almost self-sustaining. That’s the quiet damage sensationalism does to marginalised communities specifically. It doesn’t just misinform. It reinforces exactly the stereotypes and biases that were already sitting underneath the surface, giving them a headline and a news cycle to hide behind.

What I found refreshing in her approach was how she handles the gap that comes with stepping back. She’s not under any illusion that she knows everything happening in the world, and she’s made peace with that trade-off in a way that felt strikingly mature. When I asked whether she ever feels guilty for not knowing about a major event, her answer was honest rather than defensive. She doesn’t, because not knowing also means not speaking with false confidence on things she hasn’t actually taken the time to understand, and that, to her, is worth more than staying current for its own sake. There’s real wisdom tucked into that. A huge amount of the noise clogging public conversation right now comes from people who absorbed a headline, skipped the nuance entirely, and ran straight into an opinion. Choosing not to participate in that particular cycle isn’t ignorance. It’s arguably a form of discipline most of us could use more of.

None of this is an argument for total disengagement, and it’s worth saying clearly that staying informed still matters, particularly for anyone with the capacity to act on what they learn. But there’s a real difference between being informed and being marinated, and most of the American media landscape right now is built for the second, not the first. What her approach points toward, and what a growing number of media researchers have started calling for too, is something closer to solutions-oriented reporting, coverage that doesn’t ignore hard truths but also doesn’t treat every single story as an opportunity to maximise alarm. She said something toward the end of our conversation that’s stuck with me since. She hopes the next generation, her son’s generation, gets to see more of the good than the bad, not because the bad doesn’t exist, but because right now it’s almost the only thing being shown. The quiet, local, human stories, the ones about people showing up for each other, used to have space in the news cycle too. Somewhere along the way they got crowded out by whatever performs best in the algorithm, and that loss is worth naming as its own kind of harm.

Protecting your peace, in this context, isn’t the same as burying your head. It’s an act of discernment, choosing where your attention goes with the same care you’d bring to any other resource that’s finite. The news was never designed to be consumed the way most of us currently consume it, endlessly, passively, at all hours, without a filter between the world’s worst moments and our own nervous systems. She found her own way back to a healthier relationship with it. It might be worth asking, honestly, what yours actually looks like right now, and whether it’s one you chose on purpose or one that simply happened to you.

Mind Over Matter.

Disclaimer: This article is for general psychoeducational and informational purposes only. It reflects personal experiences and perspectives and is not a substitute for individual counselling, psychological assessment, diagnosis, or treatment. Where personal experiences are shared, identifying details have been changed or omitted to protect privacy.

MENS MENTAL HEALTH

MENS MENTAL HEALTH

by Kirsten Rossouw ♥ 0 Leave a Comment

Mind Over Matter Psych Talks | Season 1 Episode 11 | Written Reflection

I spent some time recently talking with two men I’ve known for years, from two very different corners of the world, about mental health. What struck me wasn’t how different their stories were. It was how similar the underlying architecture turned out to be, no matter which continent it was built on. Strip away the specifics of geography and upbringing, and you find the same quiet rule sitting underneath almost every conversation men have, or don’t have, about what’s going on inside them. You handle it yourself, and you don’t make it anyone else’s problem.

That rule gets installed early, and it rarely arrives as an explicit lesson. Nobody sits a boy down and says, out loud, you are not allowed to struggle. It gets absorbed sideways, from watching who gets protected and who’s expected to just cope, from noticing that vulnerability reads as risk rather than honesty in certain rooms. In under-resourced communities, this hardens into something closer to survival logic. If you can’t afford to look soft, because softness actually gets you hurt, then toughness stops being a personality trait and becomes armour you put on before you’re old enough to know you’re doing it. Smiling too freely can get you checked. Talking too openly can mark you as an easy target. So you learn, fast, to keep your inner life to yourself, and you get remarkably good at it.

The strange thing is that this same instinct shows up just as strongly in communities that look nothing alike on the surface. One friend described growing up where the accepted way to manage stress wasn’t therapy, it was a drink or a smoke, something that could dull the noise without ever addressing where the noise was coming from. This is worth naming properly, because it has a term in the psychological literature rather than just being a bad habit. Using a substance to regulate an emotional state you don’t have another way of managing is a recognised pattern called self-medication. It rarely starts as recklessness. It usually starts as the only available tool, something that works in the short term precisely because it quiets the feeling instead of requiring you to sit with it or name it. The trouble is that self-medication treats the symptom and leaves the actual cause completely untouched, which is part of why it tends to need repeating, and repeating, and repeating.

Nobody actively discouraged seeking real help, in either of the conversations I had. It simply wasn’t part of the conversation, because it had never been part of anyone else’s conversation either. That’s the part I think gets missed in a lot of mainstream mental health messaging aimed at men. It’s rarely outright hostility to therapy or emotional openness. It’s more often a total absence of exposure to the idea that there was ever another option on the table.

Part of why that gap is so easy to fall into is that a lot of men simply struggle to identify what they’re feeling in the first place, not just to talk about it. There’s a specific term for this in the research, alexithymia, which describes difficulty recognising, naming and describing one’s own emotional states. It isn’t the same as being emotionally shut down or uncaring. It’s closer to reaching for a feeling and finding the label missing. Some researchers use the term normative male alexithymia to describe how common this pattern is among men specifically, not because of anything biological, but because of how consistently boys are socialised away from emotional vocabulary from a young age. If nobody ever asks you what you’re feeling, and instead asks what happened or what you’re going to do about it, you can grow into an adult with a noticeably underdeveloped internal vocabulary. That matters, because it reframes a lot of what looks like silence or avoidance. Sometimes a man isn’t withholding what he feels. He’s still working out what it actually is.

This also explains why depression in men often doesn’t look like depression at all, at least not the version most people are taught to recognise. Sadness and low mood are only part of the picture. Depression in men more frequently presents as irritability, anger, restlessness, physical complaints such as headaches or fatigue, risk taking, or simply disappearing into work until there’s no time left to feel anything. This is sometimes referred to as masked or externalised depression, and it matters enormously, because a man who is irritable, withdrawn or overworking rather than visibly sad can go completely unnoticed by the people around him, and sometimes by himself. He isn’t performing wellness. He’s often experiencing something real, just filtered through a presentation nobody was taught to screen for.

The stakes of that gap are not abstract. Men die by suicide at markedly higher rates than women in most countries, despite reporting lower rates of diagnosed depression, something researchers sometimes call the gender paradox in suicide. The likely explanation isn’t that men suffer less. It’s that the suffering goes unrecognised for longer, gets self-medicated instead of treated, or simply never gets voiced until there’s a crisis rather than a conversation. This is precisely why the quiet rule matters so much. It isn’t just a cultural quirk or a personality preference for stoicism. Left unaddressed, it can be seriously dangerous, and naming that plainly seems more useful than dancing around it.

Community matters here too, though it cuts in two different directions depending on where you land. In tightly bound communities, mental health support often happens ambiently rather than formally. Everyone knows everyone’s business, and when something goes wrong, the response is instinctive and collective rather than clinical. That has real protective power. It also has a ceiling, because ambient support built entirely on proximity and shared history doesn’t always transfer cleanly to formal treatment, and it can leave serious struggles unaddressed simply because everyone assumes someone else is already handling it. Move into a more individualised environment, the kind many men encounter when they relocate for work, study or opportunity, and the formal access to mental health resources often improves dramatically, therapists, hotlines, campus counselling, real infrastructure, while the ambient, communal safety net that used to exist by default disappears almost overnight. Neither model is complete on its own. The healthiest version, from what I can tell, borrows the openness and infrastructure of one and the instinctive, unconditional showing up of the other.

What actually filled that gap, in both of the conversations I had, wasn’t nothing. It just rarely got labelled as mental health work at the time. Sport came up again and again, not as a vanity project but as one of the only socially sanctioned spaces where men are allowed to feel something intensely and have somewhere physical to put it. Discipline based practices like martial arts offer something even more specific, a structured, repeatable framework for regulating yourself, built around principles like sincerity, effort, etiquette and self control that quietly double as emotional training even when nobody’s calling it that. Reading did similar work for both of the men I spoke with, giving them real, unmonitored time alone with their own thoughts, which is a properly rare commodity for anyone raised with constant noise and constant company, let alone boys raised to believe that solitude looks a lot like weakness.

It’s also worth understanding why sport and shared activity work as emotional outlets specifically for men, rather than assuming it’s simply a preference. Research into male friendship consistently finds that it tends to be organised side by side rather than face to face, built around doing something together, playing, training, fixing, working, rather than sitting across from each other and talking directly about feelings. That isn’t a lesser or more avoidant form of connection. It’s a different architecture for the same underlying need, closeness and support communicated through shared activity and presence rather than direct verbal disclosure. Understanding that helps explain why some of the most meaningful emotional processing in a man’s life might actually happen on a pitch, a mat or a long drive, not despite the lack of direct conversation, but partly because of it.

Race adds its own layer that can’t honestly be separated out from the rest of this. For men navigating a country that isn’t the one they grew up in, mental health isn’t just an individual project, it’s tangled up with identity itself shifting underneath them. A racial category that meant one specific thing at home can mean something entirely different somewhere else, carrying a different history and different assumptions attached to it, whether a person asked for that or not. And for men who’ve grown up with generational trauma sitting quietly in the family history, there’s an added layer of vigilance that runs constantly in the background, a low hum of wondering whether a look or a reaction is about who you are or something else entirely. That’s not paranoia. It’s an accumulated, learned alertness, and it takes real energy to carry, even when nothing overtly hostile is happening in the moment.

That generational thread deserves following a little further, because very little of this starts with the man in front of you. Sons tend to absorb emotional suppression the same way they absorb an accent, by watching it modelled, not by being taught it directly. A father who never named what he felt, who managed everything through silence, work or control, tends to raise a son who assumes that is simply what a man does with difficulty. This is sometimes described as intergenerational transmission, patterns of emotional regulation, or the lack of it, passing down through families largely unnoticed until someone in the line does something different. It doesn’t require a dramatic rupture to interrupt. Sometimes it only takes one man deciding to name a feeling out loud in front of his own son for the pattern to actually bend.

When men do eventually find their way to formal support, the actual clinical relationship seems to matter far more than matching demographics on paper. One of the men I spoke with has spent seven years with a therapist who doesn’t share his racial or cultural background at all, and he was unambiguous that it never mattered. What mattered was whether she understood him as a specific person rather than as a category. This connects to something well established in therapy research, that the strength of the relationship between client and therapist, often called the therapeutic alliance, tends to predict outcomes more reliably than shared identity or technique alone. Feeling truly understood, trusted and safe with the person across from you does more of the work than most people expect. That’s worth sitting with, because a lot of the conversation around access to culturally competent care, important as it is, can accidentally suggest that identity match is the whole answer. Sometimes the more decisive factor is simpler, whether you feel properly seen, and whether you trust the person across from you enough to actually say the hard thing out loud.

None of this adds up to a single fix, because there isn’t one. But a few things came up clearly enough, across two very different lives, that they’re worth mentioning. Men need more visible permission to seek help before a crisis forces the issue, not just messaging that therapy exists, but real modelling from other men that using it doesn’t cost you anything real. Physical and structured outlets, whatever form they take, aren’t a substitute for deeper emotional work, but they’re a legitimate and often underrated entry point into it. Community support and formal mental health infrastructure aren’t competing systems, they’re complementary, and the men who seem to be doing best are usually the ones with access to both. Recognising depression’s less obvious presentations, irritability, withdrawal, overwork, risk taking, physical complaints, matters just as much as recognising visible sadness, because the quiet cases are often the ones that get missed longest. And the specifics of someone’s background, their race, their history, their family’s story, aren’t side notes to their mental health. They’re part of the actual terrain any real support has to be built to hold.

The men I talked with didn’t have a roadmap handed to them for any of this. They built their own, in pieces, out of whatever was available. That shouldn’t have to be the default path. The more this gets talked about openly, the shorter that road gets for the next man walking it.

Mind Over Matter.

Disclaimer: This article is for general psychoeducational and informational purposes only. It reflects personal experiences and perspectives and is not a substitute for individual counselling, psychological assessment, diagnosis, or treatment. Where personal experiences are shared, identifying details have been changed or omitted to protect privacy.

LEVELS OF FRIENDSHIP

LEVELS OF FRIENDSHIP

by Kirsten Rossouw ♥ 0 Leave a Comment

Mind Over Matter Psych Talks | Season 1 Episode 10 | Written Reflection

I moved around a lot as a kid, which meant I got very good, very early, at a particular skill: showing up somewhere new and finding my feet fast. Every new place came with a new set of people, and the goal was simple. Fit in, find my footing, don’t be the outsider for too long. What I didn’t understand yet, because nobody explains this to a child moving schools for the third time, is that not every person you let close is supposed to occupy the same room in your life. I spent years treating friendship as one flat category. You were either in or you weren’t. It took getting burned a few times, in the specific way that only over-trusting people can get burned, to realise the problem was never the people. It was my approach. I had one setting for friendship, and it was wide open.

Understanding this properly means starting further back than adulthood, because friendship doesn’t arrive fully formed. It evolves right alongside us. As children, our friendships are built almost entirely on proximity: who lives nearby, who’s available to play, who happens to be standing next to you at the right moment. There’s no real selectivity involved, because there doesn’t need to be. By adolescence, something shifts. Friendship picks up an emotional weight it didn’t have before, tangled up in validation and belonging and the exhausting, universal project of trying to fit in. Young adulthood brings the next shift, where friendships start clustering around like-mindedness rather than convenience, as we begin building an identity distinct from the people around us. And somewhere in full adulthood, the circle tightens for good. Friendships become deliberately smaller, more selective, built on shared values rather than shared geography. The bond gets introspective. Trust, loyalty and emotional support move from nice-to-haves to non-negotiables.

Once you can see friendship moving through those stages, it becomes much easier to understand why not every connection needs, or deserves, the same amount of you. There’s a useful way to think about this that maps almost perfectly onto lived experience: friendship tends to organise itself in layers, from a wide outer ring of people you recognise and greet, down to a small, dense core of people who actually know you. Some researchers have mapped this numerically, showing that most people can only sustain a handful of truly intimate relationships at once, a slightly larger circle of close friends, a wider layer of casual ones, and then a much broader outer ring of familiar faces. The exact numbers matter less than the shape of it. We are simply not built to hold everyone at the same depth, and trying to is where a lot of the exhaustion and disappointment in adult friendship actually comes from.

At the outer edge, you’ve got acquaintance friendships, and I’d argue they get an unfairly bad reputation for being “just” surface level. They’re casual almost by design. A nod to a neighbour, a familiar face at work or school, someone you’ve crossed paths with enough times to recognise but not enough to actually know. The conversation stays in safe, low-stakes territory, usually the weather or whatever’s in the news that week, and there’s nothing wrong with that. There’s no pressure to perform intimacy you don’t have yet, and that low-pressure quality is exactly the point. Acquaintance friendships create a sense of community, a basic, ambient acknowledgment that you exist in shared space with other people. That matters more than we tend to credit it for.

A step in from that sits casual friendship, which starts to have a bit more shape and regularity to it. These are the people tied to a shared activity or a shared context, the gym, the office, a class you’re both stuck in. You see them often enough that a rhythm forms, and the conversation deepens slightly, still light, still easy, but with room for a bit of banter and the occasional exchange over coffee. You might offer advice here, or receive it, without either of you calling it a big moment. Casual friendships are a great way to widen your world and meet different kinds of people without the emotional overhead of a deeper bond, and having a handful running at once is completely normal.

Then things get more serious. Close friendships are where real support lives. These are the people who show up during the actually difficult stretches, who share something closer to your values and your direction in life rather than just your schedule. Your inner circle. The people who will comfort you and also, crucially, tell you the truth you didn’t ask for but needed. A good close friend holds you accountable and still manages to make you laugh about it five minutes later. These friendships take real, ongoing effort, and they ask more of you than the earlier levels do, but what they hand back, a sense of belonging and security, more than earns it.

And then, right at the centre, sit your intimate, lifelong friends. The ones who know your deepest secrets and somehow still choose to stick around. Your day ones. The people who’ve watched you move through every version of yourself and never once treated it as a reason to leave. For me, that’s my group from high school and university, the ones who first showed me what long term, genuine friendship actually looks like, after years of short-lived connections built purely on wherever I happened to be living at the time. What broke my brain a little, in the best way, was realising I could throw anything at these particular people and they simply wouldn’t walk away. That kind of consistency was a completely foreign concept to a kid who’d spent her whole childhood starting over. To this day that foundation hasn’t found a single crack, and knowing it’s there has made me far more comfortable limiting who else gets let in. My cup is already full.

My partner belongs in that same category, though we arrived there sideways. What became a relationship in 2018 started as a deep, unhurried friendship, and it taught me something I hadn’t fully absorbed until then: that friendship was never about how many people you could collect. It was about the quality of the few you actually kept close. He’s someone who holds his own circle with real boundaries and real intention, quality over quantity, no exceptions, and watching that up close changed how I hold my own relationships too.

Knowing which level a friendship sits at isn’t just a nice bit of self-awareness. It does real, practical work. It manages your expectations, so you stop expecting acquaintance-level effort to feel like close-friend-level loyalty and calling the mismatch a betrayal. It helps you set boundaries that actually make sense for the relationship in front of you, because you know where you stand. It pushes personal growth, since nurturing the right kinds of connections tends to pull you forward rather than hold you in place. It reduces conflict, because you’re not projecting expectations onto a friendship that was never built to carry them. And it sharpens communication, because once you know what a friendship actually is, you can be honest about what you need from it instead of guessing.

The mental health stakes here are not small. Genuine, close friendship has a well-documented way of easing stress, anxiety and low mood, and the reverse is just as true. A lack of meaningful connection tends to show up as isolation, as a thinner support network that leaves you more exposed to daily stress, as a narrower view of the world simply because you’re not being challenged by different perspectives. It can quietly erode confidence too, that particular kind of self-doubt that whispers you’re somehow bad at making friends, when really you might just be surrounded by the wrong ones for this chapter of your life. And toxic friendships do active damage rather than passive neglect, feeding guilt, obligation and a slow emotional drain that’s easy to mistake for normal friendship fatigue. A good friend leaves you feeling respected and embraced, someone who brings out a better version of you. A bad one shows up as competition dressed as camaraderie, quietly threatened by your wins, careless with your boundaries, occasionally outright dishonest. Learning to tell the two apart, and to reassess as you go rather than assuming a friendship is fixed forever, is one of the more underrated adult skills.

If you’re looking to build friendships that actually support your mental health rather than quietly draining it, the fundamentals aren’t complicated. Choose quality over sheer volume. Say what you need instead of hoping it gets guessed. Actually listen, rather than waiting for your turn to talk. Root for the other person’s growth as genuinely as your own. None of that is groundbreaking advice, but living by it consistently is rarer than it should be.

What’s also worth accepting, and this took me longer than I’d like to admit, is that friendships are not meant to be permanent fixtures. They ebb and flow. People grow in different directions, priorities shift, life throws in a move or a career change or a new baby, and connection that once felt effortless suddenly requires more than either of you has to give. Sometimes it’s unresolved conflict. Sometimes it’s just distance, physical or otherwise. Sometimes someone is quietly dealing with something you can’t see, and the friendship simply can’t hold its old shape anymore. None of that automatically means anyone did anything wrong. It usually just means the friendship ran its natural course. That’s a strange thing to accept as an adult, particularly if, like me, you spent childhood assuming trust was something you gave freely and kept forever. But protecting your peace sometimes means letting go of people you’re not actively upset with, simply because that chapter has closed. And it means holding onto the ones who somehow keep choosing to stay, no matter what, a little tighter, because those are the ones building your actual tribe. The family you get to choose, and keep choosing, again and again.

Mind Over Matter.

Disclaimer: This article is for general psychoeducational and informational purposes only. It reflects personal experiences and perspectives and is not a substitute for individual counselling, psychological assessment, diagnosis, or treatment. Where personal experiences are shared, identifying details have been changed or omitted to protect privacy.

THE PSYCHOLOGY OF BIRTHDAYS

THE PSYCHOLOGY OF BIRTHDAYS

by Kirsten Rossouw ♥ 0 Leave a Comment

Mind Over Matter Psych Talks | Season 1 Episode 9 | Written Reflection

I turned twenty-eight on the 19th of May, and true to form, it sent me spiralling into the kind of introspection I usually reserve for New Year’s Eve. Not spiralling in the bad sense, more the sense of catching yourself mid-thought and realising you’ve wandered somewhere interesting. Why do we do this every year? Light candles, blow them out, make a wish we don’t say out loud in case saying it ruins it? Why does one person start counting down the days with genuine glee while another quietly hopes the calendar just skips it?

Birthdays are older than most of our current explanations for why we bother with them. The Egyptians were lighting candles for reasons that had nothing to do with cake and everything to do with warding off evil spirits, treating the day as a marker of transformation rather than a milestone to post about. The Romans came along later and did something that, in hindsight, changed everything: they were the first to celebrate birthdays for ordinary people, not just gods and kings. Which means the entire tradition, at its root, was an act of quiet rebellion, insisting that an ordinary life deserved a day of its own. I like that. I like it a lot, actually, because I have always been what you might call a birthday person, mine or anyone else’s. There is something thrilling about making someone feel seen for twenty-four hours, about the small conspiracy of a surprise, about watching someone’s face do that particular thing it does when they realise people remembered.

But not everyone feels that. Social media would have you believe birthdays are universally adored, a parade of balloons and captions and confetti emojis, but plenty of people quietly dread the day the way some people dread Mondays. There’s a real term for it: birthday blues, sometimes birthday depression, sometimes birthday anxiety, depending on who’s naming it. It shows up before it even shows up. You feel it circling for days beforehand, a kind of low-grade tiredness or disinterest that creeps in ahead of schedule. Some people go quiet. Some withdraw socially just as the day looms, like they’re bracing for impact rather than looking forward to anything. Self-esteem takes a dip. Appetite shifts. There’s a fog that settles in that has nothing to do with the cake you haven’t eaten yet.

So where does that come from? A lot of it, if I’m honest, comes down to expectation, and expectation is a dangerous game, one most of us have played and lost at some point. You have a version of the day in your head, the perfect gathering or the perfect gift, and reality, as it tends to, shows up looking nothing like the mental storyboard. Maybe you’re the type who moves heaven and earth to make everyone else feel celebrated, yet quietly, privately, you’re still waiting for someone to throw you the party you’ve never asked for out loud. And when birthday after birthday passes without it, you start to draw a conclusion that’s hard to shake: nobody’s going to think of this for me unless I spell it out myself. That conclusion, once it takes root, has a way of souring the whole day before it even starts.

Then there’s the ageing of it all, which is its own particular flavour of dread. Birthdays are an annual, unavoidable reminder that time is doing what time does. For some people that reminder tips over into something darker, a kind of countdown logic, where each birthday reads less like a celebration and more like a ticking clock inching toward mortality. The face in the mirror looks a little different. The energy doesn’t bounce back the way it used to. And somewhere in there, a quieter thought creeps in: what have I actually done with the years I’ve already spent? Which is really a different name for the same thing: life assessment. Birthdays are notorious for turning into an audit, particularly the milestone ones. Eighteen. Twenty-one. The big three-oh, the big four-oh, whichever number carries weight in your particular corner of the world. We’ve built entire cultural rituals, extravagant parties, expensive gifts, elaborate expectations, around the idea that certain ages demand certain achievements, and if you haven’t hit them, the day itself can feel like an uncomfortable mirror rather than a celebration. Suddenly you’re thinking about the resolution you made in January and conveniently forgot by February, the hobby you keep meaning to pick up, the promise you made yourself and quietly shelved. And you start doing the maths on whether you still have time, a time frame that, more often than not, somebody else built for you without asking.

Comparison doesn’t help, either, and social media has turned it into a full-contact sport. A single scroll through everyone else’s confetti and candlelit dinners is enough to make your own plans feel small by comparison. That’s the trap of it. The second you start comparing, you’ve already lost, because comparison always finds a way to make you feel like you’re missing something you didn’t know you wanted until you saw someone else have it. Add in family and friends nudging you toward a particular kind of celebration, or the entire gift-industrial-complex insisting that love is measurable in packaging, and you’ve got a day engineered to disappoint almost by design.

And sometimes it’s simpler and sadder than any of that. You’ve just had some shitty birthdays before. A hard year. A first birthday without someone who used to be there. A loss or a change so significant it recoloured the whole occasion permanently, so that the day carries a certain ache no matter how much time has passed. Nostalgia can cut the opposite way, too, chasing the memory of a birthday so good that nothing since has managed to top it, which is its own quiet grief. Some people simply aren’t ready for the amount of change a birthday represents and would rather stay exactly where they are, thank you very much. Others feel the specific dread of being watched, the gifts, the attention, the hosting, the sheer performance of being celebrated, and would honestly rather disappear into a corner with a book. And underneath a lot of it, there’s loneliness: the day arriving and reminding you, pointedly, of who isn’t there to share it.

None of this discriminates by age or background, by the way. You can love your birthday for twenty-seven years running and then, one year, without much warning, feel completely different about it. That’s allowed. The trick isn’t pretending it doesn’t happen. It’s noticing it and actually doing something with it rather than white-knuckling through the day and calling it fine.

For what it’s worth, I’ve always been the birthday person in my family, and I think I know exactly why. We were never a family with much to throw around, but birthdays were somehow always full: good food, good cake, and everyone actually present. We have this tradition of waking each other up with the birthday cake, candles already lit, first thing in the morning, and even now that half my family is scattered across the world, they still send it to me on video. That small, slightly ridiculous ritual has carried more weight for me over the years than any elaborate party could. Turning twenty-eight, I feel steady. Grateful for the decade of mess and growth that got me here, aligned with where I’m headed, and, this is the part that actually surprised me, genuinely proud of the goals I gave myself extra time to reach, rather than disappointed I didn’t rush them. Each birthday I set myself something to carry into the next year, the same way some people do resolutions at New Year’s. And the honest truth is I don’t need much beyond that. My people, a cake, a candle, and a goal, that’s the whole formula. My family taught me, without ever saying it directly, that less really can be more.

If any of this birthday-blues business sounds familiar, there are ways to loosen its grip. Say what you actually want out loud, rather than hoping someone reads your mind. Tell your people how you’d like to be celebrated and where they fit into that picture, because most people aren’t withholding on purpose, they simply don’t know. Let go of the milestone scoreboard society hands you and measure the day against your own priorities instead of someone else’s idea of where you should be by now. It’s worth asking yourself honestly whether your goals are yours or borrowed. If loneliness or sadness creeps in, say that out loud too, to someone who can actually hold it with you; most people would rather know than guess. Write it down if that’s more your speed, what’s actually bothering you, and what you’re looking forward to accomplishing, because a birthday is as good a reset point as January ever was. And write a gratitude list while you’re at it, not as a performative exercise but because it has a way of shrinking the comparison instinct down to something manageable.

A birthday is, at the end of the day, a personal thing, not a public examination. It deserves to be shaped around what actually makes you feel good rather than what looks good from the outside. However you celebrate, celebrate it as yours. Don’t hand another one over to the blues if you don’t have to.

Mind Over Matter.

Disclaimer: This article is for general psychoeducational and informational purposes only. It reflects personal experiences and perspectives and is not a substitute for individual counselling, psychological assessment, diagnosis, or treatment. Where personal experiences are shared, identifying details have been changed or omitted to protect privacy.

THE FIVE PILLARS OF RESILIENCE

THE FIVE PILLARS OF RESILIENCE

by Kirsten Rossouw ♥ 0 Leave a Comment

Mind Over Matter Psych Talks | Season 1 Episode 8 | Written Reflection

For most of my early twenties, I thought resilience was a personality trait, something you either had, like good posture or a high tolerance for spicy food, or something you were quietly missing. My version of it looked like powering through. Suppressing what I felt so I’d never have to sit with fear or anxiety, because feeling those things seemed, somehow, like losing. I built my entire concept of resilience on aggression and hardness, and I wore it like it was armour I’d earned.

I was sorely mistaken.

Resilience isn’t armour. It’s not the art of becoming unbothered. It’s your own built-in protective mechanism, your ability to withstand hard things and recover from them, not by being immune to difficulty but by learning to cope with it, adapt to it, and come out the other side more resourceful than you went in. It’s less “nothing gets to me” and more “I know what to do when something does.” That distinction took me the better part of a decade to understand, and it changed everything about how I approach hard seasons of life.

Here’s the good news: resilience isn’t fixed. It’s not something you’re issued at birth and stuck with. It’s built, the same way a muscle is built, in small repeated efforts rather than one dramatic transformation. And it rests on five pillars. Take the moment to work on each of these, and you’ll find yourself far better equipped to handle whatever your life decides to throw at you next.

1. Mindfulness

Mindfulness gets marketed as some kind of exotic discipline, but at its core it’s simple: being fully present with your thoughts, feelings, and physical sensations, without rushing to judge them. It’s acceptance. It’s the very South African “it is what it is,” minus the shrug and plus a little curiosity.

Practically, mindfulness means looking backward before you look forward. How did you cope last time something went sideways? What patterns show up in how you behave under pressure? Do you react in an instant, or do you take your time? Mindfulness isn’t about tuning out of life. It’s about tuning into yourself. A softer way of listening to your own body and mind.

I needed this one badly. I spent years walking around with my shoulders somewhere near my ears, braced for the next thing, and I didn’t even notice until I started paying attention. Mindfulness is a skill, not a switch. It takes practice and repetition, and it starts absurdly small. A few conscious breaths. Noticing one sensation instead of steamrolling past it. That’s the whole beginning. The difference it made was enough that I started actively pointing other people toward it, too, whether that’s a guided meditation app that tracks your progress (and, yes, mildly guilts you into showing up, I happen to like that part), or just five minutes of stillness before your day starts moving too fast to stop it.

2. Self-Awareness

If mindfulness is tuning in, self-awareness is what you hear once you do. It’s the conscious knowledge of who you actually are: your strengths, your weaknesses, your emotional patterns, what motivates you, what you’re chasing and why. Think of it as a mirror turned inward.

There’s an external layer too: how other people perceive you. That one is trickier, because it depends entirely on what you do with the feedback, whether you let it sharpen you or just let it sting. Used well, it can show you exactly which behaviours need adjusting.

Building self-awareness is a practice of interrogating your own beliefs rather than just holding them. I get a lot of mine from reading philosophy and following ethics discussions, not because I’m trying to win an argument, but because it’s remarkably good at revealing what actually triggers me and which ideas make me uncomfortable enough to be worth sitting with. Keeping a diary works the same way, tracking which emotions show up and what causes them. Like mindfulness, it’s a long game. What you put in is generally what you get out.

3. Self-Care

Self-care has been so flattened by marketing that it’s easy to forget what it actually means: taking deliberate action to care for your body, your mind, and your spirit. A genuine, structural check-in rather than a bubble bath as compensation for burnout.

Physically, that’s the basics people love to skip: movement, food that actually nourishes you, sleep that’s more than a formality. Mentally, it’s whatever keeps your mind stimulated and engaged: meditation, reading, learning something new. And then there’s the part people forget entirely: your spirit. The hobbies and connections that hand you joy, purpose, a reason to feel like yourself again.

None of this is selfish. It’s closer to the opposite. You fill yourself up so you have something left to give the people around you. And there’s no universal formula for it. What restores one person might do nothing for another. The job is to experiment until you find what actually works for you, then build it into a rhythm you can return to.

4. Positive Relationships

There’s a reason “it takes a village” refuses to die as an expression. It’s stubbornly true. Positive relationships are the ones that are healthy, supportive, and genuinely add value to your life. And I’ll be honest: I didn’t take this pillar seriously until my later years, mostly because staying consistent with relationships across life’s different stages is hard.

I left university surrounded daily by my closest people, moved abroad, and quietly assumed the distance would dissolve those bonds. I was wrong, thankfully, but I also got swept up chasing new connections in a new place and let a lot of the old ones go slack, apart from a rare few (my now-partner among them, my greatest find). Looking back, a lot of what I’d been calling friendship was really just proximity. Convenience dressed up as connection.

Over time, distancing myself from relationships that weren’t serving me became less optional and more necessary. I started noticing who got uncomfortable when I grew, who preferred me smaller or unchanged, and where the shared values had quietly disappeared. That’s not a tragedy. Realising someone no longer aligns with where you’re headed is actually a bit of a gift. It clears the field.

What remained were the people who value each other’s thinking. Who discuss ideas instead of people. Who are honest enough to fight fair (real communication, no dressing it up) and who show up consistently to invest in the relationship rather than just enjoy its benefits. Positive relationships don’t have to be romantic; they can be family, professional, platonic. Mine, mostly, are friends: the family you actually get to choose. They’re the first to celebrate your good news and the first to catch you when things go sideways. And here’s the part worth remembering: when you level up in life, only the genuine ones stay close. Anyone running on envy was never really on your team, and that’s fine. Let them go. Building the ones that remain takes time and effort from everyone involved, but it pays for itself many times over.

5. Purpose

Purpose is the why underneath everything you do: the meaning behind your goals, your actions, your decisions. It gives you direction, motivation, a reason to keep going when things get difficult. It’s less a destination and more a compass: something that points you forward and helps you decide, in the moment, what actually matters.

It doesn’t have to be singular or grand. It can be a personal dream, a passion, a career, a role you feel called to, a value you refuse to compromise on. For me, it’s mental health, understanding its complexity and sharing that understanding with other people. My goal of becoming a practicing counsellor grows directly out of that, tied to a broader hope of leaving some kind of real impact behind.

Purpose isn’t static, either. It’s allowed to evolve as you do. The only real rule is not to settle for a path that doesn’t actually align with who you are, because eventually, always, that misalignment catches up with you. Take the time you need to find it. There’s no clock running against you here.

Resilience, in the end, isn’t about becoming someone who doesn’t get knocked down. It’s about becoming someone who knows, deeply and practically, how to get back up, and who trusts that every setback is simply raw material for whatever comes next. It’s learnable. It’s buildable. And unlike the version I believed in at twenty one, it doesn’t require you to feel less. It just asks you to understand yourself a little better.

Take the moment. Start with one pillar. See where it takes you.

Mind Over Matter.

Disclaimer: This article is for general psychoeducational and informational purposes only. It reflects personal experiences and perspectives and is not a substitute for individual counselling, psychological assessment, diagnosis, or treatment. Where personal experiences are shared, identifying details have been changed or omitted to protect privacy.

CULTURAL IDENTITY

CULTURAL IDENTITY

by Kirsten Rossouw ♥ 0 Leave a Comment

Mind Over Matter Psych Talks | Season 1 Episode 7 | Written Reflection

I’m writing this from North Carolina, though the story behind that sentence begins much further away. It starts in South Africa, travels through the United Kingdom, crosses the United States, and somehow keeps finding its way back home.

My partner and I recently drove from Montana to North Carolina, a ten day road trip across a country I’d lived in for years without ever quite seeing it properly. We passed through Montana, Wyoming and South Dakota, through national parks and historic sites and landscapes vast enough to make a person feel genuinely small. It was beautiful. It was also, unexpectedly, heavy. Much of the route ran through land connected to Native and Indigenous communities, and alongside the natural beauty I noticed poverty, loss, and communities still carrying the weight of displacement and historical neglect reduced, elsewhere, to a paragraph in a textbook. I wasn’t prepared for how emotional that would make me, and I think that’s because I’ve spent a great deal of my own life thinking about what it actually means to belong somewhere.

One of the stranger things about cultural identity is that other people sometimes seem more confident about who you are than you’re ever required to be yourself. At one stop, a woman at a petrol station assumed I was Native American and began asking me about nearby trails as though I obviously knew the area. In South Dakota, another woman checked my identification and asked whether my name was my native name. Neither moment upset me exactly. If anything, both left me a little sad, because there’s something quietly uncomfortable about being confidently misidentified by someone with no real understanding of the identity they’re assigning you.

I am South African. I am also Coloured, a South African racial and cultural identity with its own specific historical and social context, and my heritage includes African, European and Indian ancestry among others. That identity doesn’t translate neatly into every country’s understanding of race, and that mismatch has been its own education. When I first started working in the United States back in 2017, a colleague once told me I couldn’t possibly be Coloured because I was African, and therefore, in his framework, I had to be Black. I remember thinking, quite genuinely, how are you arguing with me about my own identity. I tried explaining the South African context, including the fact that the word Coloured carries an entirely different history there than the slur it’s associated with in America. That conversation taught me something worth holding onto. Our cultural frameworks are not universal. American history is not world history. A word doesn’t automatically carry the same meaning simply because the spelling matches, and neither does identity.

There’s a psychological concept sitting underneath most of this, cultural identity, the part of our sense of self that develops through our connection to culture, ethnicity, nationality, language, tradition, belief, family and community. It isn’t handed to us at birth and quietly stored away. It develops through lived experience. We learn what’s considered normal, what’s acceptable, what makes us feel connected, and sometimes, unfortunately, we learn which parts of ourselves make other people uncomfortable. I learned that particular lesson very young.

My family moved from South Africa to North London when I was a child, and we spent roughly a decade in the United Kingdom. I want to be clear that the move itself was one of the better decisions my family ever made, full of genuinely beautiful memories, friendships and achievements. But being grateful for a chapter doesn’t require pretending every page of it was easy. On my first day at an English primary school, feeling academically confident and entirely comfortable in how I spoke, I was asked to count. The first word out of my mouth was naught. The classroom erupted into laughter. They asked me to repeat it. I did, and the laughter only grew. I had no idea what I’d done wrong. I’d simply used a word that made complete sense to me, and suddenly my own language had become a visible marker of difference. That was only the beginning. At break time I was called racial slurs, told by other African children that I couldn’t really be African because I didn’t look African, and handed labels like mixed breed and half caste that I had no framework yet to process. I only understood, as a child, that the version of myself I’d arrived with wasn’t being particularly well received. So I started adapting.

This is where psychology gives language to something I originally just experienced as trying to fit in. When people move between cultures, they often go through acculturation, the psychological and behavioural changes that develop through sustained contact with another culture. New social rules get learned. Expressions get picked up. The way you dress, speak, eat and even understand yourself can shift, sometimes exciting, sometimes painful, often both. For me, the first thing to change was my accent. I picked up local slang, adjusted my pronunciation, and grew genuinely anxious about reading aloud in class because my own voice had become something I was suddenly self conscious of. Eventually I got remarkably good at shifting it depending on company, though I didn’t have a name for what I was doing at the time. It was code-switching, the process of adjusting how we communicate depending on the social or cultural context we’re in, whether that’s language, accent, vocabulary, tone or behaviour. My South African accent came naturally at home. Around British friends, I adapted. It became genuine over time rather than performed, simply another real part of me that had developed alongside everything else. But there’s a meaningful difference between choosing how you communicate and feeling like you have to change how you communicate in order to be accepted, and that distinction matters enormously. Code-switching can be a genuinely useful social skill. It becomes something closer to self erasure when the underlying message shifts from flexibility to the way you naturally speak simply isn’t acceptable here.

My lunchbox became another quiet battleground. I remember opening it at school to good curry, the kind of properly flavourful, second day curry that genuinely earns its reputation, and clocking the turned noses and reactions from the kids around me. Eventually I stopped wanting those lunches at all and started choosing blander food instead. Looking back, I wasn’t simply changing what I ate. I was negotiating my own visibility. Food was home, family, culture, all at once, and when that culture started attracting unwanted attention, I quietly began hiding it. That’s one of the less obvious ways cultural assimilation actually happens, the gradual process through which someone from a minority or migrant group increasingly adopts the dominant culture around them, sometimes voluntarily, sometimes because the environment simply makes adaptation feel necessary, and often without ever consciously deciding to do it. I loosened my tie. I rolled up my skirt. I asked my mother to stop walking me to school so I could walk home the way the other children did. I wasn’t thinking, today I will assimilate. I was a child trying to make friends, which is exactly why cultural identity and belonging are so tightly bound together. We don’t develop identity in isolation. We develop it in relationship with the people around us, and if those people repeatedly signal that certain parts of you are strange or embarrassing, that message tends to get absorbed long before you have the tools to challenge it. For a while I distanced myself from my Indian heritage too, even though my grandfather is Indian and that history is genuinely mine. The hostility I’d encountered made we want to quietly step away from it. That’s what makes experiences like this psychologically significant. The real problem was never simply that someone said something unkind. It’s the message sitting underneath it, that something about you makes you unacceptable here, and when you’re young, that message can settle in before you’re equipped to question it.

Migration rarely gets talked about in these terms. People discuss it as an adventure, a new home, a new school, a new opportunity, and all of that is true. What gets left out is the psychological labour of learning to exist inside an entirely different social environment while simultaneously trying to work out who you actually are. You’re not just learning where the supermarket is. You’re learning the unwritten rules, often while still a child, often while doing both at once.

I was proudly South African before I ever left. Growing up in a diverse, urban part of the country, with friends across different races and backgrounds, I simply hadn’t spent much of my childhood thinking consciously about race at all. Then, almost overnight, I found myself being categorised, questioned, labelled and corrected, moving from a place where my identity had felt entirely ordinary to one where parts of it suddenly needed explaining. And when I eventually returned to South Africa as an older teenager, I discovered I didn’t feel completely South African anymore either. I’d changed. I’d built independence, friendships and achievements in the UK, absorbed enough of that culture that coming home meant facing another, quieter kind of adjustment. I wasn’t automatically Coloured enough anymore, not because anything about my heritage had changed, but because my experiences had. This is something people rarely understand about cultural identity. Returning home geographically doesn’t automatically return you to the person who left. There’s a real term for the disorientation that can follow, reverse culture shock, and I lived through my own version of it, missing the independence and friendships I’d built abroad while simultaneously feeling a stronger pull back toward being proudly South African than I’d ever felt before leaving.

Eventually I stopped treating those identities as though they were in competition. I didn’t need to decide whether I was more South African or more British, because I could simply be both. That’s really where the idea of a bicultural identity becomes useful, identifying with and navigating more than one cultural framework at once, not by splitting yourself neatly in half but by letting different cultural experiences become part of the same whole person. The British part of me never made the South African part less authentic. It just meant I’d grown somewhere else too. Today I can genuinely value the independence the UK gave me alongside the hospitality, family closeness, respect for elders, food, music and warmth that shaped my South African upbringing, without needing to choose between them. That, I think, is the point at which cultural identity stops being about survival and starts being about ownership, because there’s a real difference between adapting because you have to and adapting because you have the freedom to choose what actually fits you.

Living in the United States as an adult gave me yet another version of this same lesson. I’ve fielded some remarkable questions about South Africa, plenty of assumptions about my race, my accent, my heritage, occasionally from people who couldn’t have located the country on a map. I’ve had to explain, repeatedly, that Africa is not a country, that South Africa carries its own distinct history, that being African doesn’t automatically determine someone’s race, and that being mixed doesn’t mean the person in front of you is confused about who they are. But something in me has genuinely shifted. The girl who once hid her curry is now considerably more comfortable talking about exactly where she comes from. The child who altered her accent to fit into a room now understands that her voice never needed anyone’s permission. The teenager who came home wondering whether she was still enough now knows identity was never something measured by how perfectly it fits someone else’s expectations.

What I’ve grown most comfortable with, honestly, is educating people who genuinely want to learn. There’s something worthwhile in that exchange, someone asks, I explain, they listen, and I usually learn something about them in return. That’s cultural curiosity at its best, and it’s worth distinguishing from its opposite. Being interested in another culture should never turn the person from that culture into a walking encyclopedia, and curiosity without humility curdles quickly into assumption. I don’t mind someone saying they don’t know much about South Africa and asking me to explain. What sits far less comfortably is being told, flatly, no, that isn’t what you are. There’s a real difference between not knowing and refusing to learn, and that distinction matters more and more in a world where increasing numbers of people are living across cultural boundaries rather than neatly inside one.

There’s an odd contradiction built into most immigrant experiences worth naming plainly. You leave because something mattered enough to make leaving worthwhile, and then you spend years defending exactly why the place you left still matters to you, your food, your language, your people, your history, sometimes defending yourself against misconceptions that were never accurate in the first place. I’ve done this from childhood well into adulthood, from a young girl explaining why she was African despite not matching someone else’s visual expectation, to a grown woman explaining what being Coloured actually means. But that lifelong translating has given me something real in return. It’s made me curious about other people’s cultures, interested in ancestry and migration, and considerably more alert to how quickly an us and a them can get invented out of very little.

Cultural identity was never only about asking who am I. Sometimes the more useful questions are who was I allowed to be, who did I have to become to feel safe, which parts of myself did I hide, which parts did I adapt, which parts did I eventually reclaim, and perhaps most importantly, which parts do I now actively choose to keep. For anyone who’s moved countries, married into another culture, grown up between cultures, been raised by immigrant parents, or simply never quite fit the cultural box other people expected them to occupy, those questions tend to land with real weight. Identity isn’t fixed. It evolves. Experiences leave marks, and so do people and places, some of which hurt, some of which teach, some of which end up making us considerably stronger. Which is worth remembering in both directions, because a careless comment about someone’s accent might feel insignificant to whoever says it, and a joke about someone’s lunch might be forgotten within minutes, but the person on the receiving end often carries it for a great deal longer. Children in particular are learning who they are largely through the reactions of the people around them, which means one of the more useful things any of us can practise in an increasingly multicultural world is becoming a little less certain about other people and a little more genuinely curious. Ask before assuming. Listen before correcting. Learn before judging. Someone’s difference is rarely a problem waiting to be solved. More often it’s simply a story you haven’t heard yet.

I think about all of this now from North Carolina, tracing the line from the girl who arrived in North London with her South African accent and her curry filled lunchbox, through the teenager who came home carrying pieces of Britain with her, to the woman who ended up in the United States once again explaining her own identity to strangers. I don’t feel divided anymore. I feel layered, and there’s a real difference between the two. I carry South Africa with me. I carry the UK with me. I carry every friendship, every place, every uncomfortable conversation and every version of myself that had to work out how to belong, and none of those versions needs to disappear for the current one to exist. That, I think, is what genuinely growing into a cultural identity looks like. Not becoming less of where you came from, and not becoming more of somewhere else, but growing secure enough in yourself to carry the whole collection at once. Belonging, in the end, was probably never about finding the one place you fit perfectly. It’s closer to reaching the point where you no longer need to edit yourself to fit anywhere at all.

Mind Over Matter.

Disclaimer: This article is for general psychoeducational and informational purposes only. It reflects personal experiences and perspectives and is not a substitute for individual counselling, psychological assessment, diagnosis, or treatment. Where personal experiences are shared, identifying details have been changed or omitted to protect privacy.

SEVEN BEST DOCTORS

SEVEN BEST DOCTORS

by Kirsten Rossouw ♥ 0 Leave a Comment

Mind Over Matter Psych Talks | Season 1 Episode 6 | Written Reflection

There are certain things we spend an extraordinary amount of money trying to replace that have been sitting quietly in front of us the entire time. Sunlight. Water. Rest. Fresh air. Movement. Good food. Even the moon. We call them ordinary because they’re familiar, and perhaps that’s exactly why we overlook them.

I started thinking about this after a conversation with colleagues about how readily we reach for medication, products and quick fixes the moment something in the body or mind feels out of balance. It got me thinking about how easy it is to become disconnected from the things that supported us long before wellness became an industry. Before anyone misunderstands me, this isn’t an argument against medicine. There are moments when medicine is necessary, important and genuinely life-saving, and I’m not suggesting anyone replace professional healthcare with a walk in the sunshine and a glass of water. But there is something worth remembering about the basics. Our bodies aren’t machines that only respond when we intervene from the outside. They’re constantly responding to the environment around them, and sometimes, before going searching for something complicated, it’s worth asking whether we’ve neglected something incredibly simple.

For me, that starts with the sun. I grew up in a beach city in South Africa, so sunshine was never something I had to deliberately schedule into my day, it was simply there, part of childhood, sand between your toes and that particular exhaustion that comes after a full day outside, the good kind of tired that meant bedtime never had to be negotiated. Then I moved to the UK, and the sun developed a rather impressive disappearing act. I was too young at the time to understand seasonal affective disorder, but I could see that the lack of sunlight affected people, more lethargy, lower moods, an almost instinctive pull toward staying indoors. Looking back, I understand that differently now. Daylight plays a genuine role in our circadian rhythm, and sunlight supports vitamin D production, which in turn supports bone and immune health, while light exposure more broadly helps regulate the body’s relationship with sleep. There’s also something about sunshine that doesn’t always need a scientific explanation. You wake up, see a bright blue sky, and the day suddenly feels possible, even though nothing has actually changed, the emails are still waiting, the laundry remains committed to its existence. But you feel a little more ready to meet the day, and that matters. None of this is a suggestion to spend hours in unprotected sun, skin protection matters and excessive UV exposure carries real risk, my own childhood memories involve sunscreen applied with the dedication of a small construction project, white cast and all. But safe, sensible daylight exposure is something we shouldn’t take for granted, especially when we’re feeling low. Sometimes you simply need to step outside and let the sun find you.

Moving from South Africa to the UK also made me notice something else I’d taken for granted: water. I’d grown up drinking tap water without a second thought, then found myself somewhere I wasn’t particularly fond of the taste or quality, and started buying bottled water instead. It sounds like such a small thing, but it made me realise how invisible water becomes when access to it is easy. We only really notice it once it isn’t there. Our bodies depend on adequate hydration for so many everyday functions, and dehydration leaves us feeling tired, sluggish and foggy, which is why I like the idea of beginning the morning with water rather than reaching straight for coffee, giving the body something it actually needs after hours of sleep without any. Water isn’t only something we drink, either. It can also be somewhere we go. I grew up around the sea, and I underestimated how much that relationship was doing for me until I was away from it, there’s something about floating that temporarily convinces you that you don’t have to carry quite so much. The sound of waves breaking against the shore becomes its own kind of mental white noise, and rain does something similar for me, the sound of it, the smell of it, simply standing outside and letting the weather happen around me. There’s something grounding about that. You don’t have to do anything or fix anything. You can simply listen. And if the ocean or standing in the rain isn’t your thing, a warm bath or a long shower can offer that same sense of slowing down, a few quiet minutes in water without your phone demanding your attention. Water doesn’t always have to be an activity. Sometimes it can simply be a pause.

Which brings me naturally to something we’re becoming increasingly bad at giving ourselves: rest. We live in a culture that can make exhaustion sound like an achievement. I’ve been so busy. I barely slept. I’ll rest when everything is done, except everything is rarely done, there’s always another email, another responsibility, another thing waiting, and somewhere along the way we started treating rest as though it has to be earned. It doesn’t. Sleep isn’t wasted time and rest isn’t laziness, the body is doing important work while we’re asleep, restoring itself, regulating processes, consolidating memories, supporting the brain and body in ways we don’t consciously experience. Anyone who’s had a genuinely terrible night’s sleep knows this without needing a textbook to explain it, you wake up irritable, your concentration is somewhere in another postcode, and the smallest inconvenience suddenly feels like a personal attack. Good rest isn’t simply about collapsing into bed at the end of an exhausting day. It’s also about creating an environment in which the mind understands the day is actually ending, dimming the lights, putting the phone down, letting the noise get quieter, giving yourself permission to transition. If the last thing your brain experiences before sleep is an endless stream of messages and other people’s lives, it’s unreasonable to expect it to switch off on command. Sometimes the body simply needs reminding that it’s allowed to rest.

And when I think about rest, I inevitably think about breathing, another thing we do constantly without giving it much attention at all. I only really began paying attention to my breath once I discovered yoga, something automatic suddenly became something I could consciously work with. Belly breathing was one of the first techniques I explored, and later I started using structured patterns like 4-7-8, particularly when my anxiety was running high. There’s something strangely powerful about giving your attention to the rhythm, inhale, pause, exhale, again, because for a few moments there’s genuinely nowhere else for your mind to go. I particularly enjoy doing this outdoors. Fresh air is one of those things we only notice once we’ve been indoors too long, you step outside and suddenly realise how stale everything had felt. When you’re feeling low, I know going outside can feel like the last thing you want to do, the bed feels safer, the curtains feel better closed, the world feels like too much effort. But if you can manage it, put your shoes on and step outside. You don’t need to conquer anything. Just breathe. Notice the air, the season, how differently spring smells from autumn, the particular sharpness of winter, how summer feels against your skin. There’s something grounding about remembering that you’re a body living in a world, rather than simply a mind trapped inside one.

Once you’re outside, you might as well move a little. Movement has always had a complicated relationship with me because I spent so much of my younger life playing competitive sport, and when you’re young, movement is simply part of the routine, built into your day without much thought. Then adulthood arrives and movement becomes something you have to schedule. The gym wasn’t always the answer for me, after years of competitive sport, my body sometimes needed something that felt less like punishment and more like care, which is where yoga came in during COVID, movement my body actually wanted, less like fighting my muscles and more like giving them a massage. That’s a useful way of looking at exercise generally. It shouldn’t always feel like punishment for having a body. Sometimes it’s simply a way of showing your body that you still care about it, whether that’s walking, swimming, running, dancing around the kitchen or taking the stairs instead of turning a walk into a performance. You don’t have to become the person who wakes up at five and runs ten kilometres before breakfast. Start where you are, move a little more, then move again tomorrow. Consistency has always made more sense to me than perfection.

Movement can’t exist entirely separately from what we’re putting into the body, either. You can exercise until the cows come home, but if you’re consistently giving your body very little real nourishment, eventually it’s going to have something to say about it. Food became something I appreciated far more once I moved away from South Africa. Growing up, I came home to a proper meal, my mother firmly of the opinion that a plate should look like a plate, vegetables, carbohydrates, protein and enough colour to make it obvious that something living had once been involved. I didn’t realise at the time how fortunate that was. Once I moved away, I was suddenly surrounded by boxed meals and highly processed food that looked convenient but didn’t leave me feeling particularly good, and my gut noticed, my body noticed, and eventually I started listening. That’s one of the most important parts of nutrition, learning to listen to your own body instead of blindly following whatever food trend happens to be shouting loudest. Food isn’t simply about weight. It’s fuel and nourishment, and it affects our energy, digestion, concentration and how we feel physically, and there’s no prize for eating something that makes you miserable simply because somebody online decided it was healthy. Your body gets a vote too. For me, getting back to basics with food has meant appreciating simple, nourishing meals and paying real attention to what actually makes me feel well.

And then, after all that talk of what we put into the body and how we move through the day, it’s worth looking up, because there’s one final natural rhythm we don’t talk about nearly enough: the moon. Not because I believe it’s some magical cure for whatever troubles us, the evidence for specific claims about lunar phases changing human behaviour is considerably less convincing than the evidence around daylight, sleep and circadian rhythms. But the moon represents something we badly need reminding of, that we’re cyclical beings, not designed to operate at full capacity every single day. There’s light and darkness, activity and stillness, waking and sleeping, expansion and retreat. The natural world doesn’t apologise for changing. Trees don’t feel guilty when they lose their leaves, the sky doesn’t apologise for going dark, the ocean doesn’t stay still simply because we’d prefer it to. Everything moves through cycles. Why should we be any different. Perhaps that’s why I like looking at the moon at night. It gives us perspective. You can have a difficult day, an overwhelming week, a season of life that feels entirely upside down, and then you look up and there it is, quietly carrying on. It doesn’t solve your problems. But sometimes perspective doesn’t need to solve anything. Sometimes it simply needs to remind you that your problems are not the entire universe.

That’s really what I keep coming back to with all seven of these natural doctors. They aren’t about finding a miraculous alternative to healthcare. They’re about remembering the relationship we already have with the world around us. The sun reminds us to step outside. Water reminds us to replenish. Rest reminds us that productivity is not the same thing as wellbeing. Air reminds us to breathe. Movement reminds us that our bodies are meant to be lived in. Food reminds us that nourishment matters. And the moon reminds us that we’re allowed to have seasons. I think we’ve become very good at complicating health, always another product, another programme, another supplement promising to optimise us, and some of those things surely have their place. But I keep wondering whether we sometimes need to stop trying to optimise our lives long enough to actually live them. Go outside. Drink some water. Eat something that makes you feel good. Move your body. Breathe properly. Sleep. Look up. None of these things are glamorous, and none of them will arrive in beautiful packaging or promise to transform your life in seven days. But perhaps that’s exactly why they matter. They’ve been here all along. Getting back to basics isn’t going backwards, it’s remembering what we knew before everything became so complicated. Sometimes the way forward isn’t about discovering something new. Sometimes it’s about returning to something we forgot.

Mind Over Matter.

Disclaimer: This article is for general psychoeducational and informational purposes only. It reflects personal experiences and perspectives and is not a substitute for individual counselling, psychological assessment, diagnosis, or treatment. Where personal experiences are shared, identifying details have been changed or omitted to protect privacy.