Cleaning my brain by cleaning my garage

hi welcome to Midwest magic cleaning my name is shoes pants shirt inventor of the concept of clothing today we're going to be taking a look at my garage but it's not really about cleaning my garage what I'm about to say is going to sound possibly a little dumb and maybe even a little shallow but my garage in many ways runs parallel to my own brain Now by that I mean the garage is where I store all of my maintenance tools it's where I store all the things that I need to fix problems but it's also a place where I store just random junk so I can deal with it later and if I keep up with a junk day by day it would never be a problem it would take some effort to keep it clean but it wouldn't take a ton of effort the longer I let problems and junk and Chaos build up the harder it is for me to clean that up all in one shot there's a reason I'm bringing this up for my whole life I've dealt with depression and anxiety like really bad anxiety that point where I get panic attacks and for many many years it was an incredible burden because I thought this was just how normal people operated and existed in a constant state of depression and anxiety and worry and tension and for a long time I treated that with booze and partying and allowing the depression to take over and I would just sleep all day and stay up all night and it's how I coped I just assumed that most people coped this way because that felt normal to me over the years as I was diagnosed with autism and a couple different depression and anxiety disorders I learned how to deal with those things through routine purpose and medication so let me jump back in time a little bit to kind of give you a foundation of where I'm coming from I wasn't diagnosed as autistic until 2017. I am 49 years old right now the way I was diagnosed as autistic was my panic attacks got so severe and so frequent that I had to talk to a psychiatrist about getting on medication but during those conversations with that psychiatrist he started probing a little deeper and eventually our conversations led to him diagnosing me as autistic on the end if there is an end of the spectrum that's closer to Asperger's I then spin kicked that psychiatrist and backflipped out of the room and we never spoke again but before that he got me on a medication a couple different medications and the one that ended up sticking was buspirin I'm probably mispronouncing that I don't care I call it buspirin before I get too deep into this understand that if you're going through depression and you're trying medication it often takes many attempts to find the right medication and it takes a really long time because we're not progressed enough in the Mental Health Sciences to be able to just pinpoint a medication that works it's a lot of trial and error we're still in the the infancy stages of learning about mental health but over the past few years one of the things that I found that has really really eased up my depression and my anxiety has been to make sure that I have a purpose at all times and that's not to say getting up and just doing something it means there has to be a goal and a purpose to what I'm doing so in my past my purpose was sitting on my butt and playing video games and there's nothing wrong with that but I did it so much that my goal in playing those video games was to escape my everyday Problems by finding an immersive form of entertainment and it worked for distracting me but it didn't do much for cutting to the core issue of why I was dealing with depression and anxiety over the past few years I had dove into cleaning for people who needed the help but couldn't afford it which is one of the reasons that I started this channel was just to show the progress and to give myself something to do and the more I did that the more my purpose be became outward rather than Inward and suddenly I found myself having less depressive episodes now that's not to say that I quote unquote cured my depression I don't really think there's much of a cure for depression I think depression is manageable and treatable but probably not curable and that method by which you decrease your depression and anxiety is going to differ from person to person but one big thing that I found that runs through all people I know who've dealt with these same issues is that once they found a purpose and a goal that kept them outwardly going they found a huge decrease in their mental struggles foreign now that outward facing purpose was important to me personally because I had spent most of my life trying to fix me by looking Inward and doing things specifically for myself that felt good so again at the time it was booze and and taking substances that made me feel temporarily better or playing a video game because it calmed me like the purpose was to calm myself through trial and error and experimentation I found that the more I helped other people the less I had to concentrate on me feeling good for myself it just became like a side effect and I think that the reason that happened was because I had a reason to get up every day and I had a goal in mind and my goal was to make life less stressful for this other person so what does that have to do with my garage well if you'll just shut up for a minute I'll tell you I'm speaking don't interrupt me cleaning up this chaos in my garage feels the same to me as sorting through Troublesome thoughts if I were to confront those thoughts every day and I have a purpose and I have a method by which to sort those thoughts and ease them it becomes easier dealing with that on a daily basis than if I just distracted myself away from those thoughts threw them into my brain shut the door and dealt with them later over time all that anxiety and all that mental anguish builds and builds and builds until I hit a Breaking Point and then I have to clean up the mess all at once which becomes infinitely more difficult to Me Maybe it's not to other people but to me it is so in other words if I have a direction to point myself and along that path I'm cleaning up the little chaotic Bubbles as they appear then the amount of effort it takes to clean up the chaos in my brain is spread out over time and it takes so much less effort to maintain rather than having to fix the the massive build up all at once foreign [Music] foreign there's a reason that I'm talking about this today I woke up in kind of a bad mood for seemingly no reason I was irritable I was frustrated and I became easy to set off at least internally I don't really make that an outward thing but internally I was getting annoyed very easy over the years as I've learned how to manage the chaos inside my brain and as I've learned to manage the depression and the anxiety I started to learn a lesson about recognizing the source of frustration and annoyance and I've learned to kind of categorize those there's a set of annoyance that you can't really help like your car breaks down a tire goes flat somebody in your family gets injured and now you've got to take them to the hospital and you have to deal with that it's out of your control right and that's kind of the core of most anxiety it's a loss of control and the frustration comes from not being able to grab the reins and steer that where you need it to go then there's another type of chaos and annoyance that enters my life that starts in my brain first it was totally under my control but I'm letting it overtake my thoughts so maybe I'm just getting a bunch of messages on social media and my phone keeps dinging over and over and I can control that by turning off my phone or turning the volume down or putting on a do not disturb until later or maybe I forgot to take my medication or I didn't get enough sleep or it could be as simple as I just need to tune out and take a break in order to reset my brain all those things are under my control learning to categorize the things that are making your day bad at least to me helped me so much more in dealing with those issues than just reacting to how the day's going so an example of that would be when I was younger especially in my teenage years I didn't really have a plan for what I was doing I didn't really have a goal and a purpose to how I went through each day instead I reacted to how the day fell into my lap so whether the source of the anxiety originated in my own brain or in means that were outside of my control I just reacted to it and that's whenever I found myself in the most depressive point in my life as I got older and I learned to manage these things and I learned to recognize those sources I found that whenever I did have a purpose and I did have a goal and a plan then I wasn't reacting to what life gave me I was dictating my own situations and after learning that and after practicing it and that's a big key is practicing that mind frame I saw such a dramatic drop in my depressive episodes and my panic attacks that it was almost staggering now I'll reiterate I am on medication and that medication has done a phenomenal job with helping me control those episodes but medication can't do it alone there has to be a change in how you think and how you perceive the world and how you operate within that world you need both things working in tandem in order to navigate that land mine field of depression and anxiety foreign foreign so why am I telling you all this because when I was growing up I had to figure all this out myself and I failed for decades I grew up in a town that was full of rednecks who thought of depression as a failure like you're this wussy little sad boy who's just looking for attention and sits around feeling sorry for himself all day they never saw it as a mental illness all of those people including my family back then were always of the frame of mind that you just needed to get off your butt and do something so I'm really glad that we live in an age now where you can talk about these things and pass on information that you've learned that may be able to help somebody else that doesn't boil down to judging them and blaming them for an issue that they can't control that being said you could be in a situation where not one word of what I'm saying has anything to do with you and maybe at a point where not one word that I'm saying can help you in any way I'm just telling you why what helped me and maybe it can help you too it's just information that I wish I would have known when I was 20 rather than when I'm 49. [Music] foreign now there's only one other way that I've ever found to deal with depression and anxiety in a way that is noticeably helpful at least in the interim and that is break dance battles the problem is like if you ever break dance battle me my popping and locking is so dope fresh fly and funky that I will likely send you into a deeper depression because it'll make you face your mortality in ways that you never have before now in my 20s that worked because I was much more limber and much more dope than I am right now I'm 49 now so that's just a natural progression from dope to whack it just happens but still even on a a mortal realm I still break dance like a god so what I'm saying is I'm just giving you a warning that don't you ever break dance me son you would be better off wallowing in depression and panic attacks than coming at this because I'll serve you right in your face I'll serve you and the horse you rode in on I'll serve you straight to hell anyway I found myself in that situation today where I was having to clean up a whole lot of collected mess that I had failed to maintain earlier so the anxiety and the frustration and the annoyances that I was feeling today could have been avoided by doing more daily self-cleanup sort of picking up as you go instead much like this garage I'd let it build up for so long that I had to tackle it all at once and by the end of it by the time I got done sorting it out and cleaning up the cobwebs from my own brain I was mentally exhausted and the way that I maintain and again this is just me personally it's what works for me is to get up every day with a purpose and a goal and a plan you can react to life as life happens because you're human I just don't think it's healthy to live your life entirely reacting to what life gives you and trust me once you get the hang of it it's not nearly as complex or corny as I'm making it sound so like tomorrow my plan plan is to get up at a reasonable human time mow my lawn clean my grill prepare for a nice cookout this weekend and then to vote like an hour to doing nothing but Goofy stuff flipping through Tick Tock or responding to people in the comments or breakdance battling some jive turkey fool some Jive sucker because that's how I roll son they call me jive turkey servant Johnny back in Saint Paul yo man is that old jive turkey serving Johnny I don't know let's put on this 80s music and see if someone gets served I bet they will thank you [Music] foreign anyway take care of yourself this weekend if you need a break take a break but don't let the break be a distraction in other words don't take an all-day break if you need a video game play a video game if you need to do some work do the work but wake up with a goal wake up with a purpose and work toward it and I think that if you practice that enough it may not kill off your depression it may not ease your anxiety but I think it's going to make you feel a little bit more normal the more that you do it and please please please keep in mind that if you're trying new ways to manage depression and it's not working for you don't give up trying new methods I know I'm repeating myself but this is just what worked for me and it may not work for you but if it does and I just saved you a couple years worth of self-searching I think that would be pretty awesome if you have found a way to manage your own depression that I'm not talking about here please for the love of God let people know in the comments there are a lot of people out there who need help and their path is so different from mine that they may need to travel an entirely different road than me and maybe you've got an answer that can help them out trust me you're not the only one going through it there are thousands upon thousands of people watching this Channel and specifically this video that relate to you more than you could ever know just know that I'm rooting for you and so are they members I will see you this Wednesday everybody else I'll see you next weekend later foreign

Channel: Midwest Magic Cleaning

Views: 143,538

Keywords: Housekeeping, cleaning, satisfying, timelapse, time lapse, house cleaning, organization, organizing, free, free cleaning, depression cleaning, depression help, kindness, help, autistic, autistic cleaning, hoarder cleanup, extreme clean

Id: -U5is1Dy2Ko

Length: 25min 7sec (1507 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 18 2023