The Things We Use to Switch Off

amurphy2332
Aug 29
7 min read

Men's mental health, overthinking and the risks we don't always see

There is something slightly strange about the way we approach health and safety at work. We can spend hours discussing the condition of a scaffold, the suitability of a lifting accessory or whether somebody has selected the correct gloves, yet the condition of the person actually doing the work can receive considerably less attention.

I don't mean whether they are trained, competent or physically capable of doing the job. We are generally quite good at establishing those things. I mean what is actually happening inside their head when they arrive at work that morning.

Maybe they haven't slept properly for three nights. Maybe their marriage is falling apart, they are worried about money, somebody they love is ill or their mind simply hasn't stopped racing since they opened their eyes. They still arrive at work, put their boots on, have a brew, take the piss out of somebody and get on with the day.

Nobody necessarily knows that anything is wrong.

Men can be particularly good at this.

"I'm fine" has probably concealed more complicated stories than almost any other sentence in the English language.

When your head never really goes quiet

I've written quite a lot about overthinking because I find the subject fascinating. Not simply worrying, but the way some minds seem determined to keep working long after there is anything useful left to think about.

You replay conversations and wonder whether you should have said something differently. You predict conversations that haven't happened yet and prepare responses to imaginary versions of them. You solve problems that don't currently exist, revisit ones you've already solved and occasionally create entirely new ones because apparently the existing selection wasn't keeping you sufficiently occupied.

It can be exhausting, particularly because very little of it is visible from the outside.

Someone can be productive, successful, funny, sociable and apparently completely in control while simultaneously carrying an enormous amount of noise around in their head. There doesn't have to be a breakdown or some dramatic moment where everything collapses. Often people just keep functioning.

That's probably one of the reasons we don't always recognise it as a problem.

You go to work. You answer the emails. You make decisions. You pick the kids up. You go to the gym. You make dinner. You watch television. Life continues to look perfectly normal.

The difficulty comes when your body eventually wants to stop but your mind doesn't.

So we find ways of making it stop

Most of us have something that allows us to disappear for a while.

For some people it's alcohol. For others it's gambling, food, shopping, gaming, pornography, endless scrolling or spending every available hour working. Sometimes it's something that looks completely healthy from the outside, like training twice a day or constantly finding another project to occupy yourself with.

The behaviour itself doesn't necessarily tell you very much. The reason behind it does.

There is a considerable difference between having a few drinks because you enjoy having a few drinks and discovering that you increasingly need those drinks because they're the only reliable way of turning your brain down for the evening. There is a difference between enjoying the gym and being terrified of having an evening with nothing to do because you might actually have to sit with yourself.

That's something I've become increasingly interested in: the difference between enjoyment and anaesthetic.

We tend to concentrate on the thing somebody is doing. They're drinking too much, gambling too much, working too much or spending too much time on their phone, so naturally we identify the behaviour as the problem.

Sometimes it is.

But sometimes the behaviour is simply the solution somebody has found to another problem.

If you remove the thing they are using to numb themselves without ever understanding why they needed numbing in the first place, you haven't necessarily fixed very much.

What has any of this got to do with health and safety?

Potentially, quite a lot.

One of the things I've learned from working in health and safety and construction is that incidents rarely fit neatly into the boxes we create for them. We like identifiable causes because identifiable causes give us something to fix. Poor planning. Inadequate supervision. Incorrect equipment. Failure to follow a procedure.

Those things obviously matter, but human beings are considerably messier.

The person driving the vehicle might also have slept for three hours because they spent half the night worrying about something at home. The supervisor making dozens of decisions that day might be mentally exhausted. Someone operating plant might be distracted by a situation completely unrelated to work. A manager might have been functioning under sustained pressure for months and reached the point where their judgement simply isn't as sharp as it normally is.

None of those people necessarily look unfit for work.

That's what makes this difficult.

We wouldn't knowingly allow somebody who was significantly physically impaired to carry out safety-critical work without considering the risk, yet psychological overload can be much harder to recognise. It doesn't mean employers should start interrogating people about their private lives, and it certainly doesn't mean managers should attempt to diagnose mental health conditions.

It simply means accepting that people don't leave the rest of their lives in the car park when they walk through the gate.

We have also made wellbeing strangely corporate

There has been a huge improvement in the way workplaces talk about mental health, and that should be recognised. Conversations that would barely have happened twenty years ago are now commonplace.

But I sometimes wonder whether we have made wellbeing slightly too comfortable.

We have wellbeing weeks, posters, apps, awareness campaigns, fruit in offices and photographs on LinkedIn. None of those things are inherently bad, but they're the easy part.

The difficult part is creating a workplace where somebody genuinely believes they can say they're struggling without worrying about how they will subsequently be viewed.

You can put "It's OK not to be OK" on every wall in the building, but if the culture underneath it tells people that vulnerability is weakness, nobody is going to believe the poster.

Real wellbeing is much less impressive to photograph. It's a supervisor noticing that someone who is normally full of life has become unusually quiet. It's a manager asking a second question after somebody automatically says they're fine. It's giving someone ten minutes and actually listening rather than waiting for your opportunity to speak.

Sometimes it's recognising that the person who appears to have everything under control might be the person who has become exceptionally good at appearing to have everything under control.

You don't need to become someone's therapist

I think this is where managers sometimes become uncomfortable with conversations about mental health. There can be a feeling that if you ask somebody how they're doing and they give you an honest answer, you're suddenly responsible for fixing whatever comes next.

You're not.

Most of us aren't qualified to diagnose or treat somebody's mental health, and pretending otherwise can cause more harm than good. But we are perfectly capable of noticing, asking, listening and knowing where appropriate support can be found.

Sometimes somebody doesn't need an answer anyway.

They need somebody to notice.

There is an enormous difference between trying to solve somebody's life and giving them enough space to admit that life is currently a bit difficult.

The question I've started asking myself

There is a very simple question that sits behind much of what I wrote in The Mind That Won't Switch Off and Stop Numbing Your Life.

What am I trying not to feel?

I don't think it's a particularly comfortable question, which is probably why it's useful.

The next time you find yourself reaching automatically for whatever normally switches your brain off, it can be worth asking it. Not because every beer, workout, video game or evening scrolling through your phone requires psychological analysis, but because patterns tell us things.

Maybe you're simply bored.

Maybe you're exhausted.

Maybe you're lonely.

Maybe you're stressed about money, work or a relationship. Maybe something happened months ago that you've never really processed. Or perhaps you've spent so long keeping yourself busy that you've forgotten what it feels like to actually stop.

You don't have to immediately fix the answer.

Sometimes recognising what is happening is enough to begin changing your relationship with it.

The risks that don't appear on the risk assessment

Health and safety has become increasingly sophisticated at identifying physical hazards. We design safer equipment, engineer risks out, improve planning, establish standards and investigate failures. All of that matters enormously.

But every system we create ultimately relies on people.

People have divorces. They lose parents. They worry about their children. They get into debt. They stop sleeping. They drink too much. They make mistakes. They become lonely. They get overwhelmed and occasionally lose sight of themselves for a while.

Most of that will never appear on a risk assessment.

Perhaps it shouldn't.

But that doesn't mean we should pretend it doesn't exist.

A good safety culture isn't one where everybody arrives at work mentally healthy, perfectly rested and completely free from distraction. No organisation on earth could achieve that.

It's one where people know each other well enough to notice when something has changed, where asking for help doesn't feel like admitting failure and where we understand that the person standing in front of us is more complicated than their job title.

We've spent decades getting better at asking people whether they've understood the risk assessment.

Every now and again, perhaps we should also ask them how they're doing.

And mean it.