Our physical and mental health are the core of our being.
When they fall apart, we suddenly feel powerless. It’s hard to feel capable when you’re running on empty.
But we’re not actually powerless. Feeling empty is not a permanent and unalterable state. We just need to refuel. We need to get our engines going again.
To do this, we will have to get back up.
Getting back up is difficult, though, when your physical and mental energy is gone.
But what other choice do we have? We need to restart the engine.
CGP Grey illustrates this idea beautifully in this video. I highly recommend it.
The video proposes that we could visualize our physical health and our mental health as the twin elements at the core of our “spaceship”. Near the end of the video, CGP Grey explores the idea that there will be times where despite good habits, we will end up with an empty physical health gauge and an empty mental health gauge. At some point, finding our health gauges running near empty is almost inevitable.
When this happens, we need the courage, and the faith in ourselves (and in life) to get back up. We need to take the smallest possible first step to start rebuilding our physical and mental health.
This is the rediscovery of the unbroken. The engine is still usable.We just need to refuel.
We can also ask for help with this. We don’t have to restart our engine completely on our own. We can reach out to a friend, a family member, or a crisis line. Other people can (and will) help us restart our engine. But we have to ask. The support of others is an invaluable gift that can help encourage us as we restart our engine and begin to refuel.
Even if it feels like our spaceship’s core has stopped spinning, we can always get it spinning forward again. As long as we can breathe another breath, we have another chance to get that core spinning. We have another chance to restart our engine. We have another chance to refuel.