Truth Bomb Tuesday: Who decides what is sane?
Over the years I’ve had to skill-up in the disciplines of self-development and mental health.
At first this was an area that we tried to avoid. We’re not psychologists. We’re investors – we’re here to work on your finances, not on your head.
But we couldn’t get away with that for long. When you find yourself helping someone change their financial story, that often involves helping them change their life story – whether you like it or not.
Their upbringing, their conditioning, their beliefs systems, their trauma – all of this ends up being pulled into the mix.
And it’s why I’d often find myself, on the eve of a deal going through, talking with students about unresolved grief with their mother, processing a flare up in their notions of self-worth.
Sometimes you just can’t separate them.
And so it’s an area I had to skill up on. All my coaches do.
And again, we know our limits. A two-into-four townhouse development is not the place to be processing unresolved abandonment issues from your childhood.
It’s not safe or appropriate for us to act as surrogate psychologists (and we are big advocates of people working with mental health professionals!) But we have to be aware that sometimes things will just come up.
Anyway, having been in the space quite a few years now, I’m noticing a shift in the way we talk about things. These days it’s all about regulation.
And this is a good thing. In the old days, it was “I am mad”, pointing to a permanent state. These days, it’s “I’m dysregulated” pointing to temporary state that will probably pass.
And so I think that’s much more useful.
And in that context, the gold-standard of mental health seems to have become ‘self-regulation’ – the ability to bring yourself back into a healthy state of regulation when something triggers you.
And again, this is a great focus. Letting people accept that there are times when they’re going to get knocked off balance, and then giving them tools to help right themselves again is a great thing to do.
I’m a big fan.
But like a lot of things, this idea of regulation seems to have escaped its pen in the fields of psychology, and made its way over into popular discourse. But, as so often happens, it’s meaning gets shifted along the way, and things get lost.
And what I’m seeing from people who are talking about regulation, outside of a therapeutic context, is that they’re not talking about self-regulation, as they are ‘collectively-imposed’ regulation.
And by that I mean, for a long time when people talked about “sane” what they were really talking about was “functional”.
You could be mad as the march hare, but if you could hold down a job and pay your bills, nobody cared.
Like-wise our idea of ‘regulation’ is at risk of becoming an economic concept. “I am regulated if I can show up to my 80-hour a week job and process 500 short-form videos a night.”
The self in self-regulated should refer to self-guided, but also self-chosen.
What kind of person do you want to be? How do you want to feel in your life? How do you want to be able to respond?
Because if it’s not self-chosen, then we are just trying to live up to an external ideal.
It becomes just another tyranny in our life.
And nobody needs that.
So yes, self-regulation is amazing. But beating yourself up for not fitting in with social ideals is not.
But don’t take my word for it. I’m just an economist and an investor.
There’s lot of great people doing great work in the space.
Go talk to them.
DB.