Well, a few months ago, I decided to find a Ted Talk that I saw once at a mid-grade mental hospital by the seashore. It was literally several years ago and I didn’t remember any keywords, but I took the time to find it because it had made a major impression on me. I’m always drawn in by anything about hunter-gatherers, and the Ted Talk said that they’d found a remaining tribal civilization, send in an anthropologist, discovered that nobody was depressed, and studied what the civilization was doing correctly that we in the Western world could then emulate. I didn’t remember the name of the people group, but I kind of thought they were in Papau New Guinea, which turned out to be correct. I remembered that they had tough lives and high infant mortality rates. I also remembered that they had no word for “exercise,” because exercise was just a necessary part of their lives. So they spent hours and hours a day doing really intense physical labor, but they never would have thought to do it for its own sake. So, it seemed like if I could find the talk again, it might have more tips.
I googled and googled everything I could remember from the talk. For example, humans have barely had enough time in the scope of evolution to adapt to the agricultural revolution, much less the industrialized world we live in now. So, for example, when we’re exercising, our primal brains are screaming at us to stop because we’re not going anywhere. This was instrumental in my getting rid of my car, which has done a ton of really good things for my physical and mental health. (There was then also a book I read by someone else that was specifically on getting rid of one’s car, which I might post about on here at some point.)
The resulting google search turned out to be quite the roller coaster of an experience. First, I finally found the Ted Talk, and discovered that the name of the people group was the Kaluli.
In bad news, the speaker (Stephen Ilardi) wasn’t really able to impart too much about how to achieve Kaluli-level happiness, because he ran out of time. I extensively googled him and his modality of Therapeutic Lifestyle Change, but it seemed like “TLC” had become dated and the world had moved on. Until! My luck returned because Ilardi is back in action and working on a new version of his book, expected to come out in August of 2025. This is the teaser on Google Books:
Now, a year is a long way away, but thankfully I was able to find an older version on thriftbooks.com:
Now, this Dr. Ilardi better keep his word on the 2025 edition because some of the material was a bit dated. But, it was also really good! He says that the six components of a therapeutic lifestyle are:
- Dietary omega-3 fatty acids
- Engaging activity (which he clarifies just basically means not ruminating, so I assume he rebranded it as “engaging activity” so it would be a positive)
- Physical exercise
- Sunlight exposure
- Social support
- Sleep
This is a little bit hard to remember because three of the categories begin with S. There are those who would have found that to be a positive, but not me. So I rearranged them into:
Which, incidentally, it turns out that this is actually a real word, you just better make it plural if you don’t want to forget to sleep.
Marsha Linehan would be so proud. Anyway, I’m doing my best to incorporate things, although I didn’t expect my dream job to land in my lap as soon as I finished reading the book, so it’s hard to make a lot of changes all at once. Also, after the summer I just had, I am financially destitute. So it’s going to take time to phase everything in. For example, it turns out I was taking way too low of a dose of omega-3, but currently my dose is even lower than usual because I’m out of fish oil and out of money, so that will have to wait. The sunlight box would also probably be amazing, but that’s going to have to wait a few paychecks as well. I feel like I’m pretty good about exercise though because my new job is physically demanding, plus I use walking as a primary means of transportation. Sleeping, if you read my last entry, is a major problem because I have PTSD and that’s wrecking my sleep, although being around kids is therapeutic to me and has been improving the situation. I’m doing my very best to avoid ruminating, and some of the tips in the book have helped. As for social supports (friends), that is a darned good point that I need to be working on. I mean, the book wasn’t especially designed for people who grew up in a traumatic cult that intentionally and forcibly isolated them from everyone else in the world, and who then got traumatically kicked out of said cult; and I feel like that makes finding social connections harder. But, the book had a lot of ideas, and even some tips on how to broach the topic of depression when around loved ones. Which, lately my approach has been to avoid any mention of anything sad at all ever, even if it means I can’t talk about anything and am then forced to isolate, which is unsustainable and then some poor friend gets a text message that I hate flashbacks and am miserable.
So if I can apply the strategies in the book, it should help. I’ve noticed I’m a lot better at applying strategies that I learn about by reading them in a book, rather than having them articulated to me orally. I don’t know what’s up with that. But, at this point, I definitely own a whole lot of books so maybe that will tide me over until I can someday hopefully pull off finding a therapist.
Dr. Ilardi, if you ever google yourself and find this on my incredibly obscure blog, thank you! Are you taking new patients?
