In today’s episode, I talk a bit about my understanding of ‘functioning’ from my mental health training, the myth of high-functioning and over-functioning, and my own personal experience of how society perceives functioning levels and disability.
When we are made to feel broken when we don’t “function”, it’s a huge block to reinventing ourselves when we don’t understand the impact of that word, or how pushing ourselves can be harmful.
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– Uncovering Myths of Completing Reinvention: Lessons in Unique Timing | #57
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Episode 58 Transcript:
Welcome to the podcast. Today, I want to talk a little bit about functioning.
And if you’re not familiar with the term, certainly in the mental health field, it is considered how well you are able to go about your day-to-day tasks, how well you are able to either hold down a job or go to your studies, attend a school or college, feed yourself, clean yourself, look after yourself, pay your bills. It is the ability to function as society expects us to.
And the main ways that I see the word functioning used is either with someone with high-functioning abilities.
Someone is high-functioning, means they are able to almost mask and look like they’re doing just fine, even if they’re not, or over-functioning.
And I think one of the main things in, in either of these cases, whether you’re calling it over-functioning or high-functioning, is that you look absolutely fine, or you look like you are coping, you are managing, you are doing everything you need to do from the outside, from an outside perspective. People presume or think or see what looks fine, you know, what looks healthy.
And I think something we’re starting to learn over the last couple of years is that people who look like they are functioning are not always healthy. We’re not always well, and there is a lot that goes on internally for someone who is high-functioning or over-functioning.
So much like I said in last week’s episode about that internal reinvention that’s very different from the outside. And using that example of the swan gliding gracefully along the pond, but the feet are actually like scrabbling underneath to get them to move that gracefully.
Those people who have experienced depression or anxiety have— those people who have had depression or anxiety And have been able to continue either going to school, going to work, kind of doing all the things that from an outside perspective looks like you’re doing all the right things, they would be described as, you know, seeming to function either mentally or physically at a higher level than others with the same condition.
So if we have someone who is depressed who is unable to work, and we have someone who is depressed but is still going to work every day, it may be that the person who is going to work every day is described as high-functioning.
And this is sort of— I almost want to call this a myth, because someone who is functioning at that level externally usually internally is not.
You know, if something functions, then it works as it is intended. It works as it’s meant to be. It is doing what it is meant to do.
But when you’re a person whose level of functioning on the outside is not a match of what their internal ability is— Oh, this is such a weird one to word.
And one of the difficulties, I think, of this functioning and over-functioning or high-functioning is that people who—
So, when I reflect on myself and my ability to function, I have continually told professionals, “I feel like I should be coping, or other people seem to cope better than me, or, but I should be able to do this.
So shoulds and musts, which is a category of automatic negative thoughts that we learn about when we do our cognitive therapy. And those shoulds and musts— “I should be coping better, but I should be able to come into work every day. I should be able to get to sleep at night. I should be able to have a healthy diet”, even though I’ve got this condition, this mental health condition, this physical condition, whatever it is.
And, you know, I specifically went to psychology wanting to understand humans, did cognitive neuroscience desperately to try and figure out what was wrong with my brain.
Felt very, always felt very broken. And there’s a quote actually from Glennon Doyle which I’m probably gonna butcher, but the concept of it is: Something is only broken if it’s not working as it’s intended, or if it doesn’t work like it’s meant to.
And the human brain, body, biology, the human physically is not meant to/wired to, or made, designed to, whatever phrase you want to use, the human body and brain is not able To?
Take in every ad, manage all the dopamine hits, fight off all of the negative thoughts that social media and the media have given us, undo all the conditioning of our childhood where we were told children should be seen and not heard, or where girls were told that they needed to be a good girl.
Or… there is so much that we are bombarded with from adverts that are just on bus stops and, you know, on the public transport system, or when we’re watching YouTube or television, social media, where all these people are showing their life in this perfect sort of imagery.
And the comparison, the dopamine hits, you know — The world these days has been designed to play with, to play on humans’ weaknesses.
Our brain is not designed to have dopamine hits 24/7.
Our brain is not designed to be looking at a screen.
Our bodies are not designed to be sitting for 8+ hours a day.
Our bodies and brains will not function correctly if we are not getting the right number of nutrients, if we are having too much processed food, if we are exposed to too many pollutants.
There are so many things that don’t mean that I as a person am broken, but mean that the system and society we live in breaks us.
When I first was diagnosed with my physical mobility issues, I found a quote about the social model of disability, which is that I am not disabled, but the way society is disables me.
And they gave an example with someone with Autism in the post that I read, and they said, if I go into a noisy shopping centre, I can’t cope.
But if they turn the lights down a little bit, turn the music down, and there were fewer people there, which I believe had happened during COVID: There had been some shops that obviously only, only opened very early, a very little bit, and only a few people went out because of the conditions, and they were still autistic, but they were no longer disabled – because the environment was no longer disabling them.
I’ve been working in the mental health field for, you know, 20-plus years at this point, and when I see the term high-functioning or over-functioning in those settings, I’m constantly thinking about how burned out people are, how exhausted people are from trying to maintain the impossible workload and keep all the balls in the air, you know. How much stress people put themselves under and almost who they have to become to function in this world.
And I think one of the tricky things that I particularly find, reflecting on my own reinvention, is that I was doing it all. I was functioning when I had my mental health difficulties and even my physical difficulties, and the people in my life kind of expected me to do so.
And when I then stopped functioning, I kind of got this, “What? But you’ve always managed.
“What do you mean you’re not coping? You look fine. You’re not struggling because otherwise you’d do this, this, and this, or we’d notice you were doing X, Y, and Z if you were struggling. So when did this start?”
And over-functioning can lead to things like codependency, which I will admit is where I got to at a point, where the people around me’s problems became my problem to fix. They never explicitly asked me to fix them, yet they were not taking any steps to fix the problems, and the outcome would affect me.
So, another difficulty with that functioning aspect is considering the impact on you, of others. And I find functioning particularly interesting to think about because I have felt broken since I was 11.
And that idea of: “Am I broken or is the environment around me breaking me?”
And that’s something that, to be honest, I don’t think I could have comprehended a couple of years ago. That just felt like, oh, that feels like a weird thing to say, I don’t get it.
And now that I am out of the space of struggling, high-functioning without anyone realising what struggles I’m having underneath, without being open about the burnout and the exhaustion and how impossible it is to do long-term, I’m able to kind of see which parts of my life were breaking me. And this is one of the biggest tools that I used for my Rooted Reinvention.
To help me find what my roots were, I looked for the things that were nourishing me, or at least not putting additional pressure on top of me as well as everything else.
So, I’m going to leave you with a bit of a question about how you feel about your ability to function. This answer will be different for everyone, and you don’t need to tell anyone else if you don’t want to – But I think it’s a really useful tool when we’re reflecting on ourselves, when we’re looking at, when we’re thinking about redefining or reinventing ourselves. It is such a good tool to look at how we are functioning.
What is it that you think makes you a functioning person? Or a functioning friend, or a functioning partner. But I would really go back to that functioning person first, because if you’re not a functioning person, you’re not going to be able to function doing any particular role for very long.
Are you over-functioning? Are you looking like you can function? Are you masking and presenting the facade that you are a functioning person, and yet you feel like you are not functioning?
You feel like you should be better. You feel like other people do it better, or you should be able to do something you can’t do.
And if you’re at that point, I would really truly recommend you do a bit of journaling.
If you have access to a therapist, that you take that to explore.
If you have a mental health worker of any kind, that you speak with them about it, or that you do a little bit of research yourself just on the internet around over-functioning, around high-functioning.
And depending on what it is that particularly you struggle with, so for me, I looked at high-functioning depression because that was something I’d been diagnosed with, so I could go look it up.
But really think about how are you functioning? What do you need to function?
What bits of your life are not functioning? What bits of your life make you feel broken?
And this isn’t going to be like, oh, I’ll find the answer and there’s the answer and tick! Much like any of the things I talk about in this podcast, there is no sort of quick fix.
There is no, oh, well, now I know that that’s a bit where I’m over-functioning, or that’s an issue with how things are in my life.
You’re still going to come back with, “well, now what?”
But I firmly believe that without the awareness of what is and is not working, of what you are telling yourself or you are presenting to others and how that mismatches or misaligns with who you are underneath: recognizing that mismatch is the first step to any change in your life.
As always, thank you so much for listening. If you have any questions about what I mean by functioning, or you want to ask for my input, please do pop me an email at katerose@rootedreinvention.com.
Otherwise, thank you so much for listening. Thank you. And I’ll see you next time.
Bye!