MENTAL HEALTH and THE ACTOR

An Excerpt from the book The Actor and the Spirit (Soon to be published)

 

Why is it that so many artists suffer mental health problems? It is quite possible that they don’t suffer any more than anybody else. We hear about the suicide or overdose of a well-known actor or musician. However, without their celebrity status, we may never have heard about it at all. It would be interesting to survey different occupational groups to find out if mental health issues are more prevalent in the Arts than in other sectors.

 

Reflecting on my experiences of these issues with my students over twenty-five years, I have noticed that some mental health issues are addressed by the learning of the technique, even though that was never the intention or objective of the technique or its teaching. So why might that be?

 

Here are some observations I have noted over the years. I hope they might be of use.

 

For most people, the mind seems to be divided into several Minds. This is a general observation of course, but most people dwell in one of eight different minds at different times. Let’s break these down.

 

1. The Negative Present Mind. This Mind is the place in which we find stress, panic and anxiety. Everyday chores, jobs and troubles of life live here. In this Mind we worry about things like money, family and the day-to-day running of our lives.

 

2. The Negative Past Mind. This Mind is the place in which we find regret, guilt and shame. In this Mind we dwell on our past decisions and actions and feel bad about them such as bad auditions, poor performances or simply a stupid thing we did or said that causes us to cringe.

 

3. The Positive Present Mind. This Mind is the place in which we mark and enjoy the good things we have. In this Mind we stop to smell the roses and appreciate the roof over our head, the beauty of our children, or the simple pleasure of a walk on the beach. Some refer to being in this mind as “mindfulness”.

 

4. The Positive Past Mind. This Mind is the place in which we remember the good decisions we’ve made and the good fortune we have had and feel grateful and pleased about those. In this Mind we remember a good audition and a job we got, an impressive performance we gave or simply a great holiday.

 

5. The Conscious Creative Mind. This Mind is the place in which we contemplate new ideas for the future and develop them. In this Mind we come up with new ideas for stories, films, songs and plays and consciously think about what they could be. In this mind we fantasize, whether it be an erotic fantasy, an artistic one, or an ambition for future success.

 

6. The Conscious Destructive Mind. This Mind is the place in which we contemplate a negative future for ourselves. It is riddled with fears of failure and destitution. In this mind we invent horrible scenarios for the future in which our partner perhaps cheats on us or leaves us, we lose our job, never find any success and end up homeless or dead.

 

7. The Unconscious Creative Mind. This mind is the place of dreams. In this mind we sleep and our mind unconsciously explores our world and life. It’s similar to the Conscious Creative Mind in that it is seeking order and new ideas except that we have little or no conscious control over it most of the time.

 

8. The Creative Pool. This mind is the enormous pool of untapped creative space. In this mind we experience deep rest, which allows the brain to open up new pathways to creativity. This mind is usually only experienced in very deep sleep where no dreaming takes place, coma, or deep meditation.

 

Minds one, two and six, that is the Negative Present and Past Minds and the Conscious Destructive Mind, take up the most energy. Dwelling in these minds is exhausting and releases toxic feelings and emotions such as fear, self-doubt, self-hatred and loathing. Dwelling in these Minds for too long will cause mental illnesses such as depression, anxiety and panic attacks. If the Negative Past Mind harbors memories of trauma and abuse, this can lead to even more serious mental disorders such as bi-polar disorder, schizophrenia, personality disorders and psychosis. The Negative Past Mind is probably the most dangerous of all and we can actually add to it by exposing ourselves to trauma by watching disturbing images of war or pornography. If we go out on the town and drink far too much and end up in a fistfight where the police need to intervene, we have created a Negative Past memory to add to that Mind. So we can limit the power of this Mind by not fuelling it with disturbing images and experiences. In the same way we can add to the Positive Past Mind by building up positive and peaceful memories and experiences that we can dwell on instead. One of the major issues that has arisen with the advent of sites such as Facebook is the over saturation of concentrated extreme imagery. For example, if a person is an animal rights activist and is very sensitive about the issue of cruelty to animals, they will join and like pages about that topic that will inevitably show traumatic images of animal cruelty. Posts and related images then flood this sensitive person’s newsfeed daily. Essentially that person is building up multiple images of animal cruelty in their Negative Past Mind and dwelling on them, without the balance of happy puppies running through fields of grass and other positive images. This overload of disturbing images, focused directly on the issue they are most sensitive about, can cause deep upset, depression, anxiety, and a feeling that the world is horrific and barbaric and not worth living in. Feelings like this can of course lead to self-harm and suicide.

 

Of course we are going to have some Negative Past experiences that will dwell in this Mind, and most of those will not be our own fault. If there is child abuse present in that Mind for example and we feel a sense of shame and distress as a result, that is not our fault and we can choose not to give that memory power by dwelling on it. If it is deeply disturbing and impossible to ignore, we will need to seek the help of a professional psychologist or psychiatrist to help to resolve that event and make it endurable. Some people however, take small, negative memories, such as calling someone by the wrong name or slipping over in the street, and dwell on them to such an extent that they make themselves sick over them. It’s in these instances that we can choose to control how much we dwell on those memories in the Negative Past Mind. We can rationalize these memories by telling ourselves meaningful truths like, everyone forgets a name from time to time, anyone can slip over in the street and more than likely the witnesses to either of those events have long forgotten them anyway and the only person who’s dwelling on them is us. We can choose to disempower the Negative Past Mind and spend less time there.

 

The Negative Past Mind is also a place where we regret certain decisions, such as the course we chose to study, the place we chose to live or the partner we chose to be with. Those past decisions cannot be changed, so again there’s little point in dwelling on them and feeling bad about them. What decisions we make now and next are the ones we can have some level of control over. Feeling shame or regret or guilt is only useful insofar as these feeling help us to not make the same mistakes again, but any further immersion in those feelings is utterly unhelpful and unhealthy. Changing your thinking to what you might do now or next is literally changing your Mind. You are changing from using the Negative Past Mind to using the Conscious Creative Mind.

 

Many people who struggle to free themselves of the grip of the Negative Past Mind resort to alcohol and other substances to relieve the weight of the negativity and exhaustion. Such drugs help to block out the Negative Past Mind or make it seem less venomous. Heroin is the obvious drug of choice for this, however the Arts seem to be more influenced by Cocaine. Heroin blocks out feelings of shame and regret, thus disempowering the Negative Past Mind. Cocaine enhances feelings of confidence and energy, shoving the user into the Conscious Creative Mind. However alcohol and substance abuse is equally tiring for the brain and body and will inevitably lead to addiction and worse distress rather than relief as the user begins to regret their choices and feel increased levels of shame and guilt while not stoned. Hence, the user defaults back to the drug to get that relief, except the dose needs to be increased. This will obviously result in serious health damage and possibly death. Quitting becomes incredibly difficult and recovery can take years.

 

The Negative Present mind is also toxic because it leads to fear and self-doubt, which can lead to negative self-image and depression, but of course it too is necessary to some degree because we need to get things done and it keeps us on our toes. If we didn’t have it we would not do things, promote ourselves, get our bills paid and do our work well. The best way to describe this mind when it becomes toxic is the feeling that we are not able for the world or not worthy of being in it. Everyone else seems to be handling these day-to-day stresses well, except us. Once again, this is where we can choose to disempower this Mind and spend less time in it, firstly by recognizing that we are all in the same boat. We all have bills to pay and jobs to go to and things we have to do. No one is special and no one is separate from those troubles, even those with more money than us. Money is a problem when you don’t have it, and often a bigger problem when you do because you have to manage it and you can be sure that other people like the taxman and the accountant are going to want a slice of it.

 

One of the most striking misusages of the Negative Present Mind happens among teenaged girls. They are bombarded (by media and each other) with images of fashion and beauty that are not only unrealistic but are literally not real. They are computer designed and airbrushed. When a teenaged girl looks in the mirror and sees how far they are from that idealized image, they are caught in the Negative Present Mind and may start to indulge that dissatisfaction. They may then start to take action to try to bridge the gap between themselves and the images they aspire to through dieting and spending enormous amounts of money on the right clothes and make-up to try to achieve the image. When they inevitably fail, great upset and depression can be caused. Extreme cases will result in eating disorders, self-harm and suicide.

 

When we suffer bereavement we get stuck in the Negative Present Mind. Grief is that feeling that the person we loved is now gone and our present world has been lessened, diminished or even utterly shattered. There’s very little to be done about it unfortunately, except to take your time and slowly but surely start to shift out of that Negative Present Mind and into the more positive Minds. It takes time and patience, but eventually the experience will move into the Negative Past Mind where you can try to visit it less and less. However it will be there forever. The good memories of the person, however, will always be in the Positive Past Mind, and we can certainly try to spend as much time as we can there instead, which is of course what the deceased would want for us.

 

The Negative Present Mind and the Conscious Destructive Mind are intrinsically linked. The Negative Present Mind tells us we are not worthy of life. We then imagine ourselves failing as a result of that unworthiness. I believe there is some truth in self-fulfilling prophesies. If we see ourselves homeless or alone or despised and dwell on that, we can inadvertently, subconsciously travel in that direction.

 

The upside of all this is that there are eight minds and only three of them are negative, destructive and exhausting. The ideal situation then would be that we spend as little time as possible in the Negative Past and Negative Present Minds and the Conscious Destructive Mind, and as much time as possible in the Positive Past and Positive Present minds, appreciating the positive things we have in our present moment, spending quality time with those around us, and remembering the good times and experiences we have had.

 

So what are these other three minds? The Conscious Creative Mind, as I’ve already said, is that mindset in which we contemplate a creative idea, like a new film or play or song or sculpture or picture, or whatever our art might entail. Most artists spend a great deal of time in this place. It’s a very healthy place to be. The only problem is that this place is not always furnished with good ideas. Sometimes it takes a while for an idea to come to the Conscious Creative Mind and there can be long periods where this mind seems to be bereft of creative fuel. But there are ways of getting those juices flowing.

 

The Unconscious Creative Mind is our dreaming. While sleeping our mind seems to be able to create all sorts of wild and wonderful ideas and scenarios. I dreamt the other night that I moved into my dream house in Sydney and two of Ireland’s best Casting Directors who I know well moved in with me and held their castings in different rooms of the house. The place was buzzing with life and energy. At one point one of the Casting Directors needed me to change her baby’s nappy, which I did and found that the baby had bad nappy rash, so I went down to the shops to get her some soothing cream. What does it all mean? You could analyse it till the end of time, but really it’s just my Unconscious Creative Mind having fun with the facts of my conscious reality. Sometimes the dreams seem less wacky and more realistic and the seeds of good creative ideas can be harnessed if remembered.

 

Sometimes we have bad dreams. Often those dreams come from too much time spent in the Negative Minds during our waking life. On a simple level, a child who watches a scary movie might have a nightmare because that negative image has become part of the Negative Past Mind and has not yet been resolved or come to terms with. Too much time spent in the Negative Present Mind can lead to insomnia, as we lie awake worrying about our troubles. For the most part, dreaming, even if the dream is not entirely pleasant, is healthy.

 

Over twenty-five years of teaching, I have come to be quite astute at guessing which Mind a student is in when in the studio, even if they haven’t said a word. I can see a student dwelling on the past, for example, and before too long they will be sharing a negative screen-test or audition experience they had that day with the group. That experience has drawn them deeply into the Negative Past Mind and they are stuck there, like a child who can’t shift an image of a scary movie. Drawing them away from that Mind is important if any positive progress is going to be made that day. I can also tell which students are in the Conscious Creative Mind. They have done their homework and are armed will all sorts of ideas to experiment with. They are itching to rehearse with their scene partners and are using the studio time to its fullest potential.

 

When actors audition for The Applied Art of Acting, I can easily tell if they are in the panics of the Negative Present Mind, the terrors of the Conscious Destructive Mind fearing the future, or in the energized wonder of the Conscious Creative Mind, ready to show me their creation. Too often actors prepare their audition at home in the Conscious Creative Mind and then switch inadvertently to the Conscious Destructive Mind or the Negative Present Mind. This can be avoided, or at least lessened, if the actor understands what their Minds are doing and when.

 

So the Positive Past Mind, the Positive Present Mind, The Conscious Creative Mind and the Unconscious Creative Mind are good places to be. So in short, good, simplistic, advice would be to dwell on the good things you’ve done and the good things currently in your life, daydream about what artistic things you might like to try to achieve, and get plenty of sleep. A good piece of parenting advice would be to try to fuel your little one’s childhood with as many positive experiences as possible to add to their Positive Past Mind and try to limit experiences where they feel embarrassed, ashamed or afraid, thus disempowering their Negative Present and Past Minds by starving them of fuel. Rather than exhausting us, the Positive and Creative Minds tend to energize us and make us feel reasonably good most of the time.

 

The first step I suggest to all my students is to try to recognize which of these eight minds they are in and when, and then draw a graph or table for themselves to come to an understanding of how long they are spending in each mind each day. This can be a rather eye-opening experiment. Some of my students are very surprised at how long they tend to dwell in the Negative and Destructive Minds. Sometimes up to seventy or eighty percent of their day is spent in them. Suddenly they realize why they are feeling so bad and low so much. Once you have come to an understanding of how you have been dividing your time up between each one of these Minds, you can start the process of readjusting the percentages and choosing to spend more time in the positive and creative Minds instead.

 

The only problem is that none of the Minds I’ve mentioned so far feature deep rest. Even when you’re asleep in your Unconscious Creative Mind, your mind is working. This is where the Creative Pool comes into play.

 

The Creative Pool is a deep ocean of Mind that is vastly bigger than all of the other minds combined. Most people don’t even know it’s there and even those who do rarely access it. This is a place where the mind truly just rests. It’s not a myth or a mystery. Human beings have been accessing it and trying to understand it for centuries. Religions have tried to claim it through notions like prayer and meditation, and some religions believe that this is where the human mind can connect with God or the god-head of that faith, but it doesn’t belong to any religion and it’s not a myth or something that requires belief. You go there when the brain or body is damaged and requires total rest in the form of a coma. You may have experienced deep sleep that featured no dreams and no restlessness during the night. These of course are unconscious versions of it, but there is a conscious one too that anyone can reach through fairly simple, non-religious meditation.

 

It’s important to say at this juncture that I have no agenda or investment in the commodification of meditation. I have never paid anyone to teach it to me and I do not charge anyone who asks me to teach what I know of it to them. I don’t sell it and I don’t offer it as a service. I am an atheist and a skeptic. There is no magic in the following ideas and you don’t need to join a cult of some sort to partake in it. The closest kind of meditation to what I’m about to describe is called Transcendental Meditation and you can look it up for yourself. As I said, I have never studied it officially or paid to be taught about it. Oddly, many professional actors and Dramatic Arts professionals use TM as their go-to for meaningful mental rest. There are practitioners than can teach it to you and help you to find your “mantra”. I don’t want to belittle their vocation and I’m sure they are very good at diagnostically doing that, but for me it was not necessary to pay a professional to find mine. Remember also that what I’m describing here is not according to Hoyle TM. This is my own method of reaching the Creative Pool. It is however, very similar to TM and I would highly recommend researching TM and its origins.

 

The “mantra” is a very simple series of words or sounds that you can focus on. It could literally be anything. The ticking of a clock, the chime of a bell, a series of words like apple, banana, cucumber, fish. The purpose of the mantra is simply to give you something to focus your mind on so that your mind won’t wander to any of the other seven Minds. All you need to do is close your eyes and repeat the mantra over and over in your mind. You can sit, relaxed on a chair for this or lie down, but I do find that some of my students tend to fall asleep if they lie down. (I work them pretty hard.) Now what happens next is very important. As you repeat the mantra over and over in your mind you must try your best not to read any meaning into the mantra. You are simply focusing on the sound of the bell or clock or the sound of the consonants and vowels in the words. You are not picturing a banana, for example, or trying to understand the nature of the banana, or going off on an imaginative trip about how or why a banana exists. If you do, you will drift towards the Conscious Creative Mind, which seeks theories and answers. You don’t want to be in any of the other seven Minds.

 

Now the other important direction here is that you should not become aggressive in any way. Don’t try to block out the other thoughts of the other Minds or force yourself to concentrate. Just gently encourage yourself to focus only on the sounds of your mantra. Other thoughts may come to your mind. I haven’t paid that bill! I need to finish writing my short film! I need to contact my agent! I said something stupid to that girl at that party! If these kinds of thoughts come in, allow them gently to pass through your thinking and pass away. Don’t get angry at them or yourself for thinking thoughts that are not to do with the mantra. Just forgive yourself and let the thought pass through and return to the mantra and try again to focus only on its sounds. By doing this you will give yourself the best possible chance of reaching the enormous, quiet Creative Pool.

 

Some people tell me that they can’t meditate. “I’ve tried it but it’s not for me”. They say they can’t quiet their mind. With this method, you don’t have to. Just focus on the sounds of the mantra as best you can. Don’t try to quiet your mind, but let thoughts from the other seven minds pass through rather than stay.

 

It takes a bit of practice and patience, but if you can stick it out, you will notice that the pace of the mantra will slow down. In between the sounds will be quiet space free of all thought. It’s as if there are long moments of “nothing”. Soon the mantra will fall away completely, or you can choose to stop repeating it at this point and you will realize that you are in a place of deep, thoughtless rest. Some people report feeling a sense of falling, or dropping over a ledge when they fall into this place, except that the falling is not frightening, albeit a little strange at first. In the same way as before, if a thought from one of the other minds intrudes, allow it to dissolve in the giant pool, or sail away and into the distance. If everything goes according to plan, you will soon have no connection to the other minds. You won’t know where they are. If anywhere, they might be far away above you, as if they are on the surface of an ocean that you have sunk many miles down into.

 

If it helps you, I like to think of this Pool as the primordial Mind that all the other seven minds sprung from as I grew up and matured. It was there when I was a baby, possibly even in the womb, before any of the other seven minds existed. As I matured, the other seven minds were slowly formed as I gained experiences and memories.

 

As you near this point, you may begin to see or hear unsolicited images or sounds. These are images and sounds that you did not consciously decide to focus on. They seemed to arrive out of nowhere. You may know the song “The Rainbow Connection” as sung by the great Kermit the Frog. “Have you been half asleep and have you heard voices? I’ve heard them calling my name.” This is not actually Kermit going mad, but hearing unsolicited sounds as he’s in the halfway world between sleep and waking. Many people report this and it’s not unusual. So if you see unsolicited images or hear unsolicited sounds, these are coming from your Unconscious Creative Mind, which thinks you are falling asleep and mistakenly tries to take over from your Conscious Mind by presenting images and sounds for dreaming. It’s at this juncture that some of my students who lie down for this do drift off to sleep. If that happens, they have to sit up next time. If this happens to you, again just try to let those images and sounds float away and allow yourself to be immersed in the deep quiet pool of nothingness.

 

In this deep, restful place, your mind will recharge and your brain will rest. You will be free of all worries about the present, regrets of the past, thoughts of good things or bad things, or indeed anything. You will be completely aware of the world around you. You will hear the real sounds of traffic outside or birds or wind or whatever there is to be heard, but those sounds will not be distracting or inhibiting to you. You will feel at ease there and you will not have to concentrate or aggressively try to stay there.

 

Stay in that deep Pool for around twenty to thirty minutes. TM advises twenty minutes twice a day, which is good advice. You can set an alarm for yourself if you wish, but you’ll probably find that you will feel so at ease and calm that you will effortlessly judge the twenty minutes to within a few seconds without an alarm.

 

Why am I calling it the Creative Pool when you’re not creating anything there? The reason is that this place is the source of all creativity. Any thoughts you have in the Conscious or Unconscious Creative Minds comes from here. By spending time in the pool, you are giving your mind time to rest and create space for new creative thoughts to surface throughout your day. If your mind is constantly tired from working on the problems of your present and past and in between consciously working out creative ideas, it has no time to rest and allow new kernels of thought to rise from the Creative Pool. This is what happens when you feel you are in that awful place of writer’s block, bereft of ideas and creative thoughts. Your mind isn’t coming up with them because it doesn’t have room to. It hasn’t had time to rest, recharge and reconnect with that primal Pool of creativity. Again, on a simple level, writers with writer’s block will recognize there’s no point trying to force ideas to come. They will step away from the page and go for a walk up a mountain or along a beach and think of anything other than the fact that they can’t think of anything to write. Once the mind has had time to recharge, even a little bit, the ideas have a chance to come through. This meditation within the Creative Pool daily gives the potential for masses of well- formed creative thoughts to come through. With practice, an artist can have them on tap.

 

So going back to my original musing, why does the technique of The Applied Art of Acting seem to alleviate mental health conditions like depression and anxiety? I believe that there’s a number of factors here. Doing an intensive course requires creating a simple life in which the Negative Present Mind has little fuel. They are going to the course, going home, eating, learning lines, sleeping and going back to the course. It’s only three months in duration, so most of them have saved up enough money to not have to work part time during the course. For that three months, life is pretty straight forward and the course is the anchor for that stability.

 

The student’s mind is almost entirely immersed in the Conscious Creative Mind throughout the course. They are working constantly and consistently on the application of the technique to scripts and the creation of characters. When they are not in this mind, they are spending periods of time in the morning in the Creative Pool, which is providing deep rest and a untapped fuel for creative ideas. This of course fuels the Positive Present Mind and the student enjoys the rare opportunity to be completely immersed in the thing they love, albeit for only three months. By the end of the course they are looking ahead to exciting future projects, that is, immersed in the Conscious Creative Mind as they leave. If they can maintain that prevalence of the Conscious Creative Mind in their lives after the course and remember to visit the Creative Pool daily if possible, they will be able to maintain their newly found mental health and sense of well-being.

 

It’s important to stress once again that the course was never designed to help students with mental health issues. It seems to be a happy side effect of being intensively creative and finding meditative rest periods habitually too. That said, some people have serious chemical imbalances in the brain that cause serious mental illness that require medical intervention. While this system of understanding these eight Minds might be useful and helpful, some people will always unfortunately require some form of medication or deeper therapy, or both.