Séamas O'Reilly: My experiment in wellbeing, so far, points toward some improvements

Séamas O'Reilly. Picture: Orfhlaith Whelan

Since we’re nearing the end of January, I can report on the status of the small life adjustments I’ve been making in order to enhance my sense of wellbeing.

I am 38 years old and painfully aware that, without taking direct action, every single day will be the youngest I’ll ever look again; the best my hearing, eyesight, and memory will be; the easiest I will ever find it to bend down or get out of a chair.

When talking about wellbeing, I should stress that I draw the line at the term “wellness”, a bland horror of a coinage that sounds at once insulting and made up, as if a toddler has tried to invent a single word that means “feeling good” and ended up with ‘okayment’, or ‘niceitude’.

Wellbeing is, at least, a word, and for that reason I can get behind it. Quite far behind it in most cases, but behind it nonetheless. For many years, I looked younger than I was, and had a tendency to confuse this with immortality. I was frequently asked for ID in Tesco while buying wine, something my wife never tired of me repeating to her, day after day, as I deposited a clinking carrier bag on the kitchen table. Then, it would only happen if I’d just recently shaved. And then ... it just stopped. I haven’t been asked for ID, even as a courtesy, in about five years. I presume it’s because the tribulations of parenthood are written all over my face. More than the white whiskers about my temple, or the telltale lines beneath my eyes and mouth, I simply have the slack jowls and dead stare of any adult man who can name 18 Octonaut vehicles. Although it might, I will concede, be connected to the drinking of all that wine I wasn’t getting asked for ID for in the first place.

Dry January wouldn’t be my bag. It seems to work best for people who need to go out less. As the owner/operator of two small children, I barely go out at all and thus almost all my drinking is done at home. I cook every evening, and this process is undertaken with a glass of wine while making the meal in question, and another while eating. Some might — quite rightly — see this self-erected daily drinking zone as a crutch, but I’ve grown to consider it something closer to a sacrament. And in the spirit of sacrifice afforded by the gods of January, I’ve decided to cut down. In an alteration so minor it’s actively embarrassing to report, I’ve cut out drinking “during the week”, and so far this pathetic half-measure is going well. Not quite Dry January, but a moderately clammy affair I might still trademark as Clammuary.

I’ve also returned to running. My friends think I run all the time, because the main benefit of running is smugness, and the main drawback is how sore it makes me, so bragging about how sore I am from all my running is a great way of killing both birds with one stone.

I often, however, go months without running, and every time I get back into it, I remember why those lapses arrive. When active, I try to run 5k most days, and usually keep this up for two or three months before a small injury, deadline, or holiday pushes me off course. Then, my runners go conspicuously unlaced, and the thermal undergarments retreat further and further from the front of my wardrobe.

Falling off the wagon is easy because running is tiring, painful and, more importantly, extremely boring. I’m on record, in print and in person, as saying there are few things I hate more. I’m rendered envious and astounded by fellow runners who appear to be loving the process, broad smiles on their beaming faces, deep in conversation with a friend, or taking work calls on their bluetooth earbuds. This mystifies me since I’d sooner chat while taking a shite. Seeing people enjoying themselves, even multi- tasking, while running brings to mind a seedy underground of perverts seeking recreational root canals, or those viral videos made by surgeons, in which banjo players continue playing while their brains are operated on.

And, yet, I continue to run, partly because it’s the only way I can stay fit without spending any money, and partly because, for me at least, it has significant psychological benefits.

Like many men, I’ve increasingly come to think of wellbeing as something that has more of a psychological and emotional aspect than the physical, and this is undeniably a good thing. Sure, the “talk to your mates” tone of some mental health advocacy aimed at men can get a bit wearying, since it often reads a little like someone trying to explain psychoanalysis to a Labrador.

Moreover, many of the more prolific “mental health” initiatives have a similar tenor to the greenwashing of major oil companies. Who can forget Amazon’s “Wellness Chambers”, the phone-booth sized cuboids erected in their fulfilment centres, where overworked and underpaid workers could stand fully upright, practice mindfulness and “watch short videos featuring easy-to-follow wellbeing activities, including guided meditations, positive affirmations, and calming scenes with sounds.”

But I do know there are few worries, emotional quandaries, or writer’s blocks that can’t be vaporised by the clarity I achieve when I’m so exhausted I can barely stand. I can’t deny that drinking a bit less has helped here too. At the risk of putting it in terms a Labrador might understand, I can only describe my brain as feeling like a hoover that’s been emptied, or a tumble dryer that’s had that little chamber removed, the one filled with compacted grey fluff that comes away in your hand like a big soft slab of
insulating foam.

I can’t speak for how any of this will work for anyone else, but it’s working for me even if I sometimes wish it weren’t. My three-week experiment in wellbeing, so far, points toward some improvements I’m going to continue with for now — all being well.