acutely threshold Do you ever think about when you had a blister in your mouth all the times you didn’t have one, and how food used to be easy to chew and swallow. Well, life can get that way too.

Problems are judged on a scale that is built on comparison, we all base the rationalities of our problems based on the current level of our pain threshold. If your week has been somewhat easy going then a friend being late to an arranged coffee meeting may be used as an excuse to get agitated. Spilling coffee on your favourite new trousers may cause another level of upset. Your phone falling from the edge of the table and cracking the screen may even push on your anger button.

However, all this can become very trivial if you receive a phone call regarding a loved one being seriously ill.

That’s exactly what happened when I was totting up all my chief complaints to my partner about my day when my brother rang me to say my father has been diagnosed with cancer. Since that day I can only reminisce about the time I did not have a blister on my mental well-being.

I garnish just enough resilience to make it through a day from rising from my bed to returning to my bed. This is a shameful experience, as in contrast to my father I’m wishing away time as though it was finite. The minutes between me being alone in bed again. I am acutely aware that I am not the only person doing this, millions of people whether it’s a preference, mental health, sheer tiredness or full-blown agoraphobia wish to be alone in bed. We have 1440 minutes a day, and we all live for an average of 4000, weeks. In numbers our existence is very little, but when we are we tend to wish the bad fines away so that we can be normal again.

A close friend of mine who is also currently going through a similar frame of mind told me how he was so much in the depths of despair it created an inability for him to notice things in his surroundings. How that when he ever awakens from these low moods, he begins to discover simple observations he overlooked, like a new clock in his mother’s kitchen or a large web that has formed in his room. I completely understood him, I had been in my parent’s house frequently in the last number of weeks, only to finally be able to see they had replaced a mirror on the fireplace wall with a large picture. I surmised that when we are suffering in our minds our state of present consciousness must be reduced to almost autopilot to preserve energy.

I have encountered enumerable people who I had no idea were dealing with serious matters in life and gave me no inclination of the stress they were dealing with. The question is why is it some of us can’t cope with it as good as others, or is the question about masking it well. Or even do we all just have different emotional aptitudes for the amount of empathy and compassion for others.

I’m no psychological professional so I can’t give a reasonable answer, but what I do know is that I feel better when I remember the words of Wiktor Frankl “Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.”