I feel compelled to write this blog to share some incredible news with you all. This week, I received the official confirmation, that I am to be a TEDx Open University speaker! This news comes at a poignant time for me, because this week, I also celebrate nine years clean and sober. Being given such an incredible opportunity stands as a testament to how far I have come. And to think, I worried that my sober life would be boring!
Distraction techniques are an incredibly valuable tool in our mental health wellness kit, to help us to deal with overwhelming emotions and situations. For example, anxiety can feel impossible to sit with. Urges to harm ourselves can feel overwhelming. A low mood can mean our head is full of negative thoughts. Heightened emotions can feel so distressing that it becomes tempting to self-medicate with drugs or alcohol. I have had to manage all of these challenges in my own mental health journey and I understand how exhausting and difficult it can be. However, I have found that by learning to use distraction techniques, I have been able to find healthy ways to manage the most overwhelming of feelings.
There is a great deal of stigma and misinformation around the topic of self-harm. Commonly, self-harm is associated with young female teens and often seen as a trend or as a way to get attention. Nobody hurts themselves without reason. That person with the cuts along their forearm? They are in enormous amounts of pain, and I do not mean from the wounds. I know this because I have been personally affected by self-harm. I want to share my story, to highlight that this is an issue that can affect anyone, of any gender, at any time.
I made the decision recently, to stop taking my Sertraline antidepressant. In hindsight, I could have approached this in a much less aggressive manner, but I stand by my decision to stop. Sertraline was causing me to have emotional numbness. I was unable to cry, which I was finding incredibly frustrating.
Stress is an unavoidable part of life however too much stress can negatively effect our mental health. Therefore, if you have mental health challenges, as I do, stress can quickly make things much worse. It is important then, to make sure that you use stress management techniques to lessen its impact.
We have all had those days, haven’t we? Where on waking up with good intentions, something then upsets us or makes things difficult, and our mood and motivation plummets. When this happens, we can feel tempted to throw in the towel and resign ourselves to a bad day. However, you don’t need to write the day off, you can simply choose to restart a bad day. In this blog, I will share the four simple steps, to restart a bad say, at any time, and as many times as you need.
I planned to go to the gym today. I joined last week, in the hope it may do me some good. However, I only got as far as getting up, showering and dressing. Once dressed, I felt defeated by the enormity of the rest of the steps needed to complete a gym session and could go no further. To combat the feelings of failure, I need to remind myself, especially under the current circumstances, that success is relative.
It’s been three weeks since Mum passed away. The day Mum left feels simultaneously like a lifetime away and only yesterday. Time is behaving strangely. Days of the week have no meaning. Time, space, days, they are all the same. The pain of grief is
Feeling grateful does not come easily when we are in emotional pain. When we are really low, it is so difficult to remember a time when life was good or to remember that this will pass. However, in my recovery journey, l have learned the power of perspective. If you focus on the negative, in turn, negative feelings will be the most prevalent. Conversely, by switching our focus to positive things, we start to notice more of them and our mood lifts, making us feel better. This is why writing a gratitude list is such a powerful tool in recovery.
Mum has gone. I can’t say that D-word. I don’t want to
Keeping a positive mindset is not an easy thing to do. In our interaction with the world and with people, we hear upsetting news, people and places frustrate us, and we can easily start to spiral into negativity. Whilst it is impossible to avoid negativity completely, we can do a few simple things to help counterbalance it. The best way to guard against negativity is by creating a positive environment. In this blog, I will share my tips on how to make your living space, social space, and online space, ones that nurture positivity.
Christmas can be a tough time of year for many people. There is so much unspoken pressure to be full of, ‘The joy of the Holiday Season’ but often that is the last thing people feel. People struggle at Christmas for many reasons, for being estranged from families, grieving lost loved ones or, as in my case, struggling to come to terms with a mum who has dementia.
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