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When pain is vast, the actions we take to push it down and keep it under the surface can cause damage to both the individual and their relationships. If you disconnect with one emotion, you disconnect from them all.
Regular exercise, eating well and ensuring we maintain some social contact will all help us to strengthen our mental health when we most need it.
Building resilience to shame does not mean you never feel it. Instead, it means we learn how to dust ourselves off and get back up.
If you say out loud that you are strong and lovable, but you don’t believe that you are, then your inner critic will get to work coming up with all the reasons why you are not strong or lovable.
Therefore, on the days when we don’t feel strong, we don’t need to tell ourselves that we are.
those who develop self-acceptance and learn to be self-compassionate are less likely to fear failure and more likely to try again when they do fail.
The things that give us immediate relief from our fear tend to feed that fear
in the long term. Every time we say no to something because of fear, we reconfirm our belief that it wasn’t safe or that we couldn’t handle it.
if you want to feel less anxious about something, do it as often as you can.
When we learn to face the things that make us feel afraid, we get stronger.
Exercise is one of the best anxiety management tools because it follows the natural course of your threat response. Your body is geared up to move. Allow it to do that and your body can use up the energy and stress hormones it has produced and rebalance.
Physical movement will truly relieve your body of the physical stress so that when you sit down to relax, you can feel calm and fall asleep more easily, helping you to replenish further.
exercise is also a powerful prevention tool, so try to exercise even on the days when you don’t feel anxious. This way you are setting yourself up to have a better day tomorrow. Your mental health will thank you for it.
Any time that you want to get some distance and a new perspective on your emotional state or situation, write down everything you are thinking and feeling. Seeing what you have written on the page can be a powerful way to process and make sense of your experience from a bird’s-eye view.
Overgeneralizing makes anxiety worse for a couple of reasons. It leads to a more intense spike of emotion because it turns one problem into a bigger, life problem. Secondly, it often leads us to avoid the situation in the future, which feeds anxiety and makes it much harder to face.
Our brains take in and process a lot of information every second of every day. But the world around us offers infinite amounts of information. If your brain was to try and process everything, you would not be able to function. So the brain makes choices about what to focus on. Our attention is like a spotlight. We have control of that spotlight, but we cannot control the actors who come on stage. We cannot control how long they spend there, what they say, or when they leave. What we get to do is focus that spotlight on one or two of them at a time. If we settle our focus on the
anxious thoughts that tell stories of worst-case scenarios and images of you not coping, they get the chance to feed back to the brain that all is not well. When you shift the spotlight of your attention to other thoughts on the stage that offer a different story, they will have their influence on your bodily reaction too. While you are focusing on them, the other thoughts may not leave the stage. They may stick around, waiting for the spotlight again. But without it, they have less power over your emotional state.
Reframing is when you allow yourself to consider reinterpreting the situation in a way that is going to help you move through
Your brain is constantly receiving information from your body about the demands of the outside world and trying to work out how much effort is needed. It tries to match the amount of energy being released in the body to the demands from the outside world, to ensure that nothing is wasted. When our internal physiological state feels well matched to the environment, we mostly interpret that as a positive feeling, even when it involves stress,
When adrenaline is repeatedly propping up our immune system through chronic stress and then we stop and the adrenaline goes down, so does the immune system.
Being mindful is about the practice of paying attention to the present moment and observing sensations as they come and go, without getting caught up in those sensations or struggling against them.
There is a big problem with focusing an affirmation on what not to do. We only have the one spotlight of attention and when we focus it on what not to do, that leaves little room to focus on what we do need to do for things to go well.
When we believe that mistakes and setbacks are linked to who we are as a person and our self-worth, then even the smallest of failures will trigger shame and the urge to give up, withdraw, hide away and block out the excruciating feelings. This happens a lot for perfectionists. There is a focus on being enough in the eyes of others and assuming that those others demand nothing less than perfection. If I fail then I am a failure. If I lose then I am a loser. However small and temporary that setback may have been.
What response to this situation most fits with the kind of person you want to be? How could you move forward from now in a way that you would be proud of and grateful for when you look back on this time?
But the idea of happiness has been hijacked over the years by an elusive fairytale of constant pleasure and satisfaction with life.
We are given the impression that happiness is the norm and anything outside of that could be a mental health problem. We are also sold the idea that if we can achieve material wealth, happiness will arrive and stick around.
humans are not built to be in a constant happy state. We are built to respond to the challenges of survival. Emotions are a reflection of our physical state, our actions, beliefs and what is going on around us.
When we don’t have clarity on our values, we can set goals based on what we think we should be doing, others’ expectations, or a guess that once we achieve that goal, we will finally be enough, we can finally relax and be happy with who we are.
Rather than hoping things are better in the future, what if life could be meaningful and purposeful now, by living in line with what matters most to you? You still get to strive towards change and achievement with all your strength, but you are not waiting for a meaningful life, you already have it.
Sometimes we are not happy because we are human and life is difficult.
we get to choose what action we take to bring ourselves closer to the path that we want to be on.
Overly focusing on outcome can lead us to quit more easily when we don’t see results quickly enough or when we meet resistance and hurdles along the way.
When you first decide to set a goal, you might get excited about it and a spark of motivation will strike. But motivation is like a flame on a match. It will burn itself out. It’s an unsustainable source of fuel. But if you have a routine of small actions that are not too radical or dramatic to maintain, then your new sense of identity will help to sustain you.
A long-lasting relationship is not a gentle boat ride that drifts downstream. You have to pick up the oars and make values-based choices and actions about where you want to go with it. Then you have to put the work in.
When we feel secure in a relationship, we can feel more free to be separate people and not feel threatened by the other aspects of our partner’s life.
If we buy into the myth of happily ever after, we make ourselves vulnerable to assuming that this relationship just wasn’t meant to be and end it without realizing that all relationships hit bumps in the road.
It is OK to end a relationship that causes harm to your physical or mental wellbeing.
The securely attached child is not constantly happy, with every need anticipated before a cry. They will feel safe enough to show their distress when a parent leaves, but will rekindle that connection when reunited. As they continue into adulthood they will enjoy closeness, feel able to express their needs and feelings, while maintaining the capacity for some independence.
The most powerful place to start on improving your relationships is with you. Not in a self-blame, self-attack crusade. But with curiosity and compassion. Understanding the cycles that we seem to get stuck in and what may have made us vulnerable to that. This paves the way to working out how to break those cycles.
When your mental health fluctuates, it can be even more difficult to make decisions and take action. So seeking the help you need becomes harder to do. And there is no set of rules that tells you when to see a professional.
