Be 👏 kind👏 to👏 yourself👏 When I started out taking care of my mental health and digging out of the mental illness hole, I had to make a lot of changes around things I thought were totally normal and necessary. Making those changes were tough because I’d spent years practicing and perfecting compulsions that made me miserable. I could spend entire days having imaginary arguments in my head about terrible things that hadn’t even happened but I didn’t know how …
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I’m replacing myself! It’s been a wonderful time being me but robots are cool and they can make mental health resources accessible in ways that humans can’t. I can only have one conversation at a time and even though I answer questions at all hours of the day right now, I do get sleep sometimes and my sleep skills are top-notch.
Build a new relationship with uncertainty throughout your life or your daily practices will just logically and rationally have you struggling and suffering and relapsing back into a depressive anxiety hole. This video explains an approach that I credit with helping me recover and maintaining great mental health for the past eight years:
When I bring up the idea that judgment is the first compulsion that leads to all of the other emotions and behaviors we struggle with when we’re sinking into mental health challenges, people can often become very protective of their judgment skills. We can always think of ways our ability to judge has helped us. We’ve gotten positive feedback from others. Maybe our careers depend upon our judgment skills. But it’s not that judgment is necessarily bad. It simply has …
I like to get up early and get food in me as soon as I can because I love writing in the mornings. Cooking breakfast every morning can seriously cut into writing time, so I often make a batch of nutrient-dense power bars to fuel my morning writing and start the day off well. Here is one of my favourite recipes that has a texture like a fudge brownie but marcos that work well with my lifestyle. You can also …
Recently, Matt and I did a couple of videos exploring intrusive thoughts or anxieties and why it’s useful to look at why we’re afraid of the consequences of those thoughts or anxieties coming true. There’s an exercise for doing that, The 5 Whys, which I shared in my book, The Mind Workout, and Matt explains near the end of this video:
We could also call this: Recovery is like rowing. You’ll be bad at both until you’re not. And then you’ll just push harder. If you’re working with a personal trainer on your physical fitness, it’s not strange if you expect to work with somebody that’s in better shape than you, that practices the skills you want to learn, that’s reached the same goals you want to reach. In the mental health sector, however, involving people with lived experience of recovery …
Recently, Daniela posted over on the Everybody has a Brain Tumblr about some anxiety challenges she tackled after getting laid off, then searching for a new job, and then at her new workplace. Her story was such a great example of all the skills we’re always talking about, and it includes vomit! It’s so useful to talk about overcoming these challenges and often that means overcoming very real physical symptoms, like nausea. So I wanted to share Daniela’s post and …