(I hope you all enjoy these pics from my drunken tube photoshoot - I sure as hell do. Just a little something to make this blog a little less serious and somewhat boring (:)
Again, really sorry (lol whoops) for the delay in getting this final part posted. The last couple of months have been really up and down to say the least, for a whole multitude of reasons. So I wanted to focus on myself first and I didn't feel like I had the correct mindset to write anything, especially not give any sort of advice on how to have a healthy mindset! I just felt like I had to listen to some of my own advice for a bit and finally pick myself up and put myself back together. What this shows though, that this really isn't an easy ride, there is ALWAYS going to be ups and downs, but it's how you bring yourself back up from those downs which is the most important...
My last session with Ronaldo was bittersweet. On the one hand I was happy that I had come to the end and had successfully completed 6 sessions of CBT, as well as put what I had learnt into practice outside of the Psychriactric Ward. But, on the other hand, I was now on my own, I didn't have Ronaldo's by-weekly check-ins to keep my progress steady...I'm not entirely sure if this was the reason but my last session was one of the hardest (apart from the first one obvs!) and I was the most anxious I had felt out all of the previous times we had met. I remember walking in with my hands shaking and unable to catch my breathe, just like I had in the first session. My mind was flittering all over the place and I could barely focus on what Ronaldo was saying. I said to him I felt like I had been struggling over the last couple of days and he asked me if I had ever tried mindfulness and meditation. in the weeks prior to the last session, in my bid to try anything and everything to rid of my anxiety, I had actually recently downloaded the Headspace app on my phone and began it's 10 minute meditation sessions some mornings or whenever I had time. After telling him this, he explained that what I had been learning in my previous sessions about controlling my thought processes and how to prevent my thoughts from running away and snowballing, well this was all a practice in meditation.
To give you a bit of context, within the teachings of basic mindfulness meditation, people are taught to focus on breath and body sensations and to non-judgmentally evaluate distracting thoughts and emotions. It is the practice that revolves around catching your thoughts, noting them and then coming back to the breathe. This is a way of controlling and preventing anxiety in day-to-day life. A post on Psychology Today stated that anxiety is a cognitive state connected to an inability to regulate your emotional responses to perceived threats. Mindfulness meditation strengthens a person’s cognitive ability to regulate emotions. For example, in a 2013 study, researchers recruited fifteen healthy volunteers with normal levels of everyday anxiety. These individuals had no previous meditation experience or known anxiety disorders. All volunteers participated in four 20-minute classes to learn the mindfulness meditation technique and after the study was complete, brain imaging found that meditation-related anxiety relief was associated with activation of the anterior cingulate cortex, ventromedial prefrontal cortex, and anterior insula. In other words, these areas of the brain are involved with executive function and the control of worrying... Meditation-related activation of these three regions was directly linked to anxiety relief.
We sat there with Ronaldo slowly going through breathing techniques, asking me to focus in on each individual part of my body for a few seconds and hone in on whatever emotion I was feeling at that present moment. If my mind trailed off on a random tangent about work that day, what I was having for dinner, or asking myself why the fuck I felt so awful, he would just remind to come back to my breathe. And TRUST ME, this was fucking hard.
At the end of the meditation he asked me how it went. I said it was horrible. Pins and needles trickled up and down my arms, focusing on my breathe felt impossible when my heart was racing and the last thing I wanted to do was think about how I was feeling or how my body was feeling all I wanted to do was stop. He then said to me, the reason I didn't enjoy sitting quietly by myself is obviously because I suffer from Generalized Anxiety Disorder but the main reason was because I didn't like myself, at all.
"Holy Shit" I thought...
Yeah maybe he was right and it was then when everything else seemed to fit into place. It would be every single week, come every Monday afternoon without fail, I would always badger my friends asking what their plans were for the upcoming weekend so that I didn't have to spend any of it alone, I went off and distracted myself with guys because it was the only time I felt love or affection towards myself, I got too drunk because I didn't think anyone liked me (just as I didn't) when I was sober, I ended up with shitty boyfriends because it's all I thought I deserved and I wouldn't give myself any time of day, any self-compassion and would continuously punish myself for every tiny aspect in my life for no reason whatsoever! Fucking hell. It really did all make sense and I know this all sounds horrifically sad and poor me but honestly it's fine, it took this realisation to be like yeah somethings got to give...
Ronaldo reassured me that the more energy I put into focusing on myself and the more time I spent with myself and (as cringe as it is) get to know the real me, I would begin to feel more comfortable in my own skin and learn to like myself. And god was he right.
It didn't happen overnight, it took a LOT of work and a lot of self love (again cringe) but I got there. There was a way to manage the anxiety, day-to-day stresses and self hate. You need to work hard every single day, but one day you will get there.
What the last 6 months has taught me overall, is that you don't have any idea what is going on in someone else's mind so just try to be kind to anyone and everyone you come across. What you see on Instagram isn't real, even when you see someone in real life, the way they may be acting isn't real. If you're feeling low, open up, be as raw and honest as you can about how you feel. Even if you can't find the words, just try. Someone will always be listening. Talk to your friends, your family, a therapist or even me! Don't push how you feel aside for pride, fear of being a burden or because you feel that what you're feeling will eventually pass on it's own...it might not and i'm sure your loved one's will always be happier to listen to you regardless of how big or small you believe the issue to be.
Now I can safely say that whatever anyone says about me or thinks of me, will never change the way I think about myself or my own self-worth. I know who I am, I stand by the decisions I've made and the mistakes I have made. They are what have shaped me and I will back myself until the end. I accept uncertainty as it is inevitable. I've stopped judging other people so that I stop assuming that's what people are doing of me. And I live everyday grateful for what I have because there is always so much more positive in your life than you may think.
Of course, I still have bad days and days where I can hardly face getting out of bed to tackle the world. I still go out with my friends and get ridiculously drunk and act like an idiot, because I'm 26 and if I still wasn't going out and having a good time then what is the point!? I still get super overwhelmed with daily to-do lists and the inevitable up and downs of life, but that's just it, it's life. The only difference now, as a reaction to all these things, I no longer punish myself or feel like a failure. I realise that everybody in the world at some time or the other, has had these days and issues, I'm not anything special and I give myself enough self-compassion now to get through the bad days because they are always only ever going to be temporary.
BOOKS:
- The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck by Mark Manson
- Loving What Is by Bryon Katie
- The Inner Fix by Persia Lawson & Joanne Bradford (You'll need a notebook handy too for this one as there a lot of self-help exercises to complete - absolutely brilliant!)
- Live Well with Louise by Louise Thompson
- You Got This by Bryony Gordon (This one is for younger girls, more teenagers really but I was on a roll and thought fuck it, I'll read this one too haha)
- Everything I know About Love by Dolly Alderton (Not so much a self-help book but made me realise my drunken antics were nothing out of the ordinary and just an absolutely hilarious read!)
- Jog On by Bella Mackie (Featured quite a bit in the first post regarding CBT)
- Miracle Morning by Hal Elrod
- The Secret by Rhona Byrne
PODCASTS:
- On Purpose by Jay Shetty (Great interviews and tips for everyday life)
- Where Is My Mind by Niall Breslin (Definitely worth a listen to get your head around the modern day world and how it affects people's mental health!)
- My Dad Wrote A Porno by Jamie Morton, Alice Levine and James Cooper (Just because when I'm having a shit day, this genuinely makes me laugh out loud)
Finally, techniques I have adopted over the last couple of months are below. Some of these have been mirrored and explained in the Miracle Morning by Hal Elrod and also in Niall Breslin's podcast, Where is My Mind.
In the Moment
Appreciate the small moments because if you don't they can so quickly pass you by. Small moments can, if you let them, bring you so much happiness. Throughout the day, whether it be as small as having a hug from a loved one or joking around with your friends, don't be distracted and let your mind be elsewhere. Live fully in that moment and you will learn to appreciate them more.
Practice Self-compassion
There was a time, when all you wanted was to be right where you are now. Stop chasing the next best thing and how you can be better. Reward yourself for everything you are, here, today. Don't punish yourself when things go wrong, forgive yourself and learn from your mistakes. You are enough, just as you are and as soon as we can all begin to accept that, the happier we will be. A great tip for this is, just before you go to sleep each night, literally right before you're about to fall asleep, tell yourself one good thing about yourself that you did that day. It can literally be as small as "I made a cup of tea for my colleague at work", that self-affirmation is proven in neuroscience to set you up for the following day with a positive outlook.
Toxic People
Remove these people from your life, no good can come from surrounding yourself with negative or draining people. Remove yourself from toxic situations where bitchiness, arguing or confrontation can occur.
Morning Ritual
Let the first thing you do in the morning when you wake up be to say 5 nice things about yourself or include things you are grateful for. We spend so much time in life focusing on the negative instead of the positive that we begin our day by checking out phones, seeing work emails or comparing ourselves to people on social media, this is already, without even knowing it, setting us up for a stressful or negative day. I've recently started to use my alarm clock instead of my phone to wake me up in the morning, or I put my phone on aeroplane mode and don't take it off until after I have listed what I'm grateful for. I try to not let my phone be the first thing I engage with in the mornings and feel that this has had one of the biggest positive impacts. Listing 5 positive affirmations or things you are grateful for and honing in on each one for 10 seconds or so has shown to set up a neurological signal (oooo get me) in your brain which ensures your mood is set brighter for the day ahead. This may seem long and like a bit of an effort (especially if you tend to be always running late in the mornings) but honestly it's worth setting your alarm that 5 minutes earlier to take part in this. Once you start doing it everyday I can guarantee that you will start to notice a difference and you will certainly notice the days where you have't done it.
For me, these techniques have worked wonders, putting in time and investing in myself has had to have had the biggest impact and I'll never now let myself get back to the state I was in before any of this started. For the future, I have booked myself onto a mindfulness course in September which will run for 9 weeks, which I'm sure I will write about nearer the time! I'm going to the Philippines in January for 3 weeks where during my last week there I will be taking part in a Mindfulness and Wellness Retreat which I can't bloody wait for! I will continue living every day from now on with self-compassion, humility and gratitude being a main focus. I've loved writing about my experiences and offering advice with what I have learnt along the way and subsequently, I hope you've enjoyed reading and we can continue to support each other the best we can!
All the best,
Hannah xx
Literally hilarious
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