Friday, 15 August 2014

If you feel yourself getting anxious:

Count to yourself: As you breathe in for 5 seconds, count the number 1. When you breathe out for 8 seconds, count the number 1. Keep on counting. Repeating the numbers will help you gain some continuity to help your breathing ease a little and for things to settle and calm.  
Quick meditation: Lie or sit down. If you are sitting, make sure that your feet are flat against the floor and you are sitting up in a state that is relaxed. Set your phone or a timer for a minute. For that minute, focus upon your breathing. Focus upon how your body feels and how your chest falls as you breathe in and out. If your mind wanders, don’t beat yourself up for that, it’s perfectly natural, just bring your mind back to focus upon your breathing. Doing this daily can help you feel more present in the moment and it can help to focus your mind on your breathing if you’re feeling distressed.
Hot and cold: As you breathe in, feel your body warming up from your toes up to your head. Feel it filling with warm, positive emotions. As you breathe out, feel the cold, negative emotions draining from your head down to your toes and flowing out into the ground, not a part of you anymore. You can do this in any public place when you begin to feel nervous and worried.
Drinking water/mints: Only do this if you’re breathing okay, so you don’t choke. Sucking on a mint and drinking cold water can clear your airways. When you drink the cold water, feel it going down your throat and into your system. Focus upon it reaching all the parts of your body and clearing your thoughts. It can help you focus upon breathing more steadily if your airways are clear.
Five senses: Go through each of your five senses: touch, smell, sight, taste and hearing. What do you experience with each of these? How does that feel? If you focus upon hearing, try to listen to every tiny little sound, for example, such as birds singing through a crowd of people. Work through each of those senses and repeat until you begin to feel less overwhelmed by it all.

A snippet of consciousness.

If there's one phrase that I simply can't stand, it's that we should consider ourselves lucky because we're not starving in Africa, or living on the streets, or dying of cancer. I don't think there's a slight that could discount someone's problems more. By all means, be grateful for what you have, and recognise the positives in your life, but don't ever, ever be afraid to grieve for something you lost, or never had, or deperately desire. Don't be afraid to turn to someone else and tell them that you are not okay. Don't be afraid to be happy and to be fine, because that shouldn't be a guilt-trip.

Tips for making a phonecall.

Making a phonecall can be really hard. It can be difficult to press the ‘call’ button and then, afterwards, really difficult to know what to say. We can end up stumbling over our words and mixing them up, and then we might end up hanging up in a panic or getting frustrated, or just avoiding phonecalls altogether.

Here are some tips that I thought might help - they helped me anyway:
    • Before you make the call write down what you want to say or who you will ask to speak to. This can be in bullet points or as a script, depending on how confident you’re feeling. If you want to write “hello, would it be possible to speak to X?” write that, even if it seems pedantic. It might stop you panicking if you forget your words once the phonecall has started.
    • Think about what you want to get out of the phonecall - do you need support? Do you need to ring to change bank details/college course? Write that down so that you can jog your memory if it goes blank.
    • Make sure you are somewhere you feel okay. Don’t make the phonecall with music in the background or with other people talking or it might distract you. If it helps to sit down, do that. If it helps to walk around/pace, do that. I tend to pace around my bedroom when making a phonecall and I have found that helps.
    • Dial the number into your phone. Don’t wait too long before you hit the ‘call’ button because the anticipation can sometimes be worse than the call itself, and you might end up worrying yourself out of it. If it helps, countdown from 10 and then click ‘call’.
    • It can help to have the phone on speakerphone. I know that if I’ve shut my bedroom door and I’m asking for support, it helps me to put it on speaker because that feels less intense than having the person right in my ear, and I can get some space from them and feel less panicked.
    • Put your point across as calmly as you can and just focus upon what you are reading/saying. You might not be perfect and you might feel awkward but the person on the other end of the line is human too and it’s okay. If worst comes to worst, you might not ever meet this person and if you do, it’ll only be for a few minutes.
    • Remember that the phonecall will only be a few minutes long and try to focus upon how relieved you’ll feel after it’s done. Perhaps plan something nice for yourself such as some time reading or a cup of tea, to look forward to after you’ve made the phonecall.
Hope that helps and take care <3

"Don't kill yourself. It's so selfish."

I'm not sure how to start this. I want to write something about why I wanted to write about suicide, and why I wanted to explore the quoted statement in the title. I suppose that the reason that this is so prevalent in my mind is due to Robin Williams' death, which I woke up to discover via Facebook on Tuesday. From talking to people, those I know through my experience with mental health; professionals and friends, these were the people who were sad, but non-judgemental. They didn't think badly of Robin Williams for how his life ended. It was respectful sadness, I think, more than anything else.

One of the main themes that I noticed from people I have spoken to and various articles I have seen on the internet, was that Robin Williams was selfish, that those suffering from depression and addiction are selfish, as my boss so delicately put it on Tuesday, as I finished my shift. I very much had to bite my tongue.

Selfishness implies that someone does something to spite someone else, with a sole focus upon themselves to the detriment of others. Selfishness, in society, is seen as a bad thing. We are all supposed to be 'busy' and the only time we are 'allowed' to take to ourselves, well, we have to have a reason for it. If you book time off work, the question you're met with is "why? What are you doing with yourself on your break?" If you answer with something along the lines of "nothing", you're met with raised eyebrows and loaded pauses. We are in a society where we cannot love ourselves for fear of this shutting down the whole economy. We are distrustful of others, we feel disconnected, so many of the population will state that they are "fine" and smile, with exhaustion itching at the eyes fighting to stay upwards within that smile.

I'm not saying that everybody is depressed, that everybody is tired, but from talking to the customers in my work, it sure seems that way. When I ask someone if they have had a busy day, the answer is always "yes", with a sigh biting at its heels. I wonder why. If I ask a customer if it'll calm down soon, the answer is usually 'no', followed by a wry smile. Being busy is something to be proud of, which is funny, considering only the UK figures for the number of people on anti-depressant medication last year - the highest ever, if I remember correctly. Doesn't this suggest that we need to change society? That we need to change our outlook somehow? That we are under too much pressure to conform?

I'm not trying to minimise depression - I experience it myself, I would hardly trivialise it. I am merely stating an observation, perhaps.

Using my own experience of when I tried to kill myself, I remember that some of the first words I heard were "stupid", "idiotic" and "do you never think about me, about anybody else?" And I felt sick. Sick at what I was doing to other people, yet trapped inside this whirlwind of emotions, of the kick in the gut of how much I hurt physically and mentally, but I wasn't allowed to escape that for fear of hurting other people. Other people. Think about that for a second. Instead of asking why I wanted to kill myself, why I wanted to hurt myself so much and why I was hurting so much, I had to think about other people. I think that my rather sarcastic response, when talking about this 'selfish' view of suicide that had been thrust onto me, was that it was selfish for other people to tell me to stay alive for them. It works both ways.

Suicide, in my eyes, isn't selfish. It's when you get so overwhelmed with everything that you don't see any other way out. It's when you think that you are such a horrible, terrible, evil person, you think it will be a blessing on others if you were no longer around. Even if it was selfish, what is so wrong about being selfish sometimes? Why is 'selfish' such a bad word? Why is it not okay to do something for ourselves? I'm not condoning suicide, really I'm not, it's always sad (more than sad, but I do not have the words) that someone doesn't see another way out, but I think that sometimes, it is okay to take some time for you. That might be reading that book that's been collecting dust on your shelf for months, or going for a ten minute walk, or a run, or plaiting a bracelet, or having a bubble bath... something that you enjoy. Something that is for you because heck, you work damn hard and you deserve to do something nice! Everyone does. No exceptions.

I'm not sure what the purpose of writing this post is. I don't think that I planned to go off on as many tangents as I have done but I wanted to write something. I hope that's okay.