Self care when life becomes difficult

How to look after your mental health when life throws you a curve ball.

Just imagine that you are living life to the fullest - happy, content, successful and achieving the goals that you have set for yourself and then along comes a curve ball such as a pandemic, a war and a cost-of-living crisis.

All of a sudden things have changed and you’re not too sure what to do or how to think.  This induces a level of anxiety and fear, concern for your health, your financial situation and a sense of worry for the world.

So, how do you ensure that you look after your mental health in these situations? 

There are many ways to do this and different approaches will help different people, but here are my top tips for maintaining good mental health in times of uncertainty.

Control

Taking a logical and factual view of any given situation can help you to gain some perspective and realise that a lot of the time, we worry about things that we have no control over. We can always find an element in any given situation where we can feel in control but it’s about recognising what this is.  Many people tend to look at the enormity of a curve ball situation and worry about the impact of this.  By breaking it down and looking at it’s parts, you can assess where you can gain some control in that situation.  So for example, regarding the cost of living crisis – there’s nothing that you can single handedly do to control the entire situation, but you can control how you manage your own living situation by finding ways to save money.  If you are fortunate enough to not be too affected by the financial situation, you may choose to help others by donating to food banks.  There is always something that you can take control of, even if it’s on a small scale.

Reality and expectations

A lot of the work I do with my clients involves looking at their scales of reality and expectations.  Much inner conflict can be caused when these scales are unbalanced in favour of expectations. For example, taking the current financial situation again as an example, some people expect to continue to live their life the way they have been used to, despite the cost of everything going up.  This can cause them to feel low, depressed, like they are failing and having a sense of their needs not being met.  If you take a step back from a situation and re-assess your expectations and compare them to the reality of your circumstances, this will help to highlight any discrepancies. By lowering your expectations or increasing your reality, this will help to balance your scales and therefore bring about equilibrium in your life.

Social media and the news – does it all get too much?

Do you spend a lot of time on social media and then find yourself feeling overwhelmed by everything that you read?

Do you watch the news and get a heaviness come over you as it all seems too much to listen to?

Having a break from social media can have so many benefits.  It can help to reduce anxiety and a fear of missing out.  It helps to promote real connections rather than virtual ones and therefore reduces loneliness.  Taking some time out from social media can aid sleep, and help to promote good mental health. 

Although social media has many benefits and many people use if for promoting their businesses, taking stock of the impact it has on your life and how it can negatively affect you can help to re-evaluate what is important.

If the daily news reporting of big events such as war, the pandemic and the cost of living gets too much for you, then maybe you would find Simple Politics on Instagram a useful page to keep updated on the basics of the news without the media hype around certain events (the irony of my previous paragraph advising taking a break from social media is not lost on me here!)

Self- care….joy vs fear/anxiety

How important is self care to you?  Do you spend much time looking after your mental and physical health or do you feel that more time is needed?

Self-care doesn’t need to be all fluffy blankets, cups of hot chocolate and a book or even a full on workout.  Self-care is about finding joy.  What makes your heart feel full?  What makes you smile?  At times of heightened anxiety, stress and fear inducing situations, it’s important to balance this with joy.  Similar to the reality and expectation scales, joy and fear are on opposite sides of a see-saw.  When one is at it’s highest, the other is at it’s lowest. 

So, finding time to spend doing the things that are joyful is important in maintaining well balanced mental health.

Best wishes

Hayley McAuley

Psychotherapist

Curious Counselling and Psychotherapy