Addiction

In this blog post I'm going to be discussing addiction. Even though some people think that addiction can only be to drugs or alcohol, you can literally be addicted to anything. Some people also think that only certain types of people have addictions and that it's not a very common thing, when in fact about one in three people have some form of addiction. I, personally, have an addiction, I know of many of my close friends addictions. It is more common than people think, and even though it's something that a lot of people joke about it can be really serious. 

By definition the meaning of the word addiction is: 

Noun the fact or condition of being addicted to a particular substance or activity. 

Being addicted by definition means:

Adjective physically and mentally dependent on a particular substance. 

My addiction is one that I'm still battling with, I've had it for a long time and I don't think it's something I will ever completely get over. My addiction is to self harm, I'm a lot better with it than I was when I was at the height of my addiction. I had a period of being self harm free for about two years, but then I had a relapse when I went to uni and have been on and off with it since then. For me, the self harm was a coping mechanism and a way of dealing with the horrible things that was going on in my life. 

You can literally be addicted to anything though, my addiction was self harm, but you can be addicted to drugs, alcohol, internet, shopping, sex, gambling, coffee, food, work, solvents... the list could be endless. I use to know someone who had an addiction to Wotsits and physically couldn't cope without their three packets of Wotsists a day. It sounds silly, but it was true, if she didn't get them she would literally break down and couldn't cope. 

The development of addiction is something that I find really fascinating, but that's probably because I use to study psychology as an A Level and the way in which our brain works is so interesting to me. I'm a nerd, I know. Addictions can start in a number of different ways, with things such as drugs you can get addicted to how it makes you feel physically and mentally, and then you get the urge to get that feeling back. This is the way that other addictions can start as well, my addiction with self harm came from wanting to be able to feel something and then the high I got from it. I got a feeling of being better and that it sorted out how I was feeling... if only for 10 minutes or so. I wanted to get that feeling of being okay back, so it became more and more regular until I was doing it several times a day. 

The worst thing about addicted to something is the withdrawal symptoms you have from it. I remember when I was trying to get clean from self harm, I would literally feel as though I was dying. It felt so much easier to carry on with the self harm than live with the withdrawal symptoms that I was suffering. I would get the shakes, I would cry, I would want to pull my hair out, I would beg and beg people to let me have things that were sharp, or give me my straighteners. It was honestly, so horrible. I hated it so much.

Addictions can take over your life and become your main priority rather than anything else in your life. It's the only thing you'll be to think about, it will consume everything. You can lose friends due to the addiction and your family may even have to leave too. Addictions are so hard to overcome, but it's so important that you get help with them.

There are so many charities out there to help people with addiction, and it's so important to get as much help as possible to get over it. You will probably always have an addiction, and there will always be an underlying problem there. Relapse is always a possibility, but it's how you deal with the relapse and make sure it's not something that happens all the time, just so you don't get back into that cycle of addiction. 

For more information on addiction I'll put a couple of links at the end. I'm not sure if I've made much sense in this blog post, but I hope that it's given you guys a little insight into addiction and my experiences of it. 

Stay awesome.

http://www.nhs.uk/livewell/addiction/Pages/addictionhome.aspx

https://www.psychologytoday.com/basics/addiction

Dealing With Disappointment

In this blog I'm going to talk about how I've personally dealt with disappointment and some tips and tricks to help you deal with let downs and disappointments.

Dealing with disappointment is never easy, you get that horrible feeling in the pit of your stomach and it feels like the world is going to end. You have that horrible little voice in your head going over and over all the things that have gone wrong and that's all you can focus on. It sucks. it really does. It's something we will all have in our lifetime, and something we'll have to deal with a lot. The dealing with it though is never easy or straight forward. 

You can be disappointed in a lot of things or you could have that feeling of disappointment projected on you by someone else. I can never quite work out which is worse, feeling the disappointment or knowing someone else feels that disappointment towards you. "I'm not angry with you at all, I'm just disappointed" is possibly one of the worst phrases someone can say to you, for some weird reason it just cuts you really deep and makes you feel so awful. It takes you back to being naughty in school and the teacher telling you she was disappointed and feeling so horrible and sick. This is a hard one really because you have to change someone's opinion of you. I think you just have to try and prove that you know you made a mistake or attempt to make amends with the person who is disappointed in you, that is, if you think it's worth proving them wrong, you may not feel that it is worth it at all.

I think the worst disappointment is when someone who you thought was a close friend or someone who you thought you knew really well completely betrays you or does something that you never imagined they would do. This is such a hard one because if you're really close to them or they're your partner, there is so many feelings there, as well as a load of history that you have to either put behind you or move on from. I think it's so important that you decided with these types of disappointments if you can forgive the person completely or not. If you think you can, then you can't bring up what they did every time you have an argument but if you really feel like you can't forgive them then you have to let them go. It's not fair being friends with someone or being in a relationship if you can't forgive them for something they've done.

If you're disappointed in yourself that's a whole different ball game. It's important to be able to forgive yourself and reflect on the decisions that made you feel the way you do. I think being reflective here is something that is key for almost forgiving yourself and helping you to understand what went wrong. By understanding what happened and why it did, it enables you to not do it again or make sure that  it can't happen again. If you're upset about a grade, reflect on if you did everything you possibly could, did you revise hard enough, did you follow the assessment criteria, did you put enough effort in? It's not about finding blame or over thinking, it's all about looking at where you could improve and do better next time. It's so important not to be too critical of yourself or beat yourself up if something hasn't turned out the way you expected it to. Not everything in life always goes to plan, it is, however, important to be able to see what went wrong and move on from it. 

The main problem here is being able to accept that there is nothing you can do to change what happened or how someone else is feeling at that specific moment in time, but instead realising that it's not the end of the world and being able to pick yourself up and rectify the situation. It's looking at it and thinking, yeah that sucked and I'm going to do my damn dear hardest to ensure it doesn't happen again. You're allowed to be upset with yourself and be annoyed, but don't let that swap you or define you are a person. You are more than a mistake you have made.

Stay awesome. 

Negative Ways of Thinking

This blog post is going to be all about the different ways in which we think negatively when you suffer from anxiety or depression. I'll do another blog post later on about how you can challenge those negative thoughts but for now, in this post, we'll just discuss the different ways we can think negatively. I do pretty much all of these things so it'll be interesting to see if any of you guys can recognise these thoughts in yourself.

Polarised Thinking 

This type of thinking that is all or nothing. If a situation doesn't quite turn out the exact way you think it should you consider yourself a complete failure. So for example, if you get a bad mark for one piece of work or module, you see yourself as useless and it can lead to giving up the course and not feeling good enough at anything.

Mind Reading or Fortune Telling

This is when things are interpreted negatively with no evidence at all to support this interpretation. This is something I do all the time, I constantly think that I know what people are thinking about me or what they're saying. If someone looks at me in a weird way, I automatically think that they're saying something horrible about me or that they dislike me when I have no proof of it. Fortune telling is where you predict that something is going to happen and usually the outcome is negative. So, I always say that I would be the one who bad things would happen to. If something went wrong it would always happen to me. Even though, realistically, bad things don't always happen to me but I always perceive bad things do happen to me.

Overgeneralisation

This is where you see a single event that's negative as a never ending pattern of defeat. In this negative thinking you use words such as 'never' or 'always' when you think about it. If you look through my Twitter there is so much of this. I say things like 'I always mess up' and "I'm so fed up of constantly being sick" these types of sentences are overgeneralisations.

Discounting the Positive

Here is where you reject any positive experiences you've had. When someone tells you that you look good, or that you're pretty you don't believe them or feel as though they're just saying that to be nice to you. By discounting the positives in life it can cause you to take the joy out of life and make you feel inadequate.

Magnification and Shrinking

This is where you exaggerate the importance of your problems and shortcomings, or you minimise the importance of all of your desirable qualities. You will always focus on the one thing that went badly in a situation that was otherwise successful.

Negative Mental Filtering

With this one what you do is focus on a single negative detail and dwell on that tiny detail. This makes you vision of reality quite bleak and gloomy. An example of this is if you write a book and every one but one person tells you how good it is, you would focus on that one negative piece of feedback and that's all you'd be able to think about. Not the fact that hundreds of other people enjoyed the book you wrote.

Irrational Emotional Reasoning

You make the assumption that your negative emotions reflect the way things really are. So if you're feeling guilty its because you're a terrible person, or if you feel inferior it's because you're not worth anything.

Shoulds, Musts and Have Tos

We often direct should statements on ourselves, for example, I should have done better, or I have to get a certain grade. These statements can often lead to guilt and frustration. We can also direct them towards other people, for example, she should have stopped it before it happened, which can then lead to anger as well as frustration.

Labelling

This one is pretty self explanatory but it's basically where you attach negative labels to yourself in an extreme way. If you make a mistake you would often call yourself an idiot or that you're stupid. This form of labelling is irrational because as people, we are not the same as what we do. These labels can lead to anger, anxiety, frustration and low self esteem.

Personalisation and Blame

This happens when you hold yourself personally responsible for an event when it's not under your own control. Someone might mention that the house is untidy and you will see this comment as a criticism of the fact that you can't keep a clean house. I often do this when people who I don't know walk past me and laugh, I usually always think they're laughing at me when they're probably not.

So there are some of the ways in which we think negatively. I'm sure many of you can recognise and relate to a lot of these thought patterns, I know I do all of them. These negative thought patterns can be so detrimental to your mental health and cause serious issues with self esteem and confidence. I'll hopefully be doing a blog post in the next few weeks about how to deal and challenge these negative thoughts and feelings in order to hopefully get over them. Don't worry too much if you do see some or all of these behaviours within yourself. It happens to us all, it's just learning how to deal with them properly.

Stay awesome.  

Mindfulness

This blog post is going to be all about mindfulness, what it is, how it can help you and a few exercises you can do if you want to start doing mindfulness in order to improve your life or help you de-stress during a tough time. It's something that was suggested to me by a friend and then my psychiatrist and it's currently something I'm trying out so I thought I would share with you guys. 

The whole point of mindfulness is to pay attention to what's going on around us and inside of us. It's a form of meditation and really quite simple and easy to do. It doesn't work for everyone and does take time for it to show any positive effects, but it is something I would recommend as it's seems to be really helping me de-stress and think about my negative thoughts and their effects on me. It helps you pay attention way more to the present moment and what's going on in the world around you and this awareness can lead to an improvement in mental health. 

The way in which it helps your mental well being is that it allows you to focus on the present rather than the past or the future, which anxiety sufferers will know is something they always do. By becoming more aware of the present moment it allows us to see what we would have otherwise taken for granted. It also allows you to take a step back and realise that your thoughts are, just that, thoughts, it enables you to analyse your thoughts and see when those thoughts begin to take over and control you. It helps you train yourself to notice these signs of anxiety and stress so much earlier and therefore, helps you deal with them earlier before it can take over and cause issues.

The most important thing with mindfulness is to keep it regular. One exercise I do, I try to do four times a day, every day, and I've been doing it for about a month or so and I find it so helpful. I'll explain a little later on what that particular exercise is. You can do it at any time or create a schedule for it, I like to do it as soon as I wake up, at lunch and dinner, then just before I go back to bed. It gives me lots of different scenarios in which I can practise and become more aware of myself and my surroundings. You just have to remind yourself to pay attention to the space around you, take notice to your thoughts and feelings as well as the sensations you feel in your body.

By paying attention to these negative mental events, you start to be able to name them, thus heightening your awareness of them. I find it useful to name them, others don't. So for example, if I'm fortune telling, which is a common way in which we have negative thoughts, I name that as anxiety, or fortune telling so I know exactly what's going on in my head.

It's also important to note that mindfulness DOES NOT work for everybody. It can make some people over think and cause them more anxiety because they almost attempt to make the negative thoughts go away rather than just seeing them as a mental event that passes eventually. For me it works, but for others going for a walk, run or doing an exercise like yoga may be equally as beneficial to them.

Mindfulness Exercise

1. Sit back in a chair and relax into a comfortable position. Close your eyes if you feel comfortable to do so. 
2. Breath in through your nose and out through your mouth normally.
3. Every time you breath in, in your head say breath in, every time you breath out, in your head say breath out. 
4. Pay attention to the smells around you, try to work out what they are, is there any new smells?
5. Pay attention to how your clothes feel on your body, is there anything itching you? Can you feel how the chair feels on your legs?
6. Pay attention to the sounds around you, is there a dog barking, can you hear the rain? What;s going on.
7. If any negative thoughts come your way try to bring your attention back to the thing you were thinking about previously with the last breath you have.
8. Do it for as long as you feel comfortable.
9. Slowly open your eyes when you're ready.

I do this technique four times a day for three minutes in the time periods that I discussed earlier. This is more of a personal one that you can do by yourself and I find it helps you pay attention to things you wouldn't have done normally. It also allows you to home in on those negative thoughts and push them away with your breath, helping you control them.

Another exercise you can do is to pay more attention to details of a room when you come to a new place. Try to pick out cool and interesting things about it that you wouldn't have noticed originally. Or if you're eating, pay more attention to the colours and the taste of the food, I found this to make food so much more enjoyable to eat. When you're walking around a familiar place, see if there's anything you haven't noticed before, maybe a new sign has come up or you notice a different coloured brick than the others. Just pay more attention to your surroundings and try to use all five senses if you can. 

So that's the basics of mindfulness, how it can help, what it is, and a few exercises you can try to see if it would work for you. Remember it doesn't work for everyone so don't get too caught up on the fact it may not work for you, but I do feel it's something everyone with anxiety and depression should try. I hope this blog post has been useful and informative.

Stay awesome.

It's Been A Stressful Week

I want to start off by apologising for the lack of blog posts recently, I've just finished my second year of university and the module that I was doing required me to learn a lot of lines so I didn't really have time to write anything. So major apologies there. 

This last week I've been having to deal with a lot of stress and anxiety mainly from my module and learning a lot of lines. Monday was probably my worst day, I had a panic attack in the morning because I was so paranoid about messing up my lines as I was so shaky on them so it was building up inside me for about half an hour, then it was my time to go on. I could feel my body getting ready to be sick and my friends told me to go to the toilet. I threw up about six times, and I couldn't control my breath and I began to feel so light headed. This went on for a good 20 minutes and I tried to get up and go outside but as soon as I got up I fainted and whacked my head on the toilet seat. 

I've had really bad panic attacks over the last few weeks, but I've had some really awesome support from my friends. I've been using my crisis box a lot as well, which has been so helpful for me. I've been burning the candles, colouring and playing with my Play-Doh mainly.

What I'm trying to get at is that I know how stressful things can get and how awful it can be when you are stressed. This week, although fun, has been the most stressed I've been in a long time. There were so many points where I wanted to give up and say no more, but I didn't I stuck through it and I'm really quite glad I did. It was so hard, I'm not going to lie, but I managed to not give up which is what I would usually do. 

I've had to step back a lot and try to rationalise all of my thoughts and feelings which was a really difficult thing to do. My lecturer was so helpful and I'm so thankful that he was understanding, I also had an amazing support network who were there for me no matter what which I'm so glad about. 

Sometimes with anxiety and depression you can often forget how many people do care about you or how many people want to see you do well. Even though I've had the week from hell, I've got through it. Life throws you curve balls every so often and it's about how you deal with the stress and the issues that comes from those curve balls. It's so important not to give up even if you really want to, because believe me there were times where I wanted to pack it all in and just give up. I was so ready to and run away from uni and just go home. 

I guess my point is that you can get over these bumps in the road and set backs with anxiety. Life is full of peaks and troughs and it's all about dealing with them, and you will be able to deal with them. Sometimes with a little help if needed but you'll get there. 

Stay awesome.

Letting Go Of A Toxic Person

This is something I've had to deal with very recently. I had to let a person go from my life who I really cared a lot about but they were just completely toxic to my mental health without them actually meaning to be. It can be super hard to let go of someone who is bad for you, especially when there's a buttload of feelings involved. I've had to let go of so many people in my life simply because they were not healthy and they worsened my mental state. 

It's really hard because when you're friends with that person or in a relationship with them, you don't want to see the negative effects, you only want to see the positives because you do care about them so much. You look at this toxic person through rose tinted glasses and make excuses for any wrong doings. Even when other people point out how bad they are for you, you just can't see it because you want to believe they're a good person deep down and what they're doing isn't intentional. 

I'm the type of person who wants to save other people. What I mean by that is I see someone with a problem and I want to be the one who is able to change them or make them better in some way. I've had boyfriends with anger issues, eating problems, anxiety and depression and I see them as a sort of project, not in a bad way but I want to help them get better. I like helping people, most likely because I cannot help myself most of the time. I'm powerless to change myself and better myself, but I can at least try and help a person I care deeply about. 

The problem is you can't always save people, and in the end, their problems become yours and you get the burden of it too. They don't want to burden you or anything but it happens unintentionally. Their hurt and pain becomes yours and then you almost have two sets of issues to deal with. 

This happened to a relationship of mine where he was having massive issues with his anger, trust and mental health and I spent more time worrying about him than I did sorting myself out. It made me more anxious and really affected my mental health. In the end I realised that I couldn't do anything, and although it hurt and I knew how horrible and toxic the relationship had been recently, I let go of him and we broke up. I do still miss him from time to time and I think about him a lot and how he's doing, I don't care any less about him but I couldn't have him bringing me down. I became very low in my mood when I was around him and went back into my shell a bit because I was scared of hurting or upsetting him and that's not something you should ever do really. 

The worst part of letting a toxic person in your life go is if you're still in love with them or if you still really care about them. Very recently I had to let go of someone who meant a lot to me, but wasn't being respectful or truthful to me, he messed me about a lot and my anxiety suffered because of that. I'm not saying that he didn't care about me or didn't try to help me, he did, but other things he did ruined us and it wasn't healthy for either of us to be friends or whatever we were any more. I didn't want anything in my room or in my life to remind me of him, so I got all of the stuff he had given me, including a teddy that meant a lot to me, put it in a bag, wrote him a letter that basically said goodbye. That was probably one of the hardest things I've had to do. 

The worst of it is, not a day goes by where I don't wonder how he is or think about him in passing. I don't want to, and I'm staying strong in attempts to not contact him, but it is so hard not to. Especially considering the predicament I'm in currently. Unfortunately though, he had become a toxic person in my life and I had to let him go. It was a long time coming and although it's very sad and upsetting, it's probably best in the long run. 

What I'm saying is I know how hard it can be to walk away from something when there's a lot of feelings involved or if you care deeply about someone. It's so hard to not pick up the phone and call them or not text them. They may be able to come back into your life in a year or in six months time, but for now, it's important to focus on yourself and getting better. That's something I had to realise on my own. 

Stay awesome.