Low Moods: How chemicals in your brain cause you issues.

Why hello there dears... Okay so I've had all kinds of crazy writer block and although I planned a bunch of blog posts I just haven't sat down and committed to any of them fully. Every time I sit down to write something I blank out and end up just writing words and not having any kind of emotional energy driving what I'm writing- and I hate that. I think that because of the content of this blog I like to be totally emotionally truthful and write with heart, because I just think writing words for the sake of it when I'm trying to talk about happiness is a poor use of my time to do and yours to read me babbling nothing.

Now that I have grovelled to you about my commitment issues I found something I really wanted to talk to you about today. I'm going to use a little internet research from more reputable sources than my own brain to break down "low mood" a little bit.

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Low mood is something I wanted to talk about because it is a little different from depression and is something that I find wasn't really talked about very much. I wanted to make sure the facts I put on this blog are actually solid ones and that I don't claim to know about things which a doctor or specialist would- I just want to offer advice and share what I know about issues that a lot of people will deal with in their lives. So, here I checked out the NHS website (in my opinion one of the best most straight forward for advice about anything health related) and their facts about low mood. I read a lot of websites when I was trying to figure out how to fix my issues and feel better last year, trying to find out why I was feeling the way I was, and if being so constantly miserable was normal.

When I was looking around I read a lot of opinions and a lot of information from sources I didn't recognise, so I wanted to get back to basics, a medical opinion. Although when I was trying to work things out I flatly refused to see a doctor, I did accept that it was a good idea to address my issues and research them. The NHS website is a great place to do this- they give straightforward factual information and a lot of advice and links to help people with whatever they're going through, even though at times I found them limited I very much like their website. So I thought I'd share the information that they have regarding low mood.

They explain that

 "A general low mood can include:

• sadness
• an anxious feeling
• worry
• tiredness
• low self-esteem
• frustration
• anger

Normal feelings, feeling everyone has, that we have all had to deal with at various times in our own lives. I want to just address the concept of low mood because I really think its something that a lot of people experience a lot in their daily lives. Every single person I know, regardless of how together their lives appear to be, has experiences some if not all of these emotions and low moods. A few days in a week where it just feels like everything is getting on top of them and it drives us a little bit crazy. The NHS website goes on to explain:

"However, a low mood will tend to improve after a short time. Making some small changes in your life, such as resolving a difficult situation or talking about your problems and getting more sleep, can improve your mood."

This is some information that I found incredibly comforting when I read it, the idea of a kind of temporary emotional discomfort rather than this negative grey state of being. I like the idea of things that make me feel bad being temporary, that you can switch your mood or step into a diferent mindset after a period of time. I kept on reading and the website went on to explain that low mood and depression are not necessarily the same thing, but that constant low mood can be a sign of depression. They differentiate between the two and explain depression can be characterised by:

• continuous low mood or sadness
• feeling hopeless and helpless
• having low self-esteem 
• feeling tearful
• feeling guilt-ridden
• feeling irritable and intolerant of others 
• having no motivation or interest in things
• finding it difficult to make decisions
• not getting any enjoyment out of life
• having suicidal thoughts or thoughts of harming yourself
• feeling anxious or worried

This is how I look at it: if you look mental health like other kinds of health it helps to understand it better I think. So bare with me and this metaphor for a second.

The way I see it is this: deteriorating mental health could be like pressure on a muscle, putting the muscle under strain and causing discomfort etc. This can be like low mood. With changes to lifestyle etc you can relive that kind of tension on your body, you can relax it, adjust aspects of life to accommodate or deal with things comfortably- like physio. You can do psychological yoga or mind pilates or something to get yourself out of the aches and pains you feel. In my own head I feel like that's what low mood is to me- mental aches and pains. Signals that you aren't holding up so well. But those aches and pains are temporary and they pass and you can get on with it. You can make changes so that you can deal with those blips and you can carry on going about your own little life.

I think serious depression or anxiety can be described as a kind of breaking point. You tear that muscle or you pull it really badly, you're forced to address the issue because it's left you in a kind of vulnerable position. It's after a panic attack or a night awake just crying or hurting and you realise you've crossed over a line. The aches and pains stop becoming temporary and start becoming this niggling sensation in the back of your mind that doesn't really leave. It becomes a prevalent part of your daily life that you can't shake, and that seems to keep getting progressively worse and having a greater impact on your day to day. I think coming back from that, building yourself back up is the hardest at that point, and you fall off a lot but slowly and surely you end up getting things into an order.

It helps, I think to look at your own issues like that. Like a metaphor, like an injury, that way you can almost step back from it and separate a little from yourself. Your low mood are a bruise, a sprain, not a significant and deep rooted part of you. Your body, like your mind is resilient, it'll repair and recuperate if you let it, if you help it.

Let your body fix itself, let your mind and heart recover.
Mental health is still health, treat yourself with the kindness and respect a patient needs.

Hannah Hart.

"Fears?"

"We accept the love we think we deserve" is a line from 'The Perks of Being a Wallflower' and my mum absolutely loves it. She is a firm believer in the idea that we get what we put out into this world, and her philosophy seems to extend into the concept of love. I think her belief system is probably firmly built on the fact that as my mother, she feels that I am entitled to best this world has to offer me and that anything less is a cop out. (That's a beautiful feature of mothers, even if they are a little to crazy and overboard sometimes.) That applies everywhere, in the past she's written into school about teachers who couldn't care less if I passed or failed a year, about bad text books or about the way we were told to study. She was the person throughout any hiccup with friends or relationships who reminded me that deserved to be happy too, that going out to lunch shouldn't make me anxious, that sitting with a group of friends shouldn't have been an ordeal and that I as had as much right as anyone else to have a good time doing whatever I was doing.

I think accepting the love we think we deserve is a really accurate way at looking at life and relationships and happiness. As well as love I absolutely believe that we accept the happiness we think we deserve. People who remain in toxic situations or relationships are often those who believe they can't do better than that, or they deserve the way they are treated. They accept a mediocre level of happiness and love, because it's comfortable, it's what they know, and pursuing anything more than that would mean they need to flip their whole lives around and reconsider everything. That's scary and hard.

The reason I wanted to write this post is because of the adorable little lady above. Those gifs above are from a Q&A video on Hannah Hart's channel. Hannah is a hilarious and wonderful human being who I subscribe to on YouTube and I find her really interesting and entertaining. In the midst of her typically light hearted video Hannah gave her response as to what her fears are- her response was as seen above. It kind of blew me away to be honest, what she had to say really resonated with me and I think a lot of other people and is what prompted me to want to keep writing about happiness- because let's face it, that's what I want to do with this blog.

Sometimes being truly and completely happy is not easy. It can mean that you have to cut ties with people who you've known for a really long time, because they're no longer good for you. It can mean trying something new and pushing yourself past what you know into a situation where you're out of your depth, where you're uncomfortable. Sometimes being happy requires an awful lot of pushing and will-power into the big scar unknown.

True happiness and the absolute pursuit of true happiness sometimes requires us to address the fact we're not actually happy, that we are sad or angry, that we are not content with where we are. It means instead of us pushing away the things that hurt us or pissed us off, we have to face them and that's terrifying.

So we don't.
We often drop things, we let them go so that we can go about our day. There's a certain way of doing this that means in many ways when you choose to ignore a feeling or let go of something that happened, it stops or fades and disappears, we can go on with our lives pretending it never happened. We settle. 

We settle for less than we deserve in our jobs, we don't push for the things we want or do the things we need to be successful or pursue what we really love. We settle for mediocrity and a pay check and stability and our comfort zone. We settle for nine to five and coffee smell, we settle for gross hours and rude customers and pushy co-workers and an entire pot of pens that don't work.

We settle for less than we deserve with the friends we surround ourselves with. We will allow ourselves to fall into bad habits, like ignoring our feelings or not speaking our minds. We will settle for following the crowd and moving as one entity. We will settle for not addressing hurtful comments or stand offish behaviour. We will settle for surrounding ourselves with people who hold us down, not bring us up, and who cause chaos in our space when in actuality, good and true friendship makes your space better and brighter, it makes it a clearer place to be.

We settle for less than we deserve in love. There are expectations and standards we meet as a society that put a real strain on genuine love and connections. There's a list of things that people expect you to be doing, to be saying. We settle for the artificial appearance of a great relationship, we settle for cute couple photos on instagram and pictures of the jewellery/ flowers/ shoes you bought or received. We settle for being with someone out of familiarity, out of the known.

We settle for not being valued the way we should be, people in relationships can treat you badly and you can let them. We all know being ignored or ridiculed, yelled at or belittled is wrong, we all know someone making our space chaotic and stressful is not the way relationships should be, and yet we continue to allow that to happen.

More than that, so many people settle for being "not being unhappy" in that they move along through life with another person, not miserable or unhappy or hurt, but not fully happy either. We settle for not communicating and feeling alone when there is always someone there for you. Short conversations and blank expressions and kind of dull low cloud.

We settle for second guessing love and that is so sad and so hard. We are human beings, we live for connections with one another, love holds us together and builds us up in a way that can never be fully explained. If you have love in your life, wherever it comes from, relationships or family, your kids, your friends- it helps. Love helps us in our day to day and keeps us going and focussed, it makes us feel like it's worth it. So why do we settle for anything less than be entirely fulfilled, giving and receiving love the way we know we can?

This is the way I see it: if you, in your life, are settling for less than you deserve, then you are just not going to live a fulfilled life. You are not going to be truly happy, you will not love truthfully and the pace you make for yourself in this world is always going to be a little too chaotic and a little too dark and stressful to be in, because you are not being true to yourself. You will always, always know in yourself when you are not happy. You will know when things are wrong, you will be thrown off the natural rhythm of your life and you won't be able to ignore it forever.

There is definitely something to be said for letting little things go in life. It's just not sustainable to allow yourself to feel every tiny pain the world has to offer you, otherwise you'll just end up miserable. But at the same time, you can't and you shouldn't suppress your feelings. We all deserve to express ourselves and how we feel so that we can take control of our lives and have every opportunity to be the happiest we can be. We can only do that if we are honest and true to ourselves about what we want and how we feel.

We shouldn't settle for less than we deserve because it seems scary or hard, we should be able to live life for ourselves, the happiest and most fulfilled way we can.