Riding the Waves.

I was reading over some of the posts I used to have on my old blog, little things about dealing with anxiety and mindfulness and I came across this post about riding the waves in life. This was one of the first times I ever fully addressed anxiety and panic attacks and just kind of wrote something straightforward, giving insight into how it can feel and how to deal with it in small ways, so I thought I'd share it because it's still relevant to my life today. I hope you find it helpful!

Recently I have been checking out the whole mindset of being 'mindful' to help me deal with any issues or anxieties I am having about my school work, social or home life, to try and organize my issues and various situations into more manageable chunks. As someone who does tend to panic, worry and generally get very anxious about stupidly small things, I feel like some of the techniques I use and some of the thinking I've been looking at might help other people in a similar position.So if you are the sort of person who has difficulty dealing with their anxieties and huge amounts of jobs then keep reading...

So here we are with the real talk: Sometimes it gets hard.
Sometimes life gets really overwhelming and real and important, and when that happens, everything seems to happen kind of at once. Nothing important or stressful happens by itself, it is always accompanied by other important or stressful things. I know, it sucks- but c'est la vie!
Sometimes there will be periods of time when it feels like nothing is ever going to be okay again.
Everything goes wrong, everything hurts, and the number of things that need to get done start to have an almost physical presence in your life.


1. Let me start by saying you are not alone in that feeling.
That weight, and that stress- that anxiety that keeps crashing into you like a wave, someone else has felt that way. In fact, many other people have felt that way.
So you should take comfort in the fact that your inability to handle and process everything that is happening to you, is something that we have all felt at points in our lives- you're not alone.

2. Breakdowns are human.
We are taught we need to be strong to be successful, this is not untrue. You need to be strong enough to chase your dreams, to be knocked down and to get back up again.
But it is an entirely human response once in a while, to sit down and feel sad- to be overwhelmed, to be emotional. Letting your sadness wash through you, letting the struggle hurt and addressing the fact you're angry or frustrated or upset is actually very healthy. human beings are not designed to be happy or strong all the time, we are not perfect by any stretch of the imagination, We are flawed, it is a fundamental feature of our existence. It doesn't matter how pretty, or rich, or successful, or funny, or smart a  person is- they will have flaws. They will have too short a temper, be too harsh on themselves, be too harsh on others, fear relationships, test relationships, have issues with authority, have issues without any authority. The fact is no one is perfect, and the acceptance of our flaws and moments of weakness is okay.

3. Drowning.

Being overwhelmed is a horrible feeling- it's like everything you need to and are expected to do suddenly washes over you when you least expect it. You turn your back on the sea that is your responsibility in life and suddenly you're caught up in a strong salty woosh of horrible things. Jobs pile up, and the more there is the harder that wave hits you- and if you let that wave wash over you and drag you down it feels like you're drowning.
In this instance you have to hold on to something that will keep you afloat. This can be in the form of many things, the least healthy but arguably the easiest of which is people: good, kind, constructive people in your life will help you float to the surface of the problems you are having, by giving you advice and support to get you through.
This is highly effective, although you need to be careful how regularly you do this because those people, for whatever reason, may not always be there to bring you back up, leaving you to cope for yourself. So use people to stay afloat very rarely.
Alternative ways to keep yourself afloat include routine: have a set time to do things, go and sleep, make a little time for yourself, for your family, friends, extra curricular activities. But have them in a regular and achievable routine. This will help normalise your issues, or regulate the waves you feel. Organising yourself to the point you know when those waves or that intense pile up of jobs is going to happen will help you to prepare for their impact. Trust me, it helps.


4. Physical effects of drowning (ie: panic attacks and anxiety)

To deal with the physical effects of your emotional or mental "drowning"in your worries or anxieties it's really important to think about how the effect you physically. The most important is breathing:
breathing slower and more deeply is going to pull your body out of a sense of panic and shock, and once your body starts to stop freaking out, your head should automatically follow. It's like an anchor. Think about how you're sitting and if it is going to make you feel more light headed. Do not sit paralysed, movement helps to get the blood pumping round your body in a non-panicky way. Make sure you move, but as you do make sure you are doing things deliberately with force and focus: this way you don't feel like you're treading water and more like you're swimming to shore. The more you make a conscious effort not to panic and try to improve whatever situation you're in, the faster these overwhelming thoughts and issues can be resolved.

So there we have it, some real talk about how to deal with anxiety on a small and personal scale. I hope you find it helpful, and I'd love to hear anything you have to say about this or anything else I post!

X

Tips: Do the things that make you happy.

At some points in life people don't have any advice to give you. Your friends, your mum and your dad, your boyfriend or girlfriend, even your grandparent's, who seem to have an opinion or advice about everything in life, due to a combination of both years of experience and nosiness, will sometimes not have a pearl of wisdom for you. They will not have a comforting direction to point you in sometimes because as you grow up, more and more, there are some decisions you need to make for yourself.

Your friends, parent, boyfriends, girlfriends, teachers, school office ladies, favourite Starbuck's man, brothers or sisters are never going to be the ones to decide the important things in your life. They are not always going to be able to deal with your stuff for you no mater how many times they've done it before, and there comes a time where you're making a decision, struggling and way in over your head and all they can offer you is "do what makes you happy".

The majority of the time, most people find this response wholly unhelpful and can be really irritated by it. Sometimes you feel like you are in desperate need of some guidance, but truth be told, if you're at the stage where the people in your life are telling you simply to do what makes you happy, then you need to be the one to take control of your own situation.

Doing what makes you happy does not always mean you are a selfish person. Doing what makes you happy all the time or at the expense of others makes you a selfish person. 

Some people are capable of living their lives in an entirely self-centred bubble of indulgence, where they act purely in their own interests for the purposes of furthering their own ends and interests. Some people live in a selfish way because they do only what makes them happy with no consideration for those around them. You will probably know people like this and will also know that these people tend to be destructive in that although they can be fun and spontaneous and wild that they will not pick up the pieces of you if they break you along the way. It is unsustainable to try and live doing only things that make you happy because sometimes you need to be a grown up and take on the responsibilities you have.

However, equally living to make others happy is also not sustainable. The term 'people-pleasing' is entirely apt here: living purely to accommodate the needs of others will tire you in such a way that you can deteriorate mentally as well as physically and sometimes its important to bare in mind your own health in more ways than one in order to create a life for yourself that is not selfish but sustainable. It's all about balance. The balance between the interests of ones self and the interests of what we love.

When dealing with things like anxiety and depression it is so so important to allow yourself room to breathe and do the things that make you happy, because often when you're in a place where anxiety or depression or generally consuming negativity overwhelms you, it can only really be you that can pull yourself out of that state of mind. When dealing with those issues people can feel really isolated and alone in their issues and in their life in general- which of course is not the case at all as globally, more than 350 million people of all ages suffer from depression and recent research suggests that as many as 1 in 6 young people will experience an anxiety condition at some point in their lives. This is the thing: you are not alone.

Often people dealing with their own issues feel like something is going to come and save them, whether that be a person or medication, a spiritual calling etc etc. Sometimes this really does happen. Due to the fact that more and more in modern society, mental health is being more widely addressed and discussed, there have been huge advances in medical fields within therapy and the pharmaceutical industry to try and combat such wide spread issues like depression and anxiety. But here's the thing, even with the drugs or the therapy or the calming oils and anything like that, you have to want to feel better- and within this wanting to feel better you have to be active in trying to recover or maintain a level of functionality and happiness in your life. Hence why personally I feel that doing things that makes you happy, or once made you happy, if you're stuck in a cycle of depression or overwhelming anxiety. The things that made you happy once made you happy for a reason, embrace those reasons and try to reach what you felt before.

It is very easy to feel isolated and alone, it is very easy to avoid people or social situations because of the complications that may arise. It is easy to resist love and affection which is shocking because it may be what you need the most, but you don't realise it. It is easy through learned behaviour to do what allows us to feel numb or to feel nothing at all for fear of falling to something stronger like anger or sadness. But you shouldn't- life is not a case of surviving 75 years of your own mind! Life is for  LIVING and loving and finding who you are, and then maybe in the lives of very few or possibly in the lives of many, making a positive difference and mark on the world before we leave. Doing the things we love and that make us happy allows us to more fully live our lives, rather than survive.

...

If you need any more persuasion to love yourself then, here, some reasons why you should do the things that make you happy:

Doing what makes you happy does not have to be a big deal. When I say do what makes you happy it does not always mean make huge life choices that are tailored specifically to a direction of interest in your life, it can be very small things. For example, taking time out of your day to listen to music away from people, read, take a bath and use all of those hugely overpriced bath bombs you bought on a whim and never touched. Condition the crap out of your hair, read a crappy romantic book you enjoy- little things that you do can make so much difference to your overall mood.

Doing what makes you happy can help you repair yourself. This process can work in two ways. Firstly, if you are making decisions based upon what makes you happy in life, decision making is often made much easier because you know what will make you personally happy and what will not. Often for people who suffer with anxiety or depression decision making can be hard- because you second guess yourself and your decisions often not focussing on your own needs or interests instead worrying about 100 different consequences or people's opinions, imagining yourself into absurd and negative scenarios. But if you need to make a fast decisions that will in no way infringe the freedom of other's then focussing your decision making around what makes you happy will allow you to make faster and more defined decisions.

After a long day or a hard day where it was difficult to ground yourself in your own thoughts, doing what makes you happy can lift your mood again and repair your for the next day. Involving yourself entirely in something that will make you happy kind of anchors you, emotionally, mentally- it puts you in a state where your focus is yourself, which can allow you to focus on healing yourself too.

Doing what makes you happy can allow you to develop as a person. Doing what makes you happy allows you to realise what it is that you enjoy, what it is that you're good at so that you can then go on to pursue it. Doing what makes you happy allows you to realise what brings you down so that you can identify with and distance whatever or whoever it is from yourself so that you can live feeling as free and happy as you possibly can.

Doing what makes you happy is healthy. Going on from what I previously mentioned about doing what makes you happy allowing you to identify what makes you unhappy, this process of creating distance between yourself and negative energy can bring a great deal of calm and balance to your life. I'm not entirely sure about the whole ying and yang cycle of the world but what I have gathered from it is that the concept of balance is central to the world. Balance leads to health, it's simple.

Some people believe that on an ecological level, in the ideas of biocentric equality etc, some people subscribe to a kind of holism (an idea that every living thing in the universe is intrinsically linked to each other, and stresses the importance of studying relationships between organisms rather than individuals in a really atomistic view of society). Whatever reason people have for believing in balance, it seems to create the greatest happiness. Balance allows for harmony, for natural processes to sync and become one whole system that allows individuals to thrive and it is so important to create balance within our own lives, within a work or education and home life, or even within our own minds between our positive and negative thoughts, the selfless and the selfish etc.

This whole thing brings me back to my original idea in this post- the idea that sometimes you have to make decisions that no one else can help you with and that will require you, however scary or infuriating or saddening, to make choices by yourself. In many situations it is obviously important to consider the thoughts of others, however: if a decisions is going to affect you deeply and not really have an impact on those around you, if you are not harming anyone then it is important to do what makes you happy- because this life is too damn short to exist and not live.

Years pass quicker and quicker as we get older and it is easy to fall into a trap of monotonous existence. Why are the best years of your life only a period of time? Why not extend happiness across your whole existence and really live it? I don't know about how to achieve self realisation, nor do I have a quick fix to provide a person with happiness, but I do know that it is important to foster happiness and feed it in the same way we feed negativity or consumerism, love or hate or any big emotion. If you have the capacity to do what makes you happy and live your life to its very fullest potential, as every single person on this earth does... then why not?