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Why is pacing so gosh darn difficult?
If you didn’t know, pacing is the single, most important way of managing your symptoms when you have a chronic illness like Myalgic Encephalomyelitis. It involves spreading high-energy activities over a long period of time, to stop your body over-exerting and inducing those horrible, energy limiting symptoms. ‘High energy’ is defined differently from person to person, depending on the severity of their condition. For me it is anything that involves standing up, but for someone with a more severe condition this could be as small as processing daylight. It takes a lot of planning, and a lot of practice, to be really efficient at it. However I do know people…
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Simple tips for getting through the tough days
I try my best to be a relatively positive person, to not to let the negativity of life consume me, but even I struggle with getting through the tough days. General life in itself is hard – no one has a life free of negativity. But when you live with a chronic illness, or mental health condition (or both), it can feel like the bad outweighs the good, and getting through each day can feel impossible. I’ve had my fair share of tough days, and have spent a lot of my life figuring out how best to get through them. I’ve not got it perfect by any means, but I…
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YWA Breath: What I learned doing 30 days of yoga
Before I get into this I am fully aware the yoga is one of those things that is unhelpfully recommended for people with both chronic illnesses and mental illness. I also know many people are sick of it. I am not here to tell you that yoga will solve all your problems or make your life easier, I am just here to tell you my experience of YWA Breath. So no pressure here. You know your own body better than me. But, for me personally, yoga has been a great help – a way for me to get the excercise my body needs without putting me completely out of action…
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25 Positive Affirmations for Anxiety
This isn’t the first time I have written about, and shared, positive affirmations with you. I truly believe in their power, and today I wanted to share with you my best positive affirmations for anxiety. Stating the obvious here but living with anxiety every day isn’t fun. In fact personally mine has become a hundred times worse during lockdown. And while the world around us has changed, as well as the level of support, being able to use self affirmations is something that remains constant. It’s NEVER going to change. They will ALWAYS be there for us. We can at least take some solace in that. I’m in no way…
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Lockdown Emotions: It’s okay not to be okay right now
The time we are in right now is strange. I feel like I’m in an alternate universe, where everything is reversed. Each day I sink further away from reality and my emotions just don’t know what to make of it. Let me tell you about today. Today when I logged onto my work PC I noticed I wasn’t connected to our network drive. Other people were having the same issue but were able to resolve it easily. My issue was not so simple. I tried disconnecting and reconnecting. I tried restarting my computer, twice. I tried disconnecting and restarting my computer before reconnecting. Nothing worked. If we were in the…
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Anxiety in Uncertainty
I thought that with everything that is happening in the world right now, I would have so much to talk about. I thought I’d be coming up with all kinds of new content and creative things for you guys to read and enjoy. I’d hoped that I could use this platform to not only help you through this time, but to be a breath of fresh air to put your minds on other things. There is so much that I could’ve done with this time. In all honesty I feel like I’ve failed you a little bit. I’ve been so tired, exhausted, just from daily life that I’ve not been…
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Taking care of your mental health when you can’t go outside.
We’re going through a rather unusual time right now, one we never knew we’d face. Social isolation is not something we had ever imagined having to deal with, but it has come on so quickly that we hardly had time to prepare. I know I’m not the only one feeling quite anxious and uneasy about what is happening in our country (and the world) right now. There are so many unknowns coming that my mind barely knows how to make sense of it all. People are having to work from home, businesses are closing, we’re being told not to travel or gather in large groups. It feels like the world…
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I’m not grumpy. I’m mentally ill.
I’ve been thinking back through my past a lot recently. About past relationships and friendships. About my life in general. Something that stood out to me is the memory of being miserable. That sounds quite sad, but so many moments come to mind where I was forced into a situation I didn’t want to be in, and I was just really unhappy. This may be my social anxiety talking, but what struck me most was the way other people must have thought of me in those moments. They didn’t know what was going on in my head, all they saw was this grumpy, upset, moody person. The person who clearly…
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A day in the life of anxiety
Before I get into this I feel I should give a slight trigger warning. If you’re anything like me, reading about anxiety triggers can actually trigger your own anxiety. While I don’t discuss anything particularly bad in this post I do advise to proceed with caution if that does apply to you! Right, let’s get to it then… You open your eyelids to a haze of what now’s and what ifs. Your stomach sinking further and further into the mattress, clawing and clinging, yearning to just go back to sleep. Have you ever experienced something that intense and immovable? It’s what every day can be like when you have anxiety.…
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Things not to say to someone suffering with a mental health condition.
I know this topic has been covered time and time again, but I still think it’s an important one to cover, and to keep talking about. There are so many comments, or misunderstandings, that can have a severely negative impact on people who struggle with their mental health – and it keeps happening. It can be exhausting trying to explain to people why these phrases are so unhelpful, but it’s so important. A lot of the time people do think they are really helping, or they think they know better. But there are so many better ways to support people who are struggling, and it’s not hard to do them.…
