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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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My Unhealthy Relationship With Food
Trigger warning: This blog post talks about my experience with the eating disorder Anorexia, and my unhealthy relationship with food. I was planning on writing this as a twitter thread, but the more I thought about it the bigger the thread got. In the end it was just too long to put on twitter. So as my return to blogging I thought it was a great way to ease myself back into things – or throw myself back into them! My goal for 2020 was to lose weight. We had 5 weddings planned, and I was just sick of feeling massive compared to all of our friends and family. At…
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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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5 Ways to Slow Down
Right now my life feels as though its going about a mile a minute. I have no where near enough time in the day, or week, or month, to do all the things I want to. And the stress of that it starting to take its toll. I really need to try to slow down, and I’m pretty sure I’m not the only one. Lately I’ve been trying to keep up with a lot, because there’s so much that I want to be able to do. I want to be successful, and healthy. I want to be a good person, friend and girlfriend. I want to improve my blog, writing…
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Gratitude Journal Prompts: Inject Some Positivity Into Your Life
It’s no secret that I believe in the power of gratitude. It’s great for your mood and can really help in managing your mental health. So I thought it was high time I put together some gratitude journal prompts for you to enjoy. I know gratitude not going to solve all of my problems, remove my pain or get rid of the bad things that are happening in my life. It’s not a quick fix, or a magic potion you can take to never feel bad again. But it is powerful. When you’re in the throws of depression it can feel like everything in your life just sucks. That’s your…
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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.…
