so the irish term for depression is “an mór-bhrón” which directly translates to “the big sad” and that right there is the mood of this fine winter lads
ok can we agree that the WORST feeling is when you’re just sitting around consciously procrastinating and you’re just overly aware that each second that passes is more time wasted and you like watch hours pass and you’re STILL procrastinating and you CANT STOP and your panicked brain is trapped inside a body that refuses to be productive and inside you’re screaming but outwardly you’re just eating chips
The best thing I know for this is just to do SOMETHING. It’s like you’re in a trance, so you have to break the trance. Get out of your chair and go into another room, or step outside. You don’t have to stay there long, but if there’s something small you can do in that other room, like wash a dish or fold a shirt, do it. If you hate it, you don’t have to do it forever. Then sit down somewhere and just experience the urge to do the procrastination activity but don’t act on it. See if the urge fades a little. If it doesn’t at all, go back to the distracting activity and set the timer for 10 minutes. At that ten minute mark, get out of your chair and repeat the above.
My shrink calls this STOP. It’s a DBT Distress Tolerance skill: Stop, Take a Step Back, Observe, and Proceed Mindfully. Once you get out of your trance, you can shut your eyes, check in with yourself, and DECIDE what to do next instead of just getting carried a long. Don’t pick something HARD to do, pick something very easy but active and that will give you a sense of accomplishment, no matter how small. If you really need to, you can go back to the distracting activity for little breaks but try to set a timer so you don’t get entranced again.
This is hard and takes practice. Maybe the first time, all you’ll manage is getting into the other room and then coming right back. Keep trying. It’s a muscle you build. I leave little notes around my house to remind me to do this. That helps.
Here’s a thing you might do BEFORE all of that. When I’m SUPER anxious and stuck, I’m out of what my shrink would call my Window of Tolerance, which is when you’re so keyed up (or so keyed down) that you can’t really think or act deliberately. So I have a list I keep on my wall: First I stick my face in ice water for about 30 seconds. This triggers the mammalian diving reflex, which depresses your sympathetic nervous system. Then I take a shower, trying to focus only on the water and not my racing thoughts. Finally I sit and do Four-Square breathing for a few minutes, which actually you can do anytime, anywhere. It has a similar effect as the ice-water thing. (If you have PRN anti-anxiety medication, taking a little of that at the beginning of the process can help you get through the exercises.)
Once you’ve calmed down and de-entranced yourself a little, you can possibly think about working again. Pick something very limited and specific. “I’m just going to write ONE paragraph about [x]” or “I’m going to study this one page.” Or “I’m going to work for 15 minutes.” GIVE IT A LIMIT so you aren’t trapped. Then you get a break to distract yourself. Keep the break short, but don’t skip it. You can finish a whole task by just going from one little sub-task to another, without ever looking at it from a whole-task perspective. Just keep doing one more little bit next and eventually you’ll be done.
This past night, I heard a soft whining and scratching at my door and I opened them, thinking it would probably be my dog, asking to be let in. There was nothing there and after waiting for a minute or two and softly calling out for him, I closed the door and went back to bed (my head is right next to the door so I can open them without getting up). This repeated twice more during the night and finally, I got up to collect whichever of my dog was making the ruckus and get them to sleep in my room without waking me every half an hour, only to realize that they weren’t home. I’ve been home alone this whole time. They went with my aunt to a sleepover the previous evening. After checking every room in the apartment, every closet, every cupboard, even behind doors, I ran back to bed in a hurry and tucked myself in, feeling a bit frightened about the whole experience and trying to convince myself I dreamt the whole thing. Only, it felt so real that it left me wondering about one thing.
Who was at my door?
Most likely? No one and nothing. Your sleepy brain was probably playing tricks on itself (I mean, come on, it’s a 3lb ball of jello trying to run a complex biological machine and supercomputer, and it has to do it all with less electricity than it takes to work a lightbulb; weird shit is just gonna happen).
So, it’s entirely possible that it was just a hypnagogic hallucination. Hallucinations don’t have to be visual and, especially with auditory hallucinations, it’s often difficult to determine if what you’re experiencing is real or not because your brain will lie to itself. It will pretend it heard something and then go “well I heard it, it must be real!” so it processes the imagined stimulus as if it were real, resulting in a hallucination.
Edge-of-sleep hallucinations are super common, pretty much everyone has had it happen to them at least once, because your brain is in the middle of moving from being awake into being asleep/starting to dream. So sometimes some of the “almost dreaming” leaks into the still-awake parts of your brain and you see/hear weird shit that isn’t there.
Probably, but I’d like to believe it was a ghost doggo trying to get me to play with him better than the likely truth.
people are saying these look protective. each creature represents a self-destructive coping mechanism: ruminating obsession, isolation, the false idea of control, and martyr complex. they feel comforting, but are harmful
trauma doesn’t often feel like trauma is ‘supposed’ to feel. it feels like indifferent detachment, watching from outside yourself because nothing can hurt you there. it feels normal, just how people interact, so why are you making a big deal about it? it feels like a joke – just how kids play, just how adults tease, just how some relationships work.
you wake from nightmares five years later and still wonder if you made it all up.
trauma can look like bad behaviour. like the stubborn refusal to get better, to stop self-destructing. trauma is putting yourself in harm’s way because you don’t really mean it, or because it’s funny, or because you just want to feel something, or because you just want to stop feeling. it’s wanting to destroy and reassemble yourself into another person entirely, so your real life can begin. because this isn’t real. because really bad things don’t happen to people like you.
trauma is the constant feeling of being an impostor. it’s the drive to survive twinned with the impulse to make yourself more sick in more ways. to hurt yourself to prove how bad you feel, or to punish yourself for exaggerating. you want people to believe what you’ve been through, to tell you your feelings are real, that your memories really happened. but when people do take you seriously, you play it off as a joke, apologize for bringing the mood down.
you go on and on about how it wasn’t that bad. you seek permission to still love the ones who hurt you, because it’s the people closest to us who can hurt us most deeply.
you can feel like the people who hurt you are the only ones who really knew you. in low self esteem, you can mistake cruelty for honesty.
there will always be people who have been through worse. that doesn’t make what happened to you okay.
there will always be people who don’t believe you. that doesn’t mean you are lying.
at some point, you have to take yourself seriously. you have to make a life you can stand to live. it’s the only way to survive.
You want some real legitimate advice about mental health? Stop being mean to yourself.
Like, when you wanna say mean shit about yourself either internally or externally, work to learn how to step back a moment and remind yourself that what you are doing is a form of self-harm and not a fair or legitimate judgement on you as a person, and furthermore is not productive to your survival or well-being.
Even if you fuck something up, you can resolve to do better in the future, you can tell yourself that you’re going to make this a learning experience, and even if you’ve made the same mistake 50 times already, telling yourself you’ll get it right someday if you just keep trying will always do you better than calling yourself an idiot and beating yourself up for not being able to get it right.
Take it from me, a lot of mental health shit is a product of your environment and personal history, and therefore you really don’t have the control over it that you need to get by without others’ help, but one thing you can have some control over is whether you’re going to be a friend to yourself or just another enemy, and if you want to survive, you’ve gotta strive to be in your own corner as best you can.
reblogging this again because this is from Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents and I’m reading it right now and it’s incredibly awkward to read about my entire life’s problems neatly described by a complete stranger
Fuck this is literally meeeeeeee
Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents is right at the top of my psych books list along with Why Does He Do That and Trauma and Recovery.
shower. not a bath, a shower. use water as hot or cold as u like. u dont even need to wash. just get in under the water and let it run over you for a while. sit on the floor if you gotta.
moisturize everything. use whatever lotion u like. unscented? dollar store lotion? fancy ass 48 hour lotion that makes u smell like a field of wildflowers? use whatever you want, and use it all over.
put on clean, comfortable clothes.
put on ur favorite underwear. cute black lacy panties? those ridiculous boxers u bought last christmas with candy cane hearts on the butt? put em on.
drink cold water. use ice. if u want, add some mint or lemon for an extra boost.
clean something. doesn’t have to be anything big. organize one drawer of ur desk. wash five dirty dishes. do a load of laundry. scrub the bathroom sink.
blast music. listen to something upbeat and dancey and loud, something that’s got lots of energy. sing to it, dance to it, even if you suck at both.
make food. don’t just grab a granola bar to munch. take the time and make food. even if it’s ramen. add something special to it, like a hard boiled egg or some veggies. prepare food, it tastes way better, and you’ll feel like you accomplished something.
make something. write a short story or a poem, draw a picture, color a picture, fold origami, crochet or knit, sculpt something out of clay, anything artistic. even if you don’t think you’re good at it.
go outside. take a walk. sit in the grass. look at the clouds. smell flowers. put your hands in the dirt and feel the soil against your skin.
call someone. call a loved one, a friend, a family member, call a chat service if you have no one else to call. talk to a stranger on the street. have a conversation and listen to someone’s voice. if you can’t, text or email or whatever, just have some social interaction with another person. even if you don’t say much, listen to them.
cuddle your pets if you have them/can cuddle them. take pictures of them. talk to them. tell them how u feel, about your favorite movie, a new game coming out.
Reblog as much as you can
Absolutely helpful. I think I’ve done three or four of these things today, makes you feel better.
I do a lot of these things to cope, very helpful post.
just moving along like everyone else 