Tag: anxiety

Pay Attention to Yourself – Then Act Accordingly

EricaLeave a comment

I took a mental health day today, and it was wonderful. The day has been cloudy, with a temperature staying steady in the high 40s and low 50s… essentially a perfect day to stay home in your pajamas.

I find it hard to take mental health days; I guess I find it difficult to take a vacation or sick day if I could just as easily go into the office, but choose not to. It feels like I need a better excuse. Mental health is important though – I know that – and you know that – and yet it’s still hard to just admit that we need a day off to recharge.

My anxiety had been building up for the last week. I had one of those weeks where everything felt like it was piling up all at once. I felt like I was falling behind at work, at home… the to-do list just kept growing, as did my feeling of inner dread. I’d had an emotional week too, a bit of a roller coaster.

*Side note: have you ever played the level on the Wii’s “New Super Mario Bros.” where you ride the skeleton roller coaster over the lava? It’s insane… and fun, and stressful… all at once. That’s kind of how my week was. Watch this video to see the level in action – it’s aptly titled “The Roller Coaster From Hell”:

One of the best things I’ve learned to do over the last few years is really tune in to my body and the state of my mental/emotional health. If you’ve never done it before, it’s as simple as just stopping and taking note of how you feel physically and mentally. It’s practicing mindfulness. You do it without judgment, and just observe.

Once I assess myself, I can determine what to do from there. Sometimes it requires going a bit deeper into my feelings, and finding out why I feel the way I feel.

Read More »

A Season of Mental Wellness

Erica1 Comment

It’s not often I write to share when things are going well – I normally write about difficult experiences and how I have navigated them successfully (or perhaps unsuccessfully…)

I also never wanted to be that person who came off as bragging that everything in her life was going great – I think posts like that are hard to read if you’re in a bad place. It heightens that illusion that everyone else is living their best life except for you (which is not true!) 

However, I do think there is value in admitting to myself (and all of you) that things are actually going pretty well for me lately. 

Last year, I wrote a blog post titled How Do You Thrive? and talked a bit about how I wanted to feel like I was thriving, not just surviving. I can honestly say that I now feel like I’m thriving – for the first time in probably over 4 years, I am thriving!!!

What do I mean by thriving? I mean that I’m noticing signs that I am mentally, emotionally and physically well. For example:

  • I’ve started eating better recently (more veggies and less sugar!) I’ve had very little motivation to eat healthy since before my son was born. 
  • I’ve started working out again (thankfully my foot has recovered enough to allow this), including going on long walks in the morning and doing some strength workouts at home. 
  • I had the motivation and energy to undertake a big home improvement project last weekend (which has now of course turned into a project spanning multiple weekends).
  • I’ve been able to appreciate the relationships in my life more instead of wishing for something different – I feel blessed with authentic friendships and feel like my husband and I are in a solid place of supporting one another right now.

I think one of the most important indicators that I’m thriving is that I’ve come to a place of self-love and acceptance that I haven’t had in years. 

It’s interesting to find myself thriving in the midst of this global pandemic – while I do have to monitor my anxiety levels when it comes to COVID, I actually think the pandemic has helped me to get to this better place. I’ve been forced to slow down, to spend more time at home with my husband and son… it’s been a time to re-prioritize and think about what really matters. I realized I actually really enjoy not having plans every night and weekend – if we ever get back to “normal,” I hope I will continue to leave space in my life to rejuvenate and flourish.

Despite all this talk about thriving, I don’t want to leave the impression that everything is absolutely perfect right now – rest assured, perfection is not what I have achieved! Actually, in the past month I’ve had two different days where I actually felt really down – where some insecurities and feelings of depression kind of came and hit me out of nowhere. 

It isn’t the absence of bad days that equals thriving – it’s how well I navigated the bad days when they came. 

I’m grateful to be able to say that when the bad moments came, I was able to tune into my feelings, process them, and figure out what I needed to do to get to the other side of them. Both times by the end of the day, that dark cloud above me had lifted and moved on.

And if that’s not thriving, then I don’t know what is! I’m hopeful this season of wellness will last for a long time, but realistically I know there will most likely be hard seasons at some point in my future again.

I’m proud of myself for getting to this point in my life, but am also mindful that many of the things that led me here included situations and opportunities that I can’t take full credit for. I am fortunate to have been able to go to counseling regularly over the past 5 years, and to have found an amazing counselor. I am fortunate to have a supportive husband who was there for me at my lowest points and encouraged me to get to where I am today. I am fortunate to have people in my life who spoke truths to me about my skills and talents and how much I mattered as a person.

Not everyone is fortunate to have all of those things – I know that. Maybe you’re a single parent and barely have enough energy to get through the day. That’s okay – just survive for now. Maybe you’re working two jobs and still are barely making ends meet. That’s okay – just survive for now. Maybe you have some toxic people or situations in your life right now that are sabotaging your attempts at getting mentally healthy, but you can’t get away from them at this moment. That’s okay – keep surviving for now. 

Mental health shouldn’t be a privilege reserved only for certain people – but I think sometimes it is. (This could be a topic for another blog post, there’s so much more to unpack here.) 

I guess what I’m left with now, is wondering how I can help others who are on their way to mental wellness – how can I level the playing field and give others the same opportunities to succeed that I had? 

This post took an unexpected turn – but I love that! That’s what’s so cool about writing: sometimes you just don’t know what will come out on the page once you start.

Thanks for reading.

Purposeful (Over)Planning for Managing Anxiety

Erica5 Comments

Like most people, I have good days and bad days when it comes to managing my stress and anxiety. The COVID-19 outbreak situation definitely spiked my anxiety for a few weeks – and still does on occasion. My son and I had a three-day weekend for Spring Break that began March 13, and basically we never went back to work/daycare – from then on I found myself working remotely from home.

The way my anxiety tends to manifest itself, is that I get overwhelmed. I think about all the things I need to do, and I feel paralyzed, like I can’t start on any of them. And when I sit down to do one thing, I can’t concentrate because I am worrying about all the other things on my to-do list. I have a hard time being present in the moment.

When I started working from home, I really had a hard time balancing work time, parenting time, and my own “me” time. I felt guilty that my son was watching a lot more television, and then I’d also feel guilty that I couldn’t focus on work without getting interrupted frequently (three-year-olds can be a little needy at times…) Then at the end of the day, I’d feel frustrated that I didn’t get to do anything just for myself – I’d feel worn out from interacting with people (albeit my own family) all day and not getting some much-needed alone time.

So how did this look the first few weeks at home? Well, it looked like me feeling really frustrated about all of it and getting angry and annoyed at everything. To summarize: not good.

I began to see that I really needed quiet, alone time to myself to recharge – typical for an introvert like myself. But what I found is that if I didn’t schedule this time specifically on the calendar, it just wouldn’t happen.

This eventually led to my husband and I deciding to purposefully plan out each evening – not only was I going to schedule my alone time, but we also decided to schedule other things, like family game nights, craft nights, pizza/movie nights… Our weekly schedule is jam-packed – honestly I’ve never been so meticulously scheduled with my time as I have while sheltering-in-place. You might think that scheduling almost every hour of the day would be stressful or limiting, but I have found it to be quite the opposite – it’s freeing.

Read More »