Taking my own advice!

Here we are back in September, school has started back and while I miss my little’s I am seriously loving the feeling of settling back into a routine that allows me to have some (whispers) alone time!

I am self-employed, I work in a few different therapeutic settings, as a volunteer counsellor a few times a week, I have 2 children, a husband and it gets a little busy at times! I loved the summer because it meant slow mornings and extra quality time with my family, but by the end I was feeling a little frazzled.  For me, frazzled means, a little moody, a bit snippy with my family, and an overwhelming feeling of wanting to crawl inward and hide, which isn’t a great feeling to have because as a working mother, with my own business, and a million things to do, it just led to even more feelings of guilt and hence that familiar cycle of negative feelings began to creep in.

The good news is that recognising that cycle for what it was is the first step of initiating change and getting away from it before it takes a real hold of my life, and as a person that lives with anxiety, this is the key.  Self-care is a necessary part of maintaining good mental health, so a good question to start with, is what makes you feel safe? What makes you feel calm? What makes you feel like you have some control? For me, this is definitely quiet time, no music, no talking, just me either working on admin or even doing the dreaded housework, as long as I can do it in the quiet I am happy.

In fact, noise is one of the biggest triggers for my own anxiety.  I learned this by learning to lean into that feeling of panic  when it arose, taking notice of how it felt in my body and what was going on around me when it came on.  Obviously, this is not easy to do when suffering from high anxiety and panic attacks, it took a lot of trial and error, and sitting with my own therapist who talked me through the process. However, this was an absolute game changer for me and so important to my own healing because it showed me that the common denominator  for my anxiety was almost always noise.  It could be exacerbated by stress, lack of sleep, or nerves but noise was always present, it is deafening and makes me feel like I am plugged in to a high voltage socket YUCK!

So here I am, taking my own advice, leaning into that feeling of anxiety and listening to what it is my body was trying to tell me, which was ‘turn down the volume and collect your thoughts girl!’

It never ceases to amaze me how quickly bad feelings can move in, like a summer rain storm, sunny one moment, and dark and miserable the next.  How delicate the balance of mental health can be, even for someone who spends half of her time trying to help people find their own balance, it can easily catch us up.

You do not have to suffer on your own, counselling is a wonderful way to explore the negative feelings and figure out how to balance them with something else.  Counselling is not going to magically make all the bad thoughts go away but can be that safe place where you can look at those feelings and gain some real clarity and a deeper insight into what it means to be you.  I do it because I believe in it and because I’ve lived it myself.  So come on, what do you have to lose? Imagine what can counselling do for you!