Good Morning Steemians!! Hope the past week has treated you all well. We're going to kind of stray just a little bit this week. As many of you may or may not know May is Mental Health Awareness month. Mental Health Awareness Month began in 1949 set up by the National Association for Mental Health (now known as Mental Health America) to help bring awareness of mental illness and help break the stigma of it. Since its inception Mental Health Awareness has now become recognized internationally.
With all of the different forms of mental illness there are some key factors to help you recognize some basic symptoms. By no means is this a diagnosis or does it mean you are someone you know or love has mental illness. Some of these points can be indicative of an issue may have and that you may want to check into things further.
Here are a few points to look at. At one time or another we or someone we know has had a reaction of this nature. Let's take a look at these points and a few things we can do to avoid them. Also some of the practices we have talked about the past couple of weeks will work wonderfully in helping through just about anyone of these situations. Mostly it working on changing your thought process, if you approach it with a calm mind, make the acknowledgement of your thought or comment, then think of how you could phrase things differently to be not so extreme.
- All or nothing thinking Life is not black and white, your thoughts should not be either. Avoid using words or phrases like: I never, I always.
- Over-generalization Making comments that are over emphasizing the truth of the situations. Avoid saying things like: 'Everybody hates me.' 'Nobody ever believes me.'
- Discounting the Positive Ignoring good, positive things that happen by thinking that it was a fluke, or 'doesn't count.' Thinking along the lines of 'You're only nice to me because you have to.'
- Jumping to Conclusions Such as mind-reading or fortune telling. You don't know what others think, so why put thoughts into their head? You can't tell the future, so why stress yourself out with comments that try to predict the outcome of something?
- Catastrophic Thinking or Minimizing Over emphasizing situations such as making a mistake. 'I made a mistake at work, they're going to fire me, I just know it.' Thinking the world is going to end because you might have done something wrong. The going to the opposite and minimizing the importance of something. Thinking that when good things do happen, it's not a big deal. You're not even sure why it happened.
- Emotional Reasoning Turning your internal feelings an personalizing them. 'I made a mistake, so I'm a bad person because I mistakes.'
- Should Statements These statements create anger and frustration. 'You should have talked to me be about it first, but I don't matter.'
- Labeling An extreme form of over-generalization. Taking a situation or statement and turning it into a description about yourself or someone else. 'They didn't like my project. I'm worthless.'
- Personalization You personally take responsibility for events or situations happening when it is usually something out of your control. 'My kitchen flooded, I just have bad luck.'
- Blaming The opposite of personalization. Where you blame others for things going wrong. 'If they would have just listened, nothing would have happened.'
Information Source
One 'label' I use, this coming from someone that can't stand labels is that I refer to myself as being broken. I feel disconnected, out-of-touch, everything I touch goes wrong, uncomfortable in my own skin and so many others. When I go through these moments, I cover almost everything on this list. Things get blown out of proportions due to my own thoughts and feelings. This is the major reason my therapist had worked with me on being mindful. It's been a long road and I still have a way to go.
The biggest things to remember and yes you're going to get sick of me saying it, but each time it is a reminder to myself. Don't beat yourself up over any of this. You don't deserve it. When we have been conditioned to think a certain way, act a certain way and so forth it's a cycle we need to break. Always strive to BE THE BEST YOU, YOU CAN BE. With mindfulness taking that half step back from the situation, calm yourself, come back to the now you will regain control of YOU and be able to start overcoming some of these points.
Thank you so much for taking the time read this. If you have questions or want me to cover something please ask. I LOVE conversation and would love to make this as interactive as possible.
If you want to see what we have covered so far please check out these past posts!
Week 1
Week 2
Week 3
Week 4
Week 5
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