Good morning everyone,
I hope you’re having a wonderful start to the weekend 🙂
Over the last couple of weeks, I’ve been starting to get back into meditation, and I’ve found that it has really been making a positive impact on my mindset – which we are going to take a look at in today’s blog!
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Do you suffer from panic or anxiety attacks? Would you like to find out some techniques and strategies to help you manage stress? Are you interested in finding out more about anxiety, and the steps that you can take to reduce its impact on your life? Well then, today’s guest blog is the one for you 🙂
Today’s blog is a guest blog called “Avoid Anxiety Attacks with Smart Strategies”, written by the brilliant Carolyn Russo! So, without further ado, I’ll leave you to Carolyn’s excellent blog, be sure to let us know what you think!
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Jon Kabat-Zinn–a leader in the field of mindfulness and health–has defined mindfulness as “paying attention in a particular way: on purpose, in the present moment, and non-judgementally.” This means consciously paying attention to our senses, and to our feelings, without further judgement. For example, mindfulness could be practised by focusing on the sensation of water […]
How to Practice Mindfulness Meditation — Be Inspired..!!
This is a reblog of a post that reminds us all about breathing and living well. Take three full breaths and dive in… Do you know how are you breathing right now? Take a moment and simply notice your breath. Perhaps place your hand on your navel and the other above your heart. Notice the […]
Change your Breath, Change your Life — Find Your Middle Ground
We all encounter stress at one point or another in our lives. In the majority of cases, it is completely natural, and is something that we can managing without much impact on our day to day lives. However, there are times when that stress may seem like too much, or when you face several different stressful situations at once, when it can start to feel overwhelming.
This is what we’ll start to take a look at in today’s blog!
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2020 has proved to be a very difficult year for many, and it is completely understandable if you feel you are going through things alone. This feeling of loneliness can have a huge impact on your mental health and wellbeing, and can lead to an increase in anxiety and stress levels. In today’s blog, I am going to be sharing how important it is to remember that you are not alone and why it is so crucial to ask for support when you need it.
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Running your own business is a dream of so many people when they are growing up, but for the ones that dive to turn that dream into a reality, how do we keep a close eye on our Mental Wellbeing while running a business? Is it something that demands we dramatically alter the way in which we live our lives, or more so a series of smaller adjustments that we can slot into our schedules? This is what we’ll be exploring in today’s blog!
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Social-Anxiety is an overwhelming and long-term fear of different social situations. It an have a truly enormous impact on how you live your day to day life, on your relationships with others, on your self-confidence, in both your work & social life and more. For something that can have have such a large effect on your life, can you safely say that you know any ways to help counter it? That’s what we’ll be looking at in today’s blog!
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On Saturday 31st October, I was asked to be a special guest on a brand new podcast, called “26 minutes with”, which has been created by Respect Mental Health and the amazing Benjamin Seal. It was an honour to be asked to e the first guest for the show and we are going to be taking a bit of a closer look at the podcast in today’s blog!
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It’s no secret that 2020 has been a very stress filled year which has had such an effect on us not only physically but mentally too. I call it Coronavirus stress. It got me thinking, can stress kill you? So naturally I googled it and apparently it can lead to some pretty shocking effects on the body. We often forget how powerful the mind really is on our bodies. I think Stress management should be one of our top priorities to maintain good mental health. There are tonnes of articles on stress management online but I thought I’d put together some of the tips I use myself to help reduce my coronavirus stress.
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I went to the library a few days ago and came across a book by Kelly McGonigal, The Upside of Stress. The book was set on recommendations shelf and was literally screaming at me “Take me, take me!”. I’m kidding, but it was a pleasant coincidence. It’s ironic, because this is something I had on […]
A while back, I wrote a post about how to take a few minutes to jolt yourself out of a bad mood. Sometimes, though, we don’t have the luxury of removing ourselves from a situation. When your boss is chewing you out, customers are yelling at you, your kids are having a tantrum, or lots […]
via Worth Trying: Dealing with Stress in the Moment — Amanda Cade
With such fast-paced lives, we all need a break from our daily stresses. These demands have physical, mental, emotional and spiritual effects. The best solution is a vacation, but that may not be possible. Instead, indulge in a hobby or two to take your mind and body to a happy place. Every day you do things for everyone else. It’s time to put yourself first! You’ll be so glad you did, and you’ll have a lot of fun while doing it. Here are a few crafting ideas to get you started:
Painting: – watercolor, oil, acrylic, pouring
Watercolor
Drawing: – pencil, charcoal, crayons, colored pencils, chalk, markers, pens
Sketching with Pens and Markers
Pottery & Ceramics: – figurines, serving pieces, vases, jars, ornaments
Pottery
Ceramics
Paper Crafts: – scrapbooking, card making, origami, quilling
Jewelry & Watches: – beaded, woven, wire
Beaded Jewelry
Flower Arranging: – fresh or artificial, wreaths…
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Today’s blog is going to be about one of my personal experiences when it comes to Male Mental Health. The aim of these personal experience blogs is to show that even when you are at rock bottom there is always a light at the end of the tunnel. I myself have gone through a number of problems when it comes to mental health and I believe that by mixing facts and personal experience help present a balanced picture on what mental health really is and how it affects us all.
The self-hate/doubt mechanism is a coping technique that I first started using when I used to get bullied a lot in school. The technique itself is a very poor one that only went on to make me feel worse about myself as you will see when I go into how the technique itself works. It is a coping technique that I used when I was desperate and it is a very bad way to go about life. If anyone reading this blog does do this to themselves then I would urge them to seek help. Even talking through your problems with a person you trust is a much better form of release rather than getting trapped in a cycle of self-hatred.
The main principle for the self-hate cycle that I created was simple. I would constantly put myself down and degrade myself before others had the chance too. Even though it didn’t make me feel better in my head at the time I was just thinking that it would be easier if I put myself down, instead of someone doing it for me. This cycle was my way of not letting others hurt me, I would break myself instead of giving someone else the chance too.
Once you put yourself in this cycle it is very hard to break after you start using it. The cycle tends to get more and more aggressive to the point where you cross-examine and doubt every action you take. It is an extremely dangerous cycle which is why I wanted to talk about it. If you know anyone who is currently, unfortunately, using this coping technique or if you use it yourself then it is key that you break the cycle. I fully comprehend that this is easy to say and to actually break the chain requires a lot more work but if the cycle isn’t broken or at least reduced then you will sadly end up in a very dark place mentally.
As I mentioned in a lot of my previous blogs Mental Health is a very complicated topic. It is very very rare that the problems people face stem from one source, it is often a mixture of several sources/problems all at once. This is where the self-hate cycle becomes even more dangerous. If you adopt this technique as a form of coping when you are already experiencing problems then it starts to become too much to handle.
The phrase that I quite like to talk about is balancing the books, and it becomes ever the more paramount here. Learning to find a way of releasing can be vital when it comes to breaking the cycle of self-hate. I can’t say one way that works for everyone as there is no one way. You need to find your release and only then will you be able to even attempt to break the cycle.
I have been experiencing the self-hate cycle for a number of years. It took me a long while to recognise what it actually is and then even longer to figure out how to manage it. To put it simply it is very very hard to completely break the cycle, however, it is manageable. Learning the manage to technique to a point where you almost never feel it is vital when it comes to beating it.
That is all I want to talk about in today’s blog! Thank you all for reading! What do you all think? Have you ever experienced the self-hate cycle? How did you overcome it? What do you think leads a person to pick up the cycle? Do we need to learn how to identify when someone is suffering from this management technique?
Thank you all for reading! Let me know what you think via the comments or on the Facebook page! We are nearly at 2,000 total views, great work everyone!
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James
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Today’s blog is going to be the eighth blog in my Looking into Male Mental Health series and is going to look into stigma in relation to mental health. Today’s blog is going to talk about what stigma is in relation to mental health, what causes it and how it affects people suffering from Mental Health problems.
First of all, we are going to talk about what stigma is in relation to Mental Health. The website Health Direct, https://www.healthdirect.gov.au/stigma, describes stigma as ” a mark, a stain or a blemish”. Stigma occurs when “negative opinions, judgments or stereotypes” are targeted at people who are experiencing or have experienced Mental health problems.
It is clear to see that stigmas do not have any positive effects on people who suffer from Mental Health problems, they only add to their problems. It is this point that raises the question why does this stigma actually exist? It is possible to link the existence of this stigma to many different sources but after doing research there are two main causes of the stigma, the media and lack of understanding.
People who suffer from Mental Health problems are often labeled as being violent and dangerous in the media and are commonly associated with crime. In reality, people who do suffer from Mental Health problems are more likely to be victims of crime rather than a perpetrator. This is just one of the reasons why this stigma surrounding people and Mental Health needs to change, people are usually just working off assumptions, not actually looking at the facts surrounding the matter.
An article published by the Time to Change organization, https://www.time-to-change.org.uk/media-centre/responsible-reporting/violence-mental-health-problems, talks about the facts surrounding Violence and Mental Health. In this article, they talk about the British Crime Survey and how the responses from this survey further back up the point that the stigma surrounding Mental health needs to be changed quickly.
The British Crime Survey results show us that around 47% of crime is done by people who are believed to be under the influence of alcohol. This figure alone should act as an eye opener, nearly half of all the crimes committed are often done by someone under the influence of alcohol. The survey also tells us that around 17% of crimes are committed by someone who is believed to be under the influence of drugs.
Surprisingly the survey shows us that only 1% of crimes are committed by someone who is believed to be suffering from a Mental Health condition. These statistics clearly prove that the majority of people who are suffering from Mental Health conditions are not usually dangerous or violent, they are more likely to be the victim fo a crime.
If we add the two statistics for people being under the influence of alcohol and then the people who were under the influence of drugs, it equals 64%. 64% of crimes are believed to be committed by someone who is either under the influence of drugs or alcohol. When we compare this to people who commit a crime with a Mental Health condition we see that there is a 63% difference. It is 63% more likely that a crime has been committed by someone under the influence of drugs or alcohol rather than someone suffering from a mental illness.
Lack of understanding is the other major cause of the stigma surrounding Mental Healths existence. A lack of understanding can often be the main cause of a lot of problems in modern day society. It is often brought up that if you haven’t actually experienced or researched a mental health condition then you cannot actually understand it.
Mental health is such a large topic to look at that, unfortunately, people do end up just assuming that they understand it when in reality they have no idea. The fact that the majority of Mental Health issues can usually be talked through is often overlooked in society. Personally, I have had people tell me that I am too young to have any problems or that I have no valid reason to say that I have a Mental Health condition. It is these people who only fuel the fire that is Mental Health when really they should be helping us extinguish it.
When I was originally planning this blog I was going to do a large section on the effects that the stigma actually has on people suffering from a Mental Health condition but now looking back I feel like it is better to cover in its own blog. I will briefly touch on some of the effects in this blog but will leave the in-depth explanations for a later blog.
The stigma surrounding Mental Health mainly affects peoples self-esteem. The stigma leads to people feeling like they are being judged constantly simply for having a Mental health problem. This feeling of being judged is only going to lower the person’s self-esteem which could lead to them experiencing more problems. This can develop a very dangerous cycle involving mental health which could end with someone getting hurt.
The feeling of being judged can also lead people to begin to isolate themselves. People tend to stop seeking treatment and support when they are scared of being judged. This approach leads to more and more problems. This can create another dangerous cycle where people just add more problems on top of the problems they already have. If they stop getting help to work through these problems then eventually they will break.
That’s all I want to talk about in today’s blog. What do you all think? Did you know about the stigma surrounding Mental Health before reading this blog? If so where did you find out about it? If not was it a useful thing to learn? how could we go about getting rid of this stigma? Is it a personal problem or a problem for society as a whole? let me know what you think in the comments or by getting in touch with me!
Thank you all for reading! Please let me know what you all think. I appreciate all feedback be it positive or negative! If you have a minute or two spare then please leave a rating on the blogs Facebook page, it lets me see if I’m doing a good job or not! Thanks for reading and I hope you’ll visit the page again,
Sweeney’s Blogs
Any money donated here will be put back into the business. This can be through marketing campaigns, upgrades to plans or for setting up future events!
£5.00
James Sweeney
Sweeney's Blogs 