Mental Health Awareness Week Journal, Written by Alex Berbank
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Thursday’s Update: Meditation and Mindfulness
So, to this point this week has been great. I’ve actually taken to the focus on my mental health and self improvement thing quite well and I hope I’ll keep these new ideas as habits going forward. I feel like I’m aware of negative thoughts sooner. I catch negative feedback loops too, something that I did do before but way after they had already changed my mood for the worse. I can’t get over the sleep I’ve gotten too. So it was about time I tried some mindfulness and meditation.
In my new zen state I attended a 1 on 1 remote call to help guide me through some meditation and mindfulness. This I feel obliged to say is probably not the optimal way to have one of these sessions. I think it would have been much better for me to attend in person and take advantage of some soft lighting and cosy surroundings. To make it happen this week however, that wasn’t a choice and I had to make do with connecting and sitting on the floor of the spare room with the lamp on the dimmest setting available.
Mindfulness is an art, it’s not a science and my brain struggled with that. It’s the process of being present in the time and aware of the thoughts you are having and why you are having them. To me it felt a little like trying to create an out of body experience. It wasn’t as ‘trippy’ as that may sound, it felt very natural and my guide was great at sensing as soon as I was drifting away from what I was being told. She made it clear it was ok to laugh or get the giggles. This is a new experience and it does feel very alien to some. For me the 90 minutes went past way too quickly. A good sign surely that I had enjoyed the time even if I had not connected with it as intended. What I can say is if you feel like time is against you and you’ve already got 15 things to do tomorrow that needed to be done yesterday, spending a small amount of your week trying something like this could be really impactful. Having the time blocked out for me meant that everything was on hold until then. It was a protected time that I couldn’t speed up and get done by rushing to complete it.
The meditation was more to my liking, even if I saw it as an adult version of story time in nursery. I was sitting in a room very comfortably and just said in a soft voice nice things to think about. I found myself losing that thought track that was monitoring the process. I think part of the reason why mindfulness didn’t work as well is because I was always thinking ‘is it working yet’ am i ‘present’ now? But I didn’t get that in the meditation. Not towards the end. Maybe this is a sign that the first session did kind of work and it was a success? I’ll let you decide that. My decision was that I liked it but it wasn’t for me. Much like Waitrose, it does good stuff and I understand the role it plays. I see how it works for millions of people but for me, I’m a big Tesco kind of guy. Or failing that, Aldi.
As my mum would tell me there’s so many ways to skin a cat. Mental health is confusing to look at for the first time and tricky to know what to do. I feel like I gained a lot from yesterday just by knowing what not to do. I’m pleased I tried it because I was thinking you can’t say you tried improving your mental health without those cliches. Things I will take from it though is how you can take small 5 or 10 minute breaks through the day,just to put some headphones on, shut your eyes and be taken elsewhere for a bit or even just take some time to talk to yourself about what’s going on.
Finding What Works for You is a Process
Each of us reading this are going to have different triggers and causes of low moods and negative thought patterns. So we’re all going to have to develop different ways of interrupting them and recognising when we need to do so. Be experimental with how you try this and don’t feel bad for getting it wrong either. It’s a long process to get this right and so far I haven’t met someone yet that would say they no longer need to work on their mental health. It’s just not what happens. Same way you speak to a bodybuilder or a marathon runner and they’ll tell you they could have another 5 seconds off their time by changing this, or have a better defined muscle if they can just do that. Mental health is the exact same.
I think too it’s been very important for me to take stock of when my mental health is working well. Life consists of ups as well as downs and if you ignore the ups you’re only left with the downs. I’m trying to take time to be better at being proud of what I’ve done and take myself less seriously. I can feel that changing already and really want to keep on going beyond this week. Unlike physical health, mental health goals can be harder to track. The nature of it is truly subjective. It makes knowing when to stop and take note of what you’ve done so far harder. For me I’ve used check-ins with my partner as a way to gauge how those closest to me see my mental health and ask if anything has changed. When I asked today if she had noticed a difference in me, I was told: ‘you seem more content with yourself’ ‘you don’t scrunch your face up as much’ ‘you used to seem like you were in deep conversations in your head before, I haven’t seen that yet’. This was news to me. I hadn’t realised I was doing that up until then. It does show that we aren’t always aware of how our mental health looks to others until we start that conversation.
Starting these conversations are difficult, especially if it’s about someone else’s conversations, much like I said yesterday start the conversation and the rest kind of looks after itself.
Tomorrow sparks the last update of the week and I’ll be interested to see how things have changed. I hope this week has come as some use to everyone. If you want to talk about anything that this week has raised for you I’d love to hear it, as well if you have any ideas for things I can do to better my mental health I’m all up for trying and I’ll report back to the community how I found it.
Until then, take care everyone.
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