Although it has been helpful for me to explore my experience of sadness, anger, fear and disgust, I am glad that I now have the opportunity to share some of my experiences of joy! I have a friend who when I tell her about the struggles that I have had asks me what things I have to be happy about that week. I am so glad that she does this as it can be so easy to think of all the negative things going on your life and forget to see the positive things that are going on at the same time.

One way that I have used to help me in the past but I confess to not being so good at using recently is a happiness journal where I listed 3 ‘moments of joy’ each day. On some days, this would be a struggle but on other days, I would have to think of a top 3. What I started to do as I didn’t have enough space on the pages was recording these ‘moments of joy’ on my phone and I found this even more helpful as I was able to bring the list out when I was feeling negative and have the reassurance that it wasn’t all bad. What I also enjoyed about this exercise was that the longer that I did it, the easier it got and the more positive things that I could think of from small things like having a good cup of tea to bigger things like re-connecting with someone that you hadn’t spoken to for a while.  

While I was still at school, I would rate my progress and compare how many people I had spoken to that day with other days which on reflection was an unhealthy way to go about my confidence. To this day, I still struggle with having the patience to wait for resolutions to my problems and get frustrated when there is long periods of little or no progress. Although I still need reminded of this at times, it is good to hold onto the small victories while waiting for an ultimate resolution. I often feel encouraged reminding myself of how far I have come in my confidence since I was younger. I also need to accept that it’s normal to have bad as well as good days.

Thank you for taking the time to read this and I hope that you find it useful. As always, feel free to get in touch with any questions/feedback, I always love to hear it.

Until next time

Kathryn