I am reading a book at the moment about having an ‘unhurried life’ and the author talks about how once we slow our lives down, we are confronted with the feelings that we have been avoiding.

In difficult times, it can be easy to try everything possible to ‘take our mind off of it.’ For me, this can be finding something mind-numbing to watch, keeping busy or directing the conversation in a different direction. Although these can be helpful to a degree especially when I have experienced a lot of negativity and I need to remind myself that joy can still be found, I have recently found that I sometimes linger in that stage for too long. I sometimes end up jumping between stressing about what’s making me anxious and then distracting myself from that without really knowing what I can do otherwise. I perhaps make things worse for myself by wanting to know how to work things out there and then. Although, I do recognize that this way of thinking is unhealthy, I think it can be good to know where or who you can turn to for support in stressful situations. Despite it being a challenge to my previous defense mechanisms, I have found that sharing my feelings either privately with someone I trust or through prayer or more publicly like with this blog has been most helpful for me confronting my issues in a healthy way even if I don’t know what to do with those feelings at the time.

As some of you will know, I am now on some time out from my course and one of the things I want to do is look into creative outlets for sharing mental health issues so stay tuned for developments with that.

Thank you for taking the time to read this and I hope you find it helpful. As always, feel free to get in touch with any questions/feedback/comments, I always love to hear it. Stay tuned for the next instalment.

Until next time

Kathryn