anxiety

This is, as promised the follow up post to my “Of Emotional Burnout and Social Anxiety” post, where I promised to tell you about the way I cope with social situations in which I can’t wear my headphones.

A while ago I was just wasting time and procrastinating on other things I had to do by browsing Instagram when an advertisement caught my eye:

Live life at your volume.

For someone who was at that point constantly overwhelmed, stressed and feeling like everything is just too much all the time, this sounded like an absolute blessing. However, sceptical as I was I just saved it and decided to look at it at a later date. Really shouldn’t have done that. Even imagining how much of a relief I could already have had, if I had looked into the advertised product sooner… well I won’t go into that otherwise I’ll just get angry at myself again.

Either way, fast forward a few months… yep, you heard right… months and I’m on my way to a holiday destination and a good friend of mine and I are talking about noise sensitivity, promted by the people surrounding us. During that talk, we realize that we’ve both been seeing the same advertisement and decide to have a proper look into it together during our holiday. We both end up ordering a pair after we decide what we want to use them for and we’re excited to see how those really work and if they will deliver what they promise

When we get them delivered, we try them out immediately. The first thing we notice is that with the type that we’ve chosen, it is legitimately possible to still have a conversation with both of them in our ears but everything feels filtered. As if someone had given us a volume control for our surroundings. Everything seemed less overwhelming at once and I’ve never felt so relieved to no longer have the constant need of drowning out unwanted sounds with other sounds; more specifically music. (Although that is still my prefered method and will always be but sometimes it’s not posssible and it is still a relief that I no longer need it in order to not feel overwhelmed.)
From then on they have become a permant fixture in my life. I never leave the house without them anymore, they are always on my keychain.

I got the chance to test them out in many situations since then. Both for reducing backround noise and reducing noise as a whole as well as using them as proper earplugs when trying to sleep by putting the lil mute thingy in. (I have since then ordered a second pair that’s specifically designend to be used for sleeping and blocking out sound completely for future situations but I didn’t have to use them yet.)

For example, we decided to go to a pretty lively bar/club while I was on holiday and there were a lot of people there. As a result, it was loud and the music that was playing wasn’t helping with that fact. So I put my Loop Earplugs in and everything just got a lil more quiet. It was an absolute blessing.

I’ve also already used them at Uni in order to block out the background noise of people shuffling, rustling, basically anything that would distract me from what I’m actually supposed to be doing, which is listening to the person speaking in front.

Needless to say, daily life and noise has become a lot less overwhelming since then.

I have also recommended them to a lot of people since then and they’ve all been extremely happy with them. So, if you’re now curious to check out the website yourself you can simply click here.

Before I end this blog post I want you to know one more thing: Yes, this is an advertisement and yes, I am affiliated with Loop Earplugs, and the link is an affiliate link, however I want you to know that it was me that looked for whether or not they had an affiliate program and I have not been approached by them, simply because I am so happy with them.

As a result everything that I have written is 100% genuine and my own opinion.

The only thing that remains to say is that if any of the things that I have mentioned have in some way shape or form spoken to you, give them a try, you won’t regret it. They even help you figure out which ones suit you best by asking you what function you hope the Loop Earplugs fulfill.

So, if you do decide to get some, feel free to let me know in the comments how your experience with them goes.

For now though take care. Till the next blog post ❤

~Luna

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Hello fellow people on this earth, I am back and a lot has happened. My mental health has gone from bad to worse and then to better again and now I would say we’re somewhere between okay and good. But let me start from the beginning.

Once upon a time… okay we don’t need to go that far back but let’s indeed go back a few months. As you may or may not know (you would know, if you watch me on twitch) my mental state was pretty fragile for a while after that stressful time last year. A lot of canceled plans, streams, events… you name it, I probably canceled it. I was constantly feeling stressed, overwhelmed and like everything was just too much. I felt like a rubber band that was being stretched too far, ready to snap at any given moment.

After a while I felt like something was seriously going wrong in my life. I started noticing things like myself being constantly anxious when around friends and family alike, which was something I used to only experience in social situations with strangers before. I also started to have a hard time doing simple things like going shopping or going to pick up a package without being super anxious or needing like days to prepare in advance.

Long story short, I noticed it was starting to affect me in my daily life and quite strongly so. I have always been a bit socially anxious but I’ve always managed to cope with it. At that point I no longer was able to, and a rule that I had set myself was that I would look for help incase it ever startes influencing my daily life and stops me from doing things. So that’s what I did. I got help and it got better. We figured out that my social anxiety probably started getting worse and developed into a disorder because I was rarely leaving my place and that that was because I was lacking the energy in the first place. So I realized that it was all connected like a weird hell cycle: Constantly stressed out and no time for myself led to me not having any energy and no longer enjoying things. That led to me canceling plans, meaning I didn’t subject myself to social situations which in turn made the social anxiety get worse and worse which made me more stressed out and …. I think you get the gist.

Fast foward a year to now and I am slowly beginning to recover. About a month ago I told my roommate “you know what? I finally feel like I wanna do more than the bare minimum again” and that was such a huge feeling for me after I had felt so empty and without energy for a long time. I’ve also changed a few things in my life. I have restructured my day just enough so that it has a lose structure to keep me from feeling like I am just drifting along, I’m trying to add some habits into my day like meditation, regularly working out and going to bed and getting up at a regular time and I call “offline-hour”.

Offline hour was really something I wanted to implement into my daily rhythm simply because a lot of my life happens online. During offline hour I turn off my Internet for an hour. No social media, no chats, just time for myself. Whether or not offline hour consists of me actively doing something or just chilling and listening to music for an hour doesn’t matter. This is my time that I am taking to turn off from the day, so to speak. And believe me when I say you cannot imagine how incredibly rejuvenating this hour is for me, it gets my mind to slow down and stops it from going what sometimes feels like million miles an hour. It’s pure bliss.

I also, believe it or not, may have finally found a solution for my pesonal problem that I have with procrastination. I will write a separate blog post on that soon because it’s really something I wanna share with you.

Alright Luna, that’s all fine and well you’ve found ways to no longer be burnt out but what about the social anxiety, how is that going?

I’m so glad, you’re asking, dear reader. As shitty as it might sound but the only way how you can beat social anxiety is by subjecting yourself to the situations you’re the most scared of. So I did. I went shopping although my heart was racing and I was constantly fidgeting around. I went to that gathering although my head was telling me a billion good reasons not to go and instead stay home where it’s safe and we don’t have to deal with anxiety symptoms.

However, just because you should subject yourself to those things, it doesn’t mean that you can’t do it with stabilizers. I used to get massively overwhelmed by a lot of people and their noise, so I used to only enter stores or places with a lot of people with my headphones on. Works totally fine when you’re alone, not so much when you’re with someone or rather you’re meeting up with people to go somewhere, where a lot of other people are too. So that was always a bit of an issue. But thanks to my instagram algorithm I have found a solution for that too. I want to give you a proper review of that solution though also in another blog post because it deserves it. Don’t worry, you won’t have to wait long.

But yeah, needless to say, I am doing much better. Of course there are always things that can still be improved, bad habits that can and need to be broken but I am making progress and I’m so incredibly happy about that. 😊

The last thing I still wanna say, if you’ve made it this far, is “thank you”. Thank you for sticking with me, thank you for being patient with me, thank you for taking the time to read this and thank you for listening to me. I’m not writing these posts because I want pity or anything the like. I’m writing these because I want to be open about mental health related topics. I want to be open about how it easy it can be to slip into something like this and I want these topics to no longer be taboo topics no one talks about because we all have to function. We don’t. It’s okay to take breaks, it’s okay to say no and it’s okay to look out for yourself, to take care of yourself. In fact, it is not only okay, it’s a must.

So please do me and yourself a favor and do so ❤

And now I will go, offline hour is about to start. We’ll read each other in the next one.
Take care.