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.
~Luna
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