anxiety-depression-recovery:

selfcarepropaganda:

dan-mcneely:

going thru phone pics and found this thing that was tacked up next to the toaster at my old job, if anyone needs some light toast eating reading material

Would anyone be kind enough to transcribe this or link to a text version?

Everything Is AWFUL and I’m Not Okay: Questions to Ask Before Giving Up on Yourself

Are you hydrated?

If not, have a glass of water. Dehydration can mimic
or increase feelings associated with anxiety and a
well hydrated brain functions optimally. Avoid
excess caffeine.

Have you eaten in the past three hours?

Don’t be a victim of hanger! Get some food–something
with protein, not just simple carbs or
high-fat. Nuts, hummus, and veggies are great
options to feed your studying brain. Keep healthy
snacks within reach to avoid mindlessly chowing
down on sweets.

Have you stretched your legs in the past day?

If not, do so right now. If you don’t have the energy
or time for a run or a trip to the gym, just walk
around the block or building. Even minimal exercise
preps the mind for learning so that you can focus
better and recall things easier, plus it’s good to get a
change of scenery.

Have you said something nice to someone in the
past day?

Do so, whether online or in person. Make it
genuine! We bet your study partner would
appreciate a compliment.

Have you moved your body to music in the past
day?

If not, jog for the length of a song at your favorite
tempo, or just dance around your bedroom for the
length of an upbeat song (singing along is a bonus)

Have you cuddled a living being in the past two
days?

If not, do so. Don’t be afraid to ask for hugs from
friends of friends’ pets. Most of them will enjoy the
cuddles too; you’re not imposing.

Have you started or changed any medications in the
past couple of weeks, including skipped doses or a
change in generic prescription brand?

That may be screwing with your head. Give things a
few days, then talk to your doctor if it doesn’t settle
down.

If daytime: are you dressed?

If no, put on clean clothes that aren’t PJs. Give
yourself permission to wear something special,
whether it’s a funny t-shirt or a pretty dress.

If nighttime: are you sleepy and fatigued but
resisting going to sleep?

Put on PJs, make yourself cozy in bed with a teddy
bear and the sound of falling rain, and close your
eyes for fifteen minutes while focusing on breathing
deeper with every breath- no electronic screens
allowed! Adequate sleep is a necessity for stress
management.

Do you feel ineffective?

Pause right now and get something small completed,
whether it’s responding to an email, loading the
dishwasher, or tidying up your room. Good job!

Do you feel unattractive?

Take a darn selfie. Your friends will remind you how
great you look. You are always insta-worthy.

Do you feel paralyzed by indecision?

Give yourself ten minutes to sit back and figure out a
game plan for the day. If a particular decision or
problem is still being a roadblock, simply set it aside
for now, and pick something else that seems doable.
Right now, the important part is to break through
that stasis, even if it means doing something trivial.

Have you over-exerted yourself lately–physically,
emotionally, socially, or intellectually?

That can take a toll that lingers for days. Give
yourself a break in that area, whether it’s physical
rest, taking some time alone, or relaxing with some
silly entertainment for a little. Time spent refreshing
yourself is never time “wasted!”

Have you waited a week?

Sometimes or perception of life is skewed, and we
can’t even tell that we’re not thinking clearly, and
there’s no obvious external cause. It happens. Keep
yourself going for a full week, whatever it takes, and
see if you still feel the same way then.

You’ve made it this far; and you will make it through. You are stronger than you think.

Because someone might need this today

Why “doing something relaxing” does not help your anxiety

systlin:

noriannbraindripshere:

systlin:

tatianathevampireslayer:

lovelyplot:

merrybitchmas91:

A lot of the time when people give advice intended to relieve anxiety, they suggest doing “relaxing” things like drawing, painting, knitting, taking a bubble bath, coloring in one of those zen coloring books, or watching glitter settle to the bottom of a jar.

This advice is always well-intentioned, and I’m not here to diss people who either give it or who benefit from it. But it has never, ever done shit for me, and this is because it goes about resolving anxiety in the completely wrong way.

THE WORST THING YOU CAN DO when suffering from anxiety is to do a “relaxing” thing that just enables your mind to dwell and obsess more on the thing that’s bothering you. You need to ESCAPE from the dwelling and the obsession in order to experience relief.

You can drive to a quiet farm, drive to the beach, drive to a park, or anywhere else, but as someone who has tried it all many, many times, trust me–it’s a waste of gas. You will just end up still sad and stressed, only with sand on your butt. You can’t physically escape your sadness. Your sadness is inside of you. To escape, you need to give your brain something to play with for a while until you can approach the issue with a healthier frame of mind.

People who have anxiety do not need more time to contemplate, because we will use it to contemplate how much we suck.

In fact, you could say that’s what anxiety is–hyper-contemplating. When we let our minds run free, they run straight into the thorn bushes. Our minds are already running, and they need to be controlled. They need to be given something to do, or they’ll destroy everything, just like an overactive husky dog ripping up all the furniture.

Therefore, I present to you:

THINGS YOU SHOULD NOT DO WHEN ANXIOUS

–Go on a walk

–Watch a sunset, watch fish in an aquarium, watch glitter, etc.

–Go anywhere where the main activity is sitting and watching

–Draw, color, do anything that occupies the hands and not the mind

–Do yoga, jog, go fishing, or anything that lets you mentally drift

–Do literally ANYTHING that gives you great amounts of mental space to obsess and dwell on things.

THINGS YOU SHOULD DO WHEN ANXIOUS:

–Do a crossword puzzle, Sudoku, or any other mind teaser game. Crosswords are the best.

–Write something. It doesn’t have to be a masterpiece. Write the Top 10 Best Restaurants in My City. Rank celebrities according to Best Smile. Write some dumb Legolas fanfiction and rip it up when you’re done. It’s not for publication, it’s a relief exercise that only you will see.

–Read something, watch TV, or watch a movie–as long as it’s engrossing. Don’t watch anything which you can run as background noise (like, off the top of my head, Say Yes to The Dress.) As weird as it seems, American Horror Story actually helps me a lot, because it sucks me in.

–Masturbate. Yes, I’m serious. Your mind has to concentrate on the mini-movie it’s running. It can’t run Sexy Titillating Things and All The Things That are Bothering Me at the same time. (…I hope. If it can, then…ignore this one.)

–Do math problems—literally, google “algebra problems worksheet” and solve them. If you haven’t done math since 7th grade this will really help you. I don’t mean with math, I mean with the anxiety.

–Play a game or a sport with someone that requires great mental concentration. Working with 5 people to get a ball over a net is a challenge which will require your brain to turn off the Sadness Channel.

–Play a video game, as long as it’s not something like candy crush or Tetris that’s mindless.

THINGS YOU SHOULD DO DURING PANIC ATTACKS ESPECIALLY:

–List the capitals of all the U.S. states

–List the capitals of all the European countries

–List all the shapes you can see. Or all the colors.

–List all the blonde celebrities you can think of.

–Pull up a random block of text and count all the As in it, or Es or whatever.

Now obviously, I am not a doctor. I am just an anxious person who has tried almost everything to help myself. I’ve finally realized that the stuff people recommend never works because this is a disorder that thrives on free time and free mental space. When I do the stuff I listed above, I can breathe again. And I hope it helps someone here too.

(Now this shouldn’t have to be said but if the “do nots” work for you then by all means do them. They’ve just never worked for me.)

This would’ve been great an hour ago

If your anxiety includes rapid heartbeat for no reason then it may help to exercise! It helps for me because I’m focused on whatever moves I’m doing and breathing, and it gives my heart rate a reason to be that high so that I can start the slow cooking down process and (hopefully) bring that heart rate down with it. Look up a quick cardio workout on YouTube or something and just do it in your room!

This is so, SO true.

All ‘doing something relaxing’ ever did for me was give my brain MORE free time to FREAK THE FUCK OUT.

I like how this boil down to grabbing something then tell the brains weasels to GO FETCH YOU PIECES OF SHIT

I mean.

That’s basically it tho.

budgetrealgood:

“Self-care is often a very unbeautiful thing.

It is making a spreadsheet of your debt and enforcing a morning routine and cooking yourself healthy meals and no longer just running from your problems and calling the distraction a solution.

It is often doing the ugliest thing that you have to do, like sweat through another workout or tell a toxic friend you don’t want to see them anymore or get a second job so you can have a savings account or figure out a way to accept yourself so that you’re not constantly exhausted from trying to be everything, all the time and then needing to take deliberate, mandated breaks from living to do basic things like drop some oil into a bath and read Marie Claire and turn your phone off for the day.

A world in which self-care has to be such a trendy topic is a world that is sick. Self-care should not be something we resort to because we are so absolutely exhausted that we need some reprieve from our own relentless internal pressure.

True self-care is not salt baths and chocolate cake, it is making the choice to build a life you don’t need to regularly escape from.

And that often takes doing the thing you least want to do.

It often means looking your failures and disappointments square in the eye and re-strategizing. It is not satiating your immediate desires. It is letting go. It is choosing new. It is disappointing some people. It is making sacrifices for others. It is living a way that other people won’t, so maybe you can live in a way that other people can’t.

It is letting yourself be normal. Regular. Unexceptional. It is sometimes having a dirty kitchen and deciding your ultimate goal in life isn’t going to be having abs and keeping up with your fake friends. It is deciding how much of your anxiety comes from not actualizing your latent potential, and how much comes from the way you were being trained to think before you even knew what was happening.

If you find yourself having to regularly indulge in consumer self-care, it’s because you are disconnected from actual self-care, which has very little to do with “treating yourself” and a whole lot do with parenting yourself and making choices for your long-term wellness.

It is no longer using your hectic and unreasonable life as justification for self-sabotage in the form of liquor and procrastination. It is learning how to stop trying to “fix yourself” and start trying to take care of yourself… and maybe finding that taking care lovingly attends to a lot of the problems you were trying to fix in the first place.

It means being the hero of your life, not the victim. It means rewiring what you have until your everyday life isn’t something you need therapy to recover from. It is no longer choosing a life that looks good over a life that feels good. It is giving the hell up on some goals so you can care about others. It is being honest even if that means you aren’t universally liked. It is meeting your own needs so you aren’t anxious and dependent on other people.

It is becoming the person you know you want and are meant to be. Someone who knows that salt baths and chocolate cake are ways to enjoy life – not escape from it.”

–Brianna Wiest, in Thought Catalog

sarahviehmann:

kaerya:

claryfairhild:

i’m so done with the way girls in twenties are treated. i’m so done with people who literally create timetable for us. 20- 24 find a guy, 24-26 make him propose to you, 27-29 get married. i’m so done. i’m do not want to get 2 a.m texts from my best friend who is freaking out that she is gonna die alone. i do not want see my 20 years old friend wasting her time on some guys who are not even interested in her. i do not want see us falling for every nice guy who does not look creepy. i do not want to see girls get sad or paranoid just bcos they do not fill in the schedule. you are ok. you should enjoy your life at its fullest and one day you will find 10/10 so do not pursue 6 just because you do not want to be single. it is ok and one day you will find someone. do not split your love with people who does not deserve it. keep it for yourself and when time will come you will know. i know it hurts. i know you wish u could just open part of yourself and release the buzzing love. but not every kind of love is romantic. show it to your family, friends, plants, yourself.

Not a real criticism, just an expansion really, but … it’s not just the timetables we need to get away from, but the goal itself, I think. “One day you will find someone,” sounds comforting, but the reason it doesn’t lay fears to rest is because we are all smart enough to know it’s not necessarily true.

My aunt is over sixty, never married, and never, so far as I am aware, ever even had a great romance. She dated a lot, but never clicked and now seems to have given up. My mentor is over seventy, divorced her asshole husband more than half her life ago and has never found anyone since.

We all know women (and men) like these. And because we know them, we know that “one day you will find someone,” is just … hogwash. Because sometimes you just … don’t. Or sometimes you do, but he turns out to be a cad. Or you do and the universe rips you apart in the most unfair way possible. And because society has us so fixated on finding “our other half” or whatever, we view these women as cautionary tales.

But …

My aunt trains dogs. Her schipperke is the national champion for his breed. She spent so much of her life as a librarian, nurturing the love of books in kids, myself among them. I ride horses because of her, and it’s one of the very few things I do that makes my soul feel at peace.

My mentor is one of the best criminal defense attorneys in her state. She has devoted her life to fighting to ensure that everyone gets a vigorous defense. Because of her countless people have had the opportunity to turn their lives around. Because of her, they’ve had a life to turn around. Because of her, the prosecution and the police in her jurisdiction are forced to behave ethically and adhere to the rule of law. She’s still, even now fighting to abolish the death penalty. It’s because of her that I am pursuing the life I am.

These women’s lives are not nothing. In fact they are a whole lot of something, and it makes my heart hurt that I ever, in my dark 3 am’s, thought of their lives as something to be avoided at all costs.

So love your family, your friends, your pets, your gardens. Love your job or your hobby or your raison d’ etre, whatever it is. Love sunsets and the smell of rain and yourself, and don’t love these as something to do as a placeholder until the buzzing, romantic love comes, but love these as things worth loving all in themselves.

It’s fucking hard some days. The dark 3 am’s still come sometimes. But most days, I am so much more at peace knowing that I am not incomplete or waiting, but that my life, if it ended today, is worth it because of the platonic, familial, friendship love I have shared. And if the other kind does come someday, that’ll be nice, but it won’t make any of the others less. It’ll just be caramel sauce on a sundae–tasty and wonderful, but the sundae was perfect without it too.

I needed this today.

thesylverlining:

santorumsoakedpikachu:

autistic-knight-errant:

I honestly think that we would eliminate one of the major causes of ableism if we stopped basing people’s worth off how much revenue they generate.

This measure is worthless. Actually, it is worth less than nothing.

I used to be a programmer for a spammer. Being rather young, naive, and also desperate for some kind of income, I had no idea what “lead generation” meant and had no idea that the fact that they didn’t talk about how their nebulous product actually helped anyone was a huge red flag. I took the job, slowly learned the codebase, and it took me months to figure out what kind of practices this place actually employed.

I was asked to put in obnoxious popups, but hide the popups for traffic coming in from Google so that Google wouldn’t cut off their sponsored traffic because the site violated their standards, a few months into my time there. That was when I began to realize the kind of place I was working at. Then I was asked to create a throwaway email account to test something, and I found out what actually happened to the poor people who put their information in for Free Insurance Quotes. They were inundated with spam. I found out the company had no site of its own, just hundreds of these “Free Insurance Quotes” sites all with slightly different stock photos and slightly different forms and a “complaints” page that was very hard to find with an email that was never checked.

I was a Hardworking Taxpaying American when I worked at that job. I was, according to this capitalist logic, contributing to society and of much more value than a disabled person who supposedly is a leech on society.

I was making the world worse by working at that job. I would have been making the world better if I did absolutely nothing but stare at the wall all day rather than work that job.

Many jobs are like this. Anyone who works at an oil company is making the world worse. Anyone who works at a tobacco company is making the world worse. People in various abusive therapy industries are making the world worse. I’m sure you can name plenty of other jobs in this category. The world would be better if those jobs did not exist.

Now, I am disabled. I am chronically ill, and I cannot even work a sedentary job because having to sit up for eight hours at a time would make me have to lie in bed for days.

I am making the world much better now by replacing the invasive grasses on my front lawn with strawberries that attract native bees, by sealing my house to increase its energy efficiency, by taking care of a flock of chickens and doing my best to ensure that they have a good happy life, by replenishing the soil in the yard with compost and chicken manure, than I was at that job. And I don’t do very much – I can’t.

Equating the arbitrary numbers one accumulates for oneself to one’s actual value or contribution is a dangerous lie, and it is poisoning the planet.

This is so incredibly important. Thank you for this.

veganconnor:

hey guys unpopular opinion but you’re not a bad person if you don’t care about every bad thing happening in the world all the time, or if you do care but you’re not constantly reblogging posts spreading awareness and information

it’s okay if you’re just on tumblr to have fun and reblog things you like or that make you happy.

humans aren’t made to process trauma and suffering on a worldwide scale without any breaks whatsoever & the internet has created an unprecedented access to bad news so please never feel guilty for scrolling past it because you can’t process it! and you’re not doing anything wrong & there’s no need to feel guilty

spiroandthelacktones:

m–ood:

How to Self Rescue in the Event you Fall Through Frozen Ice

With that music I was not expecting this to be a completely serious and informative video

goodmorningvelma:

catifex:

bishounen-curious:

chloroscythe:

bishounen-curious:

chloroscythe:

in my head theres a little mouse wearing a little apron and she makes all my emotions

she needs to read a fuckin recipe this bitch is just making a MESS

shes doing her best… maybe shed do better if you were nicer to her

making serotonin is the cooking equivalent to scrambling an egg and she can’t even do that right smh

Hi I’m Catifex and I want you to make your mouse’s work easier!

– This is a step by step on getting a therapist

– Need to find a therapist by location? Psychologytoday lets you search by city or zip code in the USA, Canada, or UK.

– Can’t afford therapy? No insurance? Need low cost options? Here is a great list of ways to get help when money or insurance is an issue..

Reblogging this in the hopes that the image of a sweet little mouse doing her best to make my emotions will help me remember to be kinder to myself.