Well, hello! It’s been a while!! So I decided to take a bit of a break from blogging to work on myself after having a couple of tough weeks. But I’m back and I have a little update on how everything has been going.

After getting back from a week away in Essex visiting family, I decided to visit the doctors to ask about some medication. If I’m being truly honest, I personally didn’t think I needed anything but it was something that friends and family suggested I try. I didn’t want to rule anything out because there was a slight chance that medication could help. So, I was prescribed Sertraline, which is a pill that helps to regulate the serotonin in your body.

I know this sounds ridiculous but I took one pill and knew that it wasn’t right for me. I felt my anxiety hit the roof, I was very nauseous, I had the chills and I didn’t sleep at all. I felt the worst I had ever felt, and it really shocked me into thinking “right, enough, I can do this on my own”.

That was when I decided to take my anxiety into my own hands. I needed to do something about it until my therapy started, which is when I stumbled across the 5 Day Anxiety Challenge. Each day, I was sent an email with a different coping mechanism to try, which I could then adopt as part of my daily routine. Out of the 5 coping mechanisms, I’ve found 3 of them to be really helpful:

1. Self Care – due to being a ‘Stay At Home Mam’, I often spend pretty much most of my time doing stuff for Evie. And if I’m not doing that, I’m doing the housework, so I rarely take any time out for myself. A part of having a happy mind is taking between 10 minutes to an hour doing something you really love. So that could be having a nice relaxing bath with some music, or reading a book in bed, or going to the gym. In the last few weeks, I’ve been dedicating the odd moment to myself which has in turn, made me feel really good because I’ve done something I enjoy. I think sometimes, it pays to be selfish, especially when it comes to your mental health.
2. Meditation – I know this sounds mega ‘hippy’ but I’ve also found meditation to be quite a big help! Especially when I’ve had a particularly stressful day. I have an app on my phone called ‘Insight Timer’ and it has a lot of different meditation tracks to listen too, ranging from tracks to help with anxiety to sleep. When I’ve had a bad day, I’ve found that the sleep based meditation tracks really help me to unwind and calm down. It usually takes me a good hour to fall asleep on a bad day, whereas when I listen to these tracks, I can be away to the land of nod within 20 minutes!
3. Gratitude List – this one has been the biggest help of all. Each day, I have started writing a Gratitude List in the journal I have on my phone. I’ll spend about 10 minutes at the end of each day writing down the things I feel I am most grateful for that has happened during that day. For example, today I am grateful for the healthy breakfast I made myself this morning. I’ve found that, since writing these lists, I have started concentrating on doing more positive things throughout the day so that I have more things to write about. I do genuinely feel like it’s really helped to pull me out of my negative shell.

So, that’s where I’m at right now! Attempting to take some control over my anxiety instead of letting it control me. And even better, I recieved my start date for CBT this morning!! Yayy!! It starts next week so I’m really looking forward to finally getting the type of help I need.

I’ll most definitely blog about how my CBT sessions are coming along, just incase anyone is interested in how it works 🙂