Tag: life

Small Changes I’ve Made To Reduce My Anxiety.

Little things that are helping my anxiety not be in control.

I have never been secretive about the fact that I suffer from Anxiety disorder. Nor am I oblivious to the fact that the older I get, and the more life experiences (and traumas) I face, the deeper and heavier the anxiety goes.

I found myself in a position where I was having major anxiety attacks more regularly. Over everything. It’s important to note that the ‘everything’ was also a series of nothing’s. And it got to a point where I had to stop myself and acknowledge that the damage I’m doing to my own health is becoming a problem. It was time I started to try out new things to start to eliminate the anxiety.

So, here are a few practices I’ve started doing which have actually started to produce much less anxiety outbursts (I just have to stick to them now).

The No Vaping Continues

If you read one of my recent posts, you’ll know I am currently in the early stages of eliminating nicotine from my life for good. I know addicts and fellow vapers hate the fact people keep saying it’s a real difference to your mental health when you stop but honestly, for me, it is. Am I still having moments where I pine for some flavoured air because I think it’ll soothe something? Sure. But every day that I don’t cave and go longer without I notice my mind become clearer and clearer. My asthmatic lungs are taking a while to heal, but I can’t magically solve everything at once can I?

I am focusing heavily on self-love.

I know there’ll probably be eye rolls at this. But it is true what they say, you become a magnet for all the energy you give out, if you don’t fall in love with yourself and be happy with who you are then how is anything going to be good enough for you? I am leaving this paragraph brief because I’m still ironing out some stuff and research on this which I will do a separate post in detail on. But what I will say is, self-love is always an ongoing journey. Whether you’re with someone or not. Read books that inspire you to love yourself, it will make a big difference to how you think about things.

Affirmations

Yeah, I know, I’m becoming that guy. I know there is a lot of judgement on manifesting and affirmations. But I have found that having those little talks with myself when I’m feeling a certain way and need to rewire myself to remember who the fuck I am. These have made a big difference. Especially if I start doing them when I feel a little shift in my emotion or like my anxiety is being triggered. It really helps bring you back in.

I am distancing myself from actively messaging

I think I may have touched on this before. But one thing that always made me heavily upset and anxious, was how I am always a person who messages quickly, replies and reassures heavily, but I have never had the same from other people. That’s okay, I’m not taking this opportunity to dig at others. But what I learned is, the only person who is feeling awkward about this is me. I am a people-pleaser. I shouldn’t be, but I am. I have recently decided to put myself first and have hours of screen time locks and on some days, I will remove notifications for a day. Sometimes, I’ll leave my phone at home or work for a day/night. I learned from doing all this that nothing disastrous happened. Breaking myself from the consistent need to be active on my phone has really worked wonders for my brain and made me a lot more relaxed in conversations.

(Obviously, I will still stress that communication is important and you should always express boundaries and meet people halfway if you can).

I’m doing things that are good for my mind and body

I’ve recently booked to have a massage. Which doesn’t sound like much, but I never have those. My body is tense AF and I made a decision that it is probably something my body really needs to have to feel better as a whole. It’s something I’m considering doing as a regular thing to take care of my body. I am also spending more time taking ‘mindful walks’. I don’t have headphones or any distractions, I just take a walk alone and acknowledge what’s present and around me. It does so many wonders for me and it also helps me think about events and situations more clearly when the algorithm isn’t manipulating me. Also, walking is good for your body too 😉

And lastly – I am slowly working on not caring about numbers of likes or attention. This is a work in progress, which I am sure I will blog about at some point .

There you have it. There’s a lil update on personal improvements I’m making. They might not work for everyone, but it’s definitely making a solid difference in my brain wiring. Anxiety doesn’t disappear, but it can be controlled.

An 8 Day Social Media Detox

A little reflection on my social media break

In July, I made a decision that due to extreme over-stimulation, I was going to spend my holiday completely off of all social media app’s, including Whatsapp.

It may sound like a bizarre decision to make but it was something I thought I really needed to focus on. The last few months have been a complete whirlwind for me, I’m still struggling with certain things but I’ve been extremely active regularly on my social media pages with my reading updates and writing (even though, I struggle a lot with the latter lately).

It was brought to my attention that I was overstimulated, working 40(+) hours a week and then trying to keep up to date with being relevant online plus organising your own living space, trying to find the time to write anything etc. my phone was stitched to my hand pretty much. And I was doing that annoying thing I think most of us do with our phones – the looking at an app, coming out of it, only to jump back in 2 seconds later (honestly, what do we think is new at that point?).

My detox was from the Friday evening, right through to the following Saturday evening. I put screen limits on my phone so that all my apps were not accessible while I was away. As I was going on a family holiday I had to leave texts/calls open but other than that I restricted everything.

The initial goal I had was: have time away from the apps, use it to clear my head, spend some free time writing and doing some self-development work.

One of the bizarre things I felt when I started this was guilt. As someone who struggles a lot with anxiety, I can be the first to understand how much silence from another person can trigger someone. However, I am a bit on the fence with some areas of this, I think as a human race, we have become very dependent on immediacy, especially from others. We need to learn to slow down (I know, I am not one to talk on this) and also appreciate that not everyone is available 24/7. No-one should be.

I did respect others in my decision though by sending messages to the people I am likely to hear from to advise them I would be off grid for just over a week. So nobody panics. So once that good deed was done, I shut it all off and went ahead with my plan.

Did it all go to plan? Almost.

I did manage to go the whole time without opening any of the app’s. It was hard at first, but I never caved. The things that didn’t go to plan was the other bits. Turns out, when you’re holidaying with family and having to share a room with a younger family member, your personal plans and requirements go out the window a little bit.

It was also a difficult process because I also decided to quit vaping cold turkey at the same time (a separate post on nicotine withdrawal to come later), and still coming to terms with my thyroid medication being a bit all over the place and the nonstop heat. So there were times I could have done with distracting myself on social media, but I still was determined and didn’t cave 🙂

(I would also like to randomly push in here that in case you weren’t aware… you can get sunburn on your feet. It’s not comfortable. Cream up).

But all my little obstacles and dilemmas aside, here are the positive things I have taken away from my detox:

A change of plan with some writing – Although I got zero writing done due to distractions, I did have a lot of time to think about why I was struggling a bit with my novel I’m trying to write. It occurred to me that there was an underlying issue with my general idea, so I am now taking it on from a whole new plot point, but I feel more confident about where this one is going now. It also gave me time to come up with some other novel draft ideas. (Yes, this does mean I am starting my novel again a little bit. But I am still going with the wing it plan and am hoping to get a massive chunk of it done by September).

I had fresher ideas and perspectives without social media influence – I cannot begin to tell you how much clearer my brain felt after being completely ignorant to social media for a while. There was no algorithm suggestions making me rethink things or influencing my ideas. I just had time to adjust to and think the way I wanted to.

I now know that although it’s a necessity these days, I don’t have to be on it all the time – Spoiler alert – the detox and not using apps for a week did not kill me. I didn’t miss anything life threatening or critical. The world carried on without me, and I caught up in my own time. I think this is an important factor for me to focus on, especially now that I’m back online and trying to regularly post again.

Yes, it’s good to stay in the know and updated on everyone and everything, but we let FOMO hit us way too much I think. After doing this detox, I am now trying to be a bit more disciplined with my usage… I have screen time locks at night now, I put it on dnd whenever I am out or about to work or do something that needs my attention, I turned my notifications off – so I only go into the apps when I want to.

I am hoping I can stick to these routines now (it would really help my writing motivation if I could) but I am not only proud of myself for managing that whole time without it, but I’m confident that I am another big step closer to not letting my anxiety overcome me when it comes to phones and communication, and maybe I will be able to achieve my 2026 goals after all?

A Reflection of Feelings Lately

I’ve been a bit off the grid lately with my writing and blog posts, a lot of it is down to May being a really busy month where I turned 40 and had loads of different fun things to do and lots of events and occasions followed by back to work which made my free-time pretty minimal. 

The other side of it though, is that I’ve been a bit all over the place emotionally as I try to process a lot of different things and finally take the time to put the work into different parts of me that I want to work on.

The motivation to write has been pretty poor, but I know that will pass. I’ve just been trying to adjust to different feelings lately and also trying to figure out where the hell I want to go and what I want to do. 

My brain has always been chaotic, it’s just how it works. I’m not very good at planning ahead or being organised with things I want to do, that’s unfortunately a part of me I think I can never change drastically. So a lot of the time, my actions are spontaneous and I say and do things too quickly. I am trying to work on that, I know I can’t completely change my brain function and who I am or how I feel about things, but I can at least try to step away and breathe a little before I do something.

As you know, if you’ve read some of my other posts, I have ADHD and a lovely dash of anxiety disorder, which means I function with anxious attachment styles and constantly stressing and overthinking every scenario possible. It means my brain never shuts off, and every single conversation or event in my life gets a whole series of panic and overthinking afterwards. But one of my biggest issues is, I dump my loneliness on other people a bit too much, and start depending on hearing from people or getting messages etc and if I don’t then I make the assumption that it’s obviously because they don’t like me, hate something I’ve said, want to erase me from their life. (Yes, I am that dramatic)

The thing is, it was only recently when I started going through some stuff and taking time away from my phone and not actively messaging constantly that I started to realise what it was like on the other side of things. I have been intentionally spending less time on social media, leaving my phone at home, not checking Whatsapp often and acknowledging messages are there but not getting around to replying to them for a day or so later, and I realised that, I have no idea what the other people around me are going through and what their reasons may be for not reaching out or talking to me. It took me being in a position where I needed to get away from things for my own personal reasons and take some time to reflect and work on my own thought processes that I thought, this isn’t a personal retaliation to anyone I know. This is about something I need to do right now and we are sadly in a generational lifestyle now where we all expect immediacy in everything. In reality, I can’t give anyone immediate attention right now, I’m working on a lot of important things in the background for myself and it doesn’t change what I think or feel about somebody.
We never know what another person is thinking or feeling. I have people that I can’t talk to, for different reasons I won’t go into. But it doesn’t erase the fact that I still have them in my thoughts consistently or still feel a certain way or care about them. I have family members I don’t talk to for weeks and I don’t question if we’re still related, it’s all about understanding that we all have our own stuff going on. None of our brains are the same and we all handle different things in our own ways. I’m glad I sort of went into a ‘block out’ mode recently, as it has really helped me see things in a different way. 

I’ve still got a lot of things I want to do, and I’m hoping to have some really productive writing underway in the next few weeks, but it is hard (I will do a different post on writing struggles later) but I am taking things one step at a time. Trying to understand my own brain and find new ways to do things or look at things, even when my brain will actively go into anxious chaos mode and try to make me see the worst. 

I’m not entirely sure what the point of me posting all this was, other than having an outlet to express why I’ve been so quiet and also let out a little bit of how my mind works and my brain is feeling.

I think I just have to remind myself that not every feeling I have is as factual as I think it is, and also working on myself right now is the most important thing I can do and it is okay to put that first and the right people will understand that, just as I am coming to understand not to feel so negatively and get personally upset if people around me are needing to do the same.

Dating Lessons

When we were young, dating always seemed like such a fun and exciting thing we couldn’t wait to get into. Unfortunately for me, and a lot of people possibly reading this, it has become a much more complicated nightmare over the years and also something I personally didn’t expect to still be trying to navigate as I’m turning 40!

A little background on my shameful history… I have spent the last decade or so always being the rebound temporary chick with every guy I meet. No matter how nice, different or unique each situation may seem.. I always end up being the one who’s hurting and upset like I’ve experienced a big heartbreak (isn’t it weird how situationships can hurt so much now?) while a guy will be able to completely disregard any feelings he had for me and move on happily content without me in their life anymore. Within a short space of time, all these guys will also then find the girl that they were ready to have a relationship with (how convenient) and I cannot begin to describe how horrible that feeling is and how much it stings each time. 

Although these experiences may hurt, there are many things I have learned over the years from various dating app drama’s, cringe dates, and conversations with friends going through similar things, which I think people take for granted. So I’m going to break down some important dating life lessons that I have learned, which you may find useful, or just enjoy to read 🙂

Don’t swipe for the wrong reasons

Seems like an obvious one and goes without saying, but it’s actually not that obvious. If there’s one thing I have discovered over the years both for myself and others when it comes to dating apps at certain points in life is that people are swiping because they think they have to! What I mean by that is, society makes us believe that being single is weird or wrong. Eventually we get to a point where we get bored and go on dating apps to cure some boredom and see what we can find. But are you actually on a dating app because you want to date someone? Are you looking for a person to date or just someone to fill the void? Because if it’s the latter, you should probably delete the app.

Take your time and don’t just settle

I’m going to break this down simply. There are a lot of people who ‘settle’ for the first thing that comes along because they’re scared of being on their own, or worse, being judged for being on their own. You should never feel like you have to be with someone. Be with them for the right reasons, because you connect with them, you’re attracted to them, you see potential in them. That’s not to say that the first person you meet after a breakup or when you step out into the dating game isn’t going to be the one, they might be. Don’t rush things, take your time to get to know the person you’re interested in. You don’t have to jump into labels and extremities within the first few months of getting to know someone. It is okay and also perfectly normal to be a bit uncertain in the early stages with someone. Especially with the ‘battlefield’ of dating being as big and ugly as it is now. Which brings me to my next point…

Don’t let FOBO ruin a good thing

We’re all familiar with FOMO (fear of missing out) but when it comes to dating, I learned in recent years of another term ‘Fear of a Better offer’ – what this means is, because of the way the dating apps are all there at our fingertips now, we can genuinely get chatting to someone or get a date any time we want. No matter what, there are always loads of profiles on the apps to scroll through. This is the problem. We now have so many ‘options’ to sift through that it’s made us develop those little jitters of ‘I really like this person, but what if I date them and then someone else I really want pops up’, again, jitters are normal in any dating situation. It’s scary letting someone in. But is it really worth the risk of spending another year or so scrolling through horrendous dates on the apps and kicking yourself because that person you had those fun dates with last year might have actually been the right person but you were too worried that someone else might appeal more and now you’ve messed it all up? 

Just make sure you really think things through before you make that decision to walk away from someone who may have the potential to be the best thing that happened to you, because trust me, you’ll regret it later.

Your friends’ situations are NOT the same as yours.

We all have friends we talk to about our partners or dating life, whether it be your mates at work or your closest friends in your own little group chat. Screenshots get shared, anxieties are expressed and the general lowdown on your dating life or situationship is discussed. It is important to remember that every single human being is different, we’re all programmed differently. If we weren’t then life would be boring. That being said, there are going to be times when your friends may say certain things to you that they consider normal or acceptable behaviour in dating, but it may not necessarily be the same in yours. For example, you may be in a situation where the person you want is in a dark place, they don’t have the mental capacity to give you what you want right now, so you’re having to step away while they heal and see if it works out okay. Your friend may not agree with this situation and express that they and their partner worked through their troubles together – you can ultimately take this the wrong way and assume the person you wanted doesn’t like or respect you enough to make it work like your friend’s partner did. But it’s important to remember those two people are not the same. Not everyone thinks the same way and we all have different behaviours and reactions to things. Take any advice or stories from a friend with a pinch of salt. Don’t expect your story to be the same as those around you, because it won’t be.

Respect the timing and that it sometimes isn’t ideal

If you watch any romantic comedy or read any romance novel, it isn’t five minutes long with two people meeting and then they date and live happily ever after. In most of these scenarios, it’s always some love triangle, friends who haven’t been honest about how they feel, people who had a bad date or dated in the past and then get thrown back together in a chain of events that draws them back to each other. These stories are fabricated to make it interesting, but these sorts of things do happen in real life. We cross paths with different people at different stages in our lives, sometimes it’s not the most ideal time and you can’t make it work when you want to. It doesn’t mean that it will always be that way. Of course, I’m not saying that you should sit and wait until your 80’s for that dream person who may or may not come back, what I’m saying is trust the process sometimes. Sometimes timing sucks, but use those situations as a stepping stone, not an expression of failure.

Lastly, be in it for the person, not the novelty
When I met a guy and had my situationship period, I was always very loyal and believed it would go somewhere, but one common pattern I had in the past was, whenever it ended, i was straight back on the app (within minutes of them ending things usually). I would obsess over finding that next distraction. It was only in my most recent experience, with a guy I genuinely liked and felt a real connection with, that when we had to pull the brakes because of our own personal issues and just be ‘friends for now’, I had no desire at all to jump on to any dating app or speak to any other guy. This was when I learned that, in a lot of my previous experiences, I was just dating people for the sake of being with someone and craving a connection that I wasn’t going to find because I was just going for the next available option. 

I’m not implying I think I should wait around for someone to change their mind. But the reality is he probably has no feelings for me anymore whatsoever in that way and never has an intention of seeing me in a romantic way again, he may already be interested in someone else. The point is, I did have genuine feelings, and I was fully aware that I was not going to be over him any time soon and therefore I was not in a mental or emotional position to date anybody for the right reasons. It’s important that you are focused on the connection with a person and not just the excitement of dating for the sake of it. 

Dating in this world is scary as hell, we’re all terrified of letting our guard down and being hurt again. Trust is difficult. It’s not an overnight fix. Just don’t give up on it, communicate openly, be sure to express your boundaries early on to avoid confusion (and also weed out the bad ones) and trust that it will all work out.

Trust the timing.

Trust the process.

Trust yourself.