For a large part of my life I was under the impression that self – awareness can only be gained through looking at yourself objectively through meditation. Meditation and mindfulness have certainly improved my ability to look at myself without judgement and offer some compassion for myself. This practice had also allowed me to pay attention to my inner needs and therefore I gained a considerable amount of self-awareness.
Recently this year however I had hit a brick wall in recovery from social anxiety. What I underestimated was how hard it actually is to do this all on your own. To get through my hurdles which derived from deep trauma I needed some external input and help at some point. I started to realise that the mind works in ways to preserve and protect it’s own psyche and beliefs. Even if those beliefs are damaging to your health, the psyche is comfortable with it’s beliefs as they have been conditioned and reinforced over time. So when you try to act against your beliefs you may get a backlash from your own ego, and without receiving guidance it can be difficult to manage this internal conflict. Our mind is equipped with a lot of cognitive biases which can subtly divert your attention from the source of your distorted thinking patterns or irrational beliefs. Therefore, the source of the problem could take a long time to figure out all on your own. Hence, I had to be humble and open to accepting help.
Having counselling can seem daunting and there are always going to be the thoughts of:
“Why can’t I just shrug this off?”
“Am I being too dramatic?”
“I’m sure I can endure this for longer and it will be over”.
Let me tell you, there are many ways you can rationalise your way out of accepting help. Some of the thoughts may seem on the surface as if they have a certain logic to them, however they are only rooted in fear or discomfort. Change is always difficult for the mind to grasp. The mind enjoys clinging onto it’s own pre-made identifications and attachments to it’s own perceptions of reality. Hence, you need to trust your will for change and embrace the unknown. You cannot make any pre-judgements or assumptions about counselling, since every counsellor comes with their own set of skills and they will always allow you to opt for an introductory half hour session to help you to understand what to expect and get comfortable with them. If you feel uncomfortable with a counsellor, you can chose another. Therefore, you really have nothing to lose.
In practice, they can act as a mirror between you and your thoughts/feelings. This will speed up your personal growth tenfold, as you get the freedom to understand yourself impartially through another person. It was through the interactions with my counsellor that I had gained more clarity on my social anxiety. In my case it was linked to my expectations and negative beliefs which were constantly reinforced by a series of traumas earlier in my life and during high school. It was hard for me to perceive any new situation as different from the past. So the counsellor was able to challenge my assumptions and eventually I was also able to disprove them upon reflection. It is through making the distinction between your perceptions and what is the actual present reality, that you are able to let go. Your confidence can grow naturally from letting go of trusting the assumptions you make and only trusting the facts and the reality. Things really aren’t as bad as your mind perceives it. The quickest way to be presented this idea is through a counsellor/therapist.
As discussed in my previous blog, social anxiety is far more complex of an issue than just being “shy”. It is caused by attachment/social trauma in early years or by a particularly discouraging event later in life. We have also established the fact that it is a persistent force that can inhibit your growth and expression. Therefore, the question remains: how can we overcome this?
I can recall the times I felt social anxiety and the symptoms are very hard to simply ignore when you experience it. I could be totally calm one moment but when met with a particular social situation that I had been avoiding my body started to turn the fight/flight mechanisms on and my thoughts lost control. I felt as though my throat was being strangled, I felt a lot of sensations in my stomach and also couldn’t stop inventing scenarios in my head. It crippled my ability to articulate myself, and made me very self-conscious. With all of this going on, it became difficult for me to become present and therefore I felt frustrated as I was missing out on connecting with certain people.
Eventually I grew fed up of feeling this so I would start to look into ways of overcoming this. If you type online “how do you recover from social anxiety” you will get a series of self help advice which generally goes like this:
Observe and try to understand your social anxiety – when you next find yourself socially anxious, study the situation around you, become aware of what triggers you and why.
Learn to relax yourself – practice breathing techniques to slow the fight/flight mechanisms.
Challenge your beliefs – are people really thinking about you? Do you have proof people think of you in a certain way? Don’t just assume you know what people will say or think.
Face the fear – do a presentation, go out and meet some friends, do whatever it takes to prove yourself wrong.
In my experience some of these methods are useful. For example, learning to observe yourself and understanding your social anxiety can help in growing a resilience towards it. The more you understand the nature of it (it originates from conditioned beliefs and anxious thinking patterns) the easier it becomes to understand the fact that the thoughts that you experience do not reflect the present reality, it only reflects the past.
Once you become aware that these fears you have are based on false assumptions you make which have no evidence; this will give you the confidence to move forward and assert yourself clearly in future social events.
When you are facing the next social event, it is important to remind yourself to stop thinking and start being present. From a clear mind, you then need to do the thing you are afraid to do. This transition from thinking to simply being is not easy, because we are actually addicted to thinking. This is why therapists may recommend meditation or mindfulness since this tackles your reliance on thinking. In my experience, I would say regular meditation does help to give clarity and improve the quality of life. Nevertheless, just going ahead and facing the fear is the fastest way out of this.
Often we don’t want to face the fear due to fear of rejection or humiliation, but let me tell you something: It will be very uncomfortable and maybe painful to face it head on, but in the long run you will suffer less. After all, would you rather feel extreme discomfort for one day or have to go through the rest of your life never being free to express and always having to plan your way out of any social situation? Believe me, I would chose the former option. Also realise this, people haven’t got time to think about you and what you did or said yesterday; they are only thinking about themselves.
If you take this advice but still struggle, don’t be too hard on yourself either; everyone has insecurities, even those that appear stoic and strong on the surface. Being fair with yourself and applying a self-loving attitude is important. If you were to seek professional help, this can prove beneficial as your therapist can help facilitate your self-awareness of what beliefs you hold and help you challenge them. In addition to this, your therapist can coach you through facing this fear systematically. Recovery will take time but the result is definite!
In my next social anxiety blog, I will share my personal experience of how counselling benefitted my social anxiety. For now, I hope the above insights prove useful.
Social anxiety is often underestimated in how severe of a mental illness it is. People have assumed it is just the same as being shy and you can simply grow out of it. However you will find through my next series of blogs that it is far more of a deeper and complex issue.
Firstly lets evaluate what it means to have social anxiety. According to the DSM-5 (Diagnostic statistical manual for mental health) social anxiety is defined as: “A persistent fear of one or more social or performance situations in which the person is exposed to unfamiliar people or to possible scrutiny by others. The individual fears that he or she will act in a way (or show anxiety symptoms) that will be embarrassing and humiliating”. The themes and key words that stand out for me in this definition are:
Persistent fear– this indicates that the distressing thoughts are persistent and therefore have the potential to be overbearing.
Social or performance situations – this indicates that either a person can get triggered by only certain stressful events (e.g. board-meeting or presentation) or any situation which requires one to be social.
Unfamiliar people or possible scrutiny– this indicates that this anxiety is triggered through a fear of the unknown or fear of judgement.
Show anxiety symptoms– this indicates that the person feels stigma for having anxiety.
Embarrassing and humiliating (further emphasises fear of judgement).
As you can see, from the themes I have mentioned above this mental illness is a persistent force which can interfere in all or some circumstances of personal interactions. It is important to review the consequences of having social anxiety since this mental illness seems to create other issues, such as always having to wear a mask over your personality to please people. In some cases having social anxiety may lead to underlying feelings of loneliness caused from not being true to yourself.
On the surface it appears the person does not know how to relate to others, however it goes deeper than this. Because of bullying or emotional trauma, the person suffering from social anxiety may be suffering from a lack of self-worth and therefore feel they need to protect themselves from judgement, since this is all they expect to happen. We cannot rule out the possibility of this being linked with depression either as a side effect of it or as a cause. When an individual suffering from social anxiety is confronted with an opportunity to socialise, that person may nervously think about it for weeks prior to the event.
Due to the fact that we inherit our way of socialising from our parents, wherever there is an attachment style between the child and their parents which inhibits the child’s expression; this is the first cause of social anxiety. For example, if your father was domineering over you in your early childhood years, you tend to grow accustomed to being quiet, and if you were shamed for speaking up you may replay this behaviour with people outside your family too. In short, the person suffering from social anxiety is conditioned to fear speaking out, since they expect there to be a negative consequence (disapproval and judgement).
In other cases, an individual could develop social anxiety from a specific public social event. For example, if you embarrass yourself in public you can internalise the ridicule you receive from others. Then other people’s judgements go through to your subconscious and then you start to believe what was said about you on that day. Then when another social situation occurs which is similar, you may end up closing yourself from other people and experiencing anxiety symptoms.
Regardless of how social anxiety manifests, there is a subtle belief that is created in the subconscious mind: “If I express myself I will be shamed for it”. It is this belief that needs to be worked on and disproven. Every person will eventually find their own method to disprove this belief with time. It is no easy task to recover from social anxiety, it requires consistent time and effort. In the next blog, we shall discuss how to recover from social anxiety and what help is available.
I was fortunate to be equipped with knowledge from my psychology degree and the various self-help books I have read. In addition to this knowledge I also had an upbringing which supported self-reflection and meditation. Therefore, despite the trauma I experienced I felt like I eventually learned and acquired the tools to bring myself up out of depression and anxiety. Even then I still needed help from others. This really proves that we may need all the information and support we can gather in order to overcome mental illness. I couldn’t help but wonder how would I have coped without the people in my life that came at the right moments, who offered the guidance and emotional support I needed. I am aware that others may not be as lucky as I was to have a smooth transition to recovery. Therefore I wanted to do something about this, hence why I published these blogs in the first place. My goal is now to raise the global standard of mental health awareness, self-help knowledge and facilitate self-awareness.
Hence, as far as generalised anxiety disorder is concerned, I believe that there are numerous ways to treat yourself that are not well known to many yet. For example, studies have shown that natural herbs have therapeutic effects rivaling that of anti-depressants for anxiety. For instance, chamomile is a known plant extract which has been attributed to reducing the symptoms of anxiety. Chamomile tea is the most common way of ingesting this substance. You can also buy pure chamomile extract from your nearest healthy eating retailer (e.g. Holland & Barrett) if you want a stronger effect. This herb is one out of a dozen of other options, which just shows that you don’t need to invest all your money on medicines. Here is a short list of some of these other options:
Other studies suggest that a high glycemic diet can heighten the severity of anxiety symptoms. See figure 1 below for a list of foods with a high glycemic index.
Figure 1
Of course you wouldn’t need to completely stop eating all of these foods, I would say just minimising your intake should do the trick, and generally having a balanced diet where you aren’t consuming too much refined sugar. For example, I myself took the challenge to stop drinking coffee and also coca cola, so instead I would drink more water. The result of this was that I felt less stressed and had a sharper focus throughout the day. I would always recommend starting small in trying to cut out certain foods in your diet, as this is a difficult lifestyle-change to adjust to. You also need to give your body time to adjust since your body may become reliant on this initially.
You may wonder how does a change in diet reduce symptoms of anxiety if this mental illness is more concerned with your mind and your thoughts? Well upon reviewing a lot of articles and books related to nutrition, biology and the nervous system it is clear that there is a direct effect on the food you eat and your mood. The reason for this is due to the fact that your nervous system is not limited to just your brain, there is a substantial amount of neurons wrapped around your organs in your “gut” area. If the stomach is not kept in a healthy condition, it may be liable to getting stomach bacteria, and hence you will also start feeling in a low mood.
Healthy diets are a good alternative to medication, but alone this will only alleviate the symptoms but may not address the root cause of your anxiety. In my opinion, we also need to challenge the negative over-thinking habits and the “fear of the unknown” mindset.
In my experience a routine that incorporated tai chi, meditation, going to gym, playing the violin and making time for fun with friends or family is what helped me to ease my anxiety and increased my sense of peace. This routine as you can notice incorporated a lot of creative activities within it (e.g. violin playing). In my blog post “break boundaries with the power of creativity and music” I did emphasise the fact that engaging in creative activities are beneficial for the mind, so please check this out for more information. Nevertheless looking at all of these activities as a whole, they all helped me to become present with the body, so that I was able to shift from dwelling so much on my worries into actively engaging with the sensations and feelings that arised from the present moment.
Should you ever find yourself experiencing difficulty switching off your mind, you may need to consider the following:
Is your lifestyle organised?– It is quite common for people who have many things to do, to not record these things in a calendar or journal. This simple habit alone can remove the mental strain of having to remember all of this and constantly think about it.
Are you overworked? – Often we tend to take too much work on without thinking about how it can effect our mental health. Do yourself a favour and be realistic with your goals, have at least one day in the week for doing nothing. Holidays are an option, however this will only provide a temporary sense of relief from stress.
Are you a perfectionist? – Often when we hold high expectations for ourselves we can never allow ourselves time to be grateful or be happy for who we are right now. We spend a lot of our time thinking about our flaws and thinking about how we can be better. This whole thinking process can also create stress.
Do you compare yourself to others? – The process of constantly monitoring what other people do and attempting to beat it or replicate it, is in itself stressful. Keep life simple and only seek to compete with your former self, if you want to continue to evolve in your own stride. You have your own timezone and your own unique set of gifts. So see life as a process of discovery, it doesn’t always have to be you against everyone else.
The answers for all the questions above are found when you engage in the practice of self-love. When you make your health and happiness a priority then you will find that your anxiety will lessen. In addition, you will be freeing yourself from the burdens of the mind and as a consequence you will be free to act based on your authentic desires and become more realistic with yourself and productive. For more information about self-love please check out my previous blogs titled: “self-compassion as an alternate motivator” and “self-compassion and self-love revisited”.
The more your lifestyle is focused on doing the things you love and enjoy, the less time you will spend in a state of worry or panic about the future. After all, when was the last time you experienced so much joy that you couldn’t care less about the stresses of tomorrow? If you haven’t experienced this amount of joy before, then do not despair. Simply, take the opportunity to do the self inquiry and evaluate how much of your routine is spent in fear and hesitation rather than pursuing fulfillment. Then after you have highlighted certain parts of your routine that don’t ignite joy in you then discard these activities. You may have certain responsibilities that you need to keep and this is a natural part of life. However, ultimately there is nothing you “should” do; only what you choose to do.
If you ever need help transitioning into this new open mindset, then feel free to seek help from close friends and relatives and even seek advice from a counsellor. As always you are never alone in any of this. Mental health professionals generally will be supportive towards facilitating your growth and recovery from anxiety. From utilising all this self-help information you can go into a therapy session with more ammo and more determination, so that they can more easily guide you to recovery.
All in all, I wish your journey to recovery will be met with ease.
Picking up from where we left off with my previous blog, we learned that generalised anxiety disorder is a higher level of anxiety which threatens your ability to stay in control of your life. It prevents you from enjoying each moment since you are caught up compulsively thinking and dwelling on a future which has not happened yet. Given the severity of these symptoms, it must be equally matched with an extensive treatment program.
Firstly, let’s outline the treatments of generalised anxiety disorder that are typically administered to you from your local psychologist or mental healthcare professional:
CBT- (“Cognitive behavioral therapy”) a goal directed form of talking therapy
Mindfulness- teaching you how to relax your mind and be more in the present
Medication-SSRI’s (selective serotonin re-uptake inhibitors), SNRI’s (serotonin and noradrenaline re-uptake inhibitors), pregabalin and benzodiazepines.
Online Self-Help Courses/Group Courses- Useful tips on how to treat anxiety using workbooks or computer-based programs.
Now that you know the popular options, I will give you my humble opinion on each of these options which is guided by my research and the professionals I have conversed with. When evaluating CBT’s effectiveness for anxiety we have to first consider it’s approach. Due to it’s goal directed nature, it may work with anxiety if it isn’t pushed too strongly on the patient to change their thoughts. Instead if the goals are directed towards encouraging more self-care practices and teaching the patient how to manage the stressful symptoms then I believe progress can be made.
Figure 1
Typically a formulation chart (see Figure 1 to the right) is used in CBT to show the client, the relationship between their thoughts, behaviour, bodily sensations and emotions. The idea is if you change one factor in this cycle the rest will also eventually follow. So if we decide to focus on working with a client’s emotions first through mindful breathing and acceptance practices, the client will start to emotionally become more resilient and feel better. From feeling better they will naturally start to think more positive thoughts and so they will start to take more actions in their life. Hence, with all these changes the physical symptoms of heart palpitations and blood pressure will also decrease.
As you saw in my example, you can often combine forms of therapy such as CBT with mindfulness. Mindfulness on it’s own serves as a powerful tool to treat anxiety because it introduces the client to their senses. So they learn that they do not need to rely on their thoughts and learn that their thoughts do not hold as much power as they once believed. For example, it is a common practice in mindfulness-based stress reduction workshops to work on engaging the senses using “mindful anchors”. Whilst many thoughts are flying through your mind you can use the weight of your feet on the ground as an anchor to focus on. Through focusing on the sensation of your foot touching the ground you then take your attention away from your thoughts and more into your body. As a result of this, your thoughts do not seem as heavy to you. Any thoughts that do occur will eventually pass as long as you choose to engage in your senses. The idea is not to stop thinking however. The goal is to give yourself the luxury of choice. To choose to simply engage your attention elsewhere when your thoughts are a burden, and even focus on different thoughts and play with them in your mind. Mindfulness can be seen as a skill and the more you practice it, the better you become at it. As a result of this, you become better at allowing your thoughts and feelings to pass, and better at actively focusing your attention to different sensations you experience in the present moment.
With regards to treating the physical symptoms, often mental health professionals deem it necessary to respond immediately with medication. Many believe that as long as we can treat the hormonal and neurotransmitter imbalances then this should be enough to eradicate anxiety on it’s own. Examples of drugs include: Prozac, SSRI’s (selective serotonin re-uptake inhibitors), Zoloft, Paxil, Lexapro and Celexa. These are often the same drugs used to treat depression and are actually referred to as “antidepressants”. Often, these medications are controlled in terms of the volume of dosage as well as how often you are told to take them. This precautionary measure of administrating medication does alleviate the risks of adverse side-effects. Generally as a rule of thumb, it is best to follow the advice from a psychiatrist who knows more about your specific symptoms. However in some cases patients can still experience some adverse side-effects, therefore I feel it’s important to cover natural alternatives to medication. These options I will cover in the next blog since there is a plethora of research related to it.
In between or even before therapy, there are a wealth of self-help guides that clients can use which can be quite beneficial. Self-help knowledge is likely to improve the client’s openness to therapy. If self-help knowledge is proactively followed and the client administers the appropriate lifestyle changes, the client may even recover before needing therapy. However, in severe cases self-help knowledge is more effective as an additional catalyst for recovery in addition to therapy. Self-help guides are often provided in the form of handouts, leaflets, and online courses by charities and the mental health practices alike. Typically for anxiety they give you a summary of how to relax the mind and body, e.g. progressive muscle relaxation techniques. Some guides detail the common forms of toxic thinking to avoid in order to stop the cycle of rumination. For example, catastrophisation is an example of a distortive thought pattern which involves a person exaggerating their circumstances and making the situation out to be more personal than it is. For more examples of distortive thinking patterns, I encourage you to check out my blog called “Understanding yourself using metacognitive awareness”. In my experience, what helped me to recover from mental illness was my openness and willingness to seek help and research multiple methods of recovery. Therefore, I would say that self-help knowledge is a good foundation to have before you go out and seek help from a professional. I would relate this advice to all other mental illnesses as well as anxiety.
As a summary, the most popular forms of treatment which are mindfulness, CBT, medication and self-help guides may or may not be sufficient when used individually. However, if a person suffering from anxiety were to experiment with all of these treatments and other alternatives that I will cover in the next blog; then this will increase that person’s chance of recovery tenfold! So keep an open-mind, utilise all your resources and most importantly do not be afraid to reach out. Everyone may not experience severe anxiety like you or someone you know, but as human beings we have all experienced stress and have had brief spells of anxiety in our lifetime.
Chronic levels of anxiety are often experienced as a recurring fear of future events which often takes precedence over everything else in your life. It goes beyond the normal feeling of fear and amplifies it into a daily obsession into thinking of hypothetical risks. To an extent we all have experienced mild to moderate levels of anxiety in our lives. Often we can trace this to a specific stressful event in our lives, which when leading up to that point we were afraid to confront it without thinking over every angle.
Prolonged feelings of anxiety lead to the development of the following anxiety disorders:
GAD (generalised anxiety disorder)
Social Anxiety
Phobia
Panic disorder
Post-traumatic stress disorder
OCD (obsessive compulsive disorder)
It is my aim to to walk you through all of these mental illnesses and give concrete examples. So in this blog we will begin with “Generalised Anxiety Disorder”.
If you can imagine the last time you were in a very stressful situation, such as delivering a presentation or sitting an exam; try and see if you can recall how you felt, what you thought and how your body reacted. For most people, they would have sweaty palms, a rigid/fidgety posture, feelings of unease in the stomach (“butterflies in your stomach” sensation) and perhaps there may be thoughts of what could go wrong in this situation. Now imagine experiencing these symptoms daily. This is what it is like for someone experiencing anxiety.
Now imagine anxiety getting progressively worse and worse… The result? Generalised anxiety disorder.
Symptoms of generalised anxiety disorder include feeling frightened or in a state of panic all the time. You may also experience some symptoms of depression such as: lack of concentration, tiredness and irritability. Sleeping and eating difficulties may also be a recurring issue. Physically you might have heart palpitations, dry mouth, trembling, faintness and you may experience stomach cramps or diarrhoea. Often these symptoms occur without a particular trigger in mind. It is as if every small threat or issue is magnified, leading to the individual feeling restlessness and eventually frustration from not being able to fully be at rest or at peace.
If we look at the biological causes of stress, the hormone responsible for triggering the fight or flight response in the body is called cortisol. This hormone prepares the body to act when under stress through increasing heart rate, supplying glucose to the muscles, reducing inflammation in the body and so on. When this hormone is produced too much, this can lead to harmful effects on the body; such as: a lower immune system, increased risk of heart disease or perhaps an increased risk of infertility later on in life. The list of symptoms goes on but the point I am making is that just from holding onto stress daily it affects your physical health as well as your mental health.
Arguably there is a relation between a person’s stress levels and their likelihood of getting anxiety. The transition from stress to anxiety would typically occur when someone holds onto feeling stressed for too long. Feeling stressed isn’t necessarily a bad thing since it primes us to respond well to difficult situations, however if you can’t learn to switch off and relax when at home; this increases your likelihood of then becoming anxious. This is due to the fact when a person can’t move on mentally from a stressful situation, they start to dwell on this event. The more they think and focus on this memory, it will trigger thoughts in relation to a similar future event such as:
“What if the next time I go to work, I get fired?”
“What if I go into debt?”
“What if my car gets towed? And so on…
This person will then come to the conclusion that they need to become prepared for all eventualities. They will always feel on edge from a past mishap or bad experience and use this as a motive to always feel like they always have to be alert, otherwise that bad experience will happen again. Therefore, when an individual experiences more stressful situations, an anxious individual will try to prevent that situation from happening again through anticipating threats. In this effort, of trying to predict the future outcomes and minimise risk, the individual may keep dwelling on the future searching for hidden threats and hence they imagine threats which are unlikely to happen in reality. During this process, of trying to predict the future and perceive real threats as well as imagined threats; the parasympathetic nervous system (responsible for fight or flight response) does not discriminate between the two and is hence stimulated even more. Therefore, even though the person has the best of intentions at heart in trying to be prepared, they end up physically and mentally draining themselves. They start to believe that worrying is the only way to cope with difficult life situations and cannot escape this self-destructive cycle.
What I have shown here, is a short summary of how the average person transitions into generalised anxiety disorder. Generally we all do experience stress daily, and its important we can keep a healthy work-life balance. We need to work smart rather than work hard. As long as we can take care of ourselves and make our mental well-being a priority, this should lead to a healthier and more peaceful lifestyle. That being said, this advice will only apply for low to moderate levels of anxiety. So in the case of someone who experiences generalised anxiety disorder, there is usually a deep traumatic event that has spurred this on. Typically if an individual experiences this early on in childhood then it is clearly due to a general lack of feeling safe and secure at home. We may often mirror habits from our parents too, so if they prefer to worry then children will likely pick up on this habit too. Where trauma and abuse is involved this can lead to more serious forms of anxiety disorders which require a lot of treatment to resolve. This is what I hope to tackle in the next blog.
With this being my first time blogging I can say for sure that I am both excited and nervous. Nevertheless, I knew that this moment couldn’t wait any longer. This is because I grew tired of sitting by whilst seeing politicians lie to us, the healthcare systems not curing illnesses only prolonging them and education systems inhibiting creativity. I personally bear witness to the fact that the world is in a difficult place. However, this blog is not going to address worldly conflicts in too much detail. This is because I know that our opinions will differ and therefore divide us. I want to focus on what I consider to be a universal truth. Which is the idea that if we can all find the natural passion and empowerment within ourselves, the world would change overnight.
In order for this dream to be realised, I want to be as honest and transparent with you as possible. I struggled with mental health for a large part of my life. Mostly in the form of depression and anxiety. I had previously spent the majority of my life not actually living but merely existing. I preferred the life in my imagination and dreams. A reality I would prefer to escape to. Eventually I had to make a decision. Do I continue a life not worth living or do I create the life I want to be a part of? I had many deep philosophical questions that kept my mind busy and made me appear wise. I went into a phase of reading many books. I felt like a man on a quest for meaning. Marching through Waterstone’s bookshop hoping to be inspired, like Robert Langdon (Tom Hanks) from “The Da Vinci Code” looking for the holy grail. It was fun to be able to let my intellectual curiosity guide me. It offered a temporary focus and opened my mind to the idea that knowledge is power.
Coming from a background in psychology at university, offered a nice continuation of my obsessive search for deep and hidden truths. What I didn’t expect was for this subject to serve as a starting point in rationalising, understanding, and accepting my mother’s schizophrenia. Ultimately, the hidden truth I found in my life was that all of my escapist behaviours were simply because I was not given the love and acceptance at an early age that I wanted. I didn’t know how to heal the wounds of my heart until I discovered how to practise self-love in order to embrace the darkness inside of me.
Long story short, I know what it is like to go through difficulty. To lose hope and to stare into the face of adversity. I want to share all I know with people who have gone or are going through similar situations in order to promote positivity and help all of you grow into the best version of yourselves. As Unitedmindsaib grows I want to run many projects, which will educate, inspire and find creative solutions to combat the stigma of mental illness. I dream of a day where society can get to a place of peace, understanding and tolerance for one another.
Before I end up on a philosophical tangent, lets build our knowledge slowly through answering this first question: What needs do we have to meet in order to live a fulfilling life? Looking back at my studies, we were taught about the Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. This is a theoretical framework that sought to represent all the motivations that govern human behaviour into a hierarchy starting from physiological needs and ending with self-actualisation needs. If we were to assume that this theory is true, then this could explain why those that gain all the riches they could imagine, do not find happiness. Since, these people are only fulfilling their need for security and status but not self-actualisation. Next question we need to ask is what is stopping all of us from meeting all of our needs from survival all the way to self actualisation?
Depending on what your circumstances are, you may know the answer or you may not, generally I would say the barriers are:
Not being able to notice when a subtle need is not met. (Lack of self-awareness).
Feeling ashamed and judging yourself for having these needs.
Being aware of a need but not knowing how to meet that need.
Feeling afraid to ask for help or perhaps a guilty conscience.
Essentially, we could find many reasons people find it difficult to meet these needs. However, I hope that what I will share may give you more tools to carve yourself out of the tunnel and into the light of your dreams! One thing I must mention is that it is important to learn how to deal with uncertainties and how to thrive anyway regardless of the confusion. Easier said than done? Of course it is, but that’s what I am here for. Anyways, I would say that you must develop your ability to identify exactly what is troubling you before you try to seek help from somebody. It does not matter if it is a therapist, general practitioner, family member, or friend because ultimately they can only meet, help, and communicate to the same language and comprehension of which you understand yourself. If you try to seek out help for an issue you do not fully understand yourself, you may not get the solutions you seek.
My advice would be to first cut away the boundaries between your senses and your thoughts. This is called mindfulness, being aware of the present, being aware of what we feel without judgement. I will go into more detail about mindfulness in later blog posts because this is a whole other can of worms in itself. For now I recommend you go and research this for yourself, in order to familiarise yourself with this concept.
Oh and by the way, I recommend you conduct your own research for all of the topics I discuss whether it is through YouTube videos, journal articles, or books, etc. This is a great way for you to be able to truly learn and gain more insights. Keeping an open mind through your journey to peace and happiness is key! I am not saying for you to believe everything you hear or see, just have the common courtesy to be open for the truth from whatever source it comes.
Unitedmindsaib is about sharing knowledge and wisdom. I thought of this name, because I knew that the only way for all of us to realise our unlimited potential is through sharing what we know and working together.
When you are facing your own internal struggle, I want you to remember that you are never alone. Please show your support for this call to change! This change that is coming from within.
P.S. Please subscribe and show your support to Joshua Chisambo who is also leading the front on this noble quest towards self actualisation!
sation needs. If we were to assume that this theory is true, then this could explain why those that gain all the riches they could imagine, do not find happiness. Since, these people are only fulfilling their need for security and status but not self-actualisation. Next question we need to ask is what is stopping all of us from meeting all of our needs from survival all the way to self actualisation?
Unitedmindsaib 