What to try when you feel like you’ve tried everything in the whole entire world
I’ve tried almost everything to improve my mental health: deleting all my social media, smoking a joint before bed, three different types of therapy, self-help courses, taking up running, volunteering, silent meditation, a 5-step grief course, ballets, and half the SSRIs under the sun.
And these experiences have all helped, but if there’s one thing I’ve learned from trying all of these things, it’s that there is no fix-all cure for poor mental health. I had this expectation that I’d finally try that one thing that would just make everything click, but that’s never been an experience I’ve had. The closest I’ve gotten to true peace is to accept the absence of a magic cure, and learn to embrace the experiences I have growing in myself. These days, I am blessed to have a wealth of resources I’ve built up by trying so many different things. This article entails some of my favourites.
You need to learn to like yourself
We need to enjoy spending time with ourselves. I think so often as humans a lot of what we experience negatively can be linked to the lens through which we view ourselves: let’s say you suffer the loss of a person, whether that be through a physical death, or an emotional severance, like a friendship or romantic break-up. What a lot of us might do is get into this rhetoric that we cannot survive on our own, that what we have in this moment—our own bodies and our own breath—is not enough. This is a lie, of course, but it’s one we’re fed every day: as we’re encouraged to be tied to the online world, to capitalism, to our studies and our work.
To consciously counteract this, I try to set out as little as 15 minutes at the start and end of every day just to be entirely by myself, offline, doing things I love. For me, this looks like reading or writing every morning while I drink coffee. It makes me excited to get out of bed, to be in my own company. In the evenings, I’ll meditate or run or spend half an hour cooking a new dinner, leaving my phone in my room.
It’s a lot easier to move through failure, rejection and turmoil if you like the person you’re always coming home to. Stop the morning scroll, or set your alarm a few minutes earlier. Greet the person you’re learning to like. In time, you can become your own best company.
Find an artistic way to process your emotions
In the last few years, I’ve filled hundreds and hundreds of pages in journals. Everything significant that I’ve thought or experienced is now written down somewhere. I cannot overstate the role regular journaling has had in improving my mental health: though it hasn’t cured me, it is the one thing that has helped me the most.
If you’re not much of a writer, visual art or some kind of craft works for a lot of people. Make a necklace, paint a picture, take up sculpting. Likewise, I’ve met a lot of people that pour themselves into music: songwriting, spending time playing an instrument, singing, learning a dance. It doesn’t matter what you’re doing, so long as you’re creating.
My best friend and I have started doing an art night once a week, where we both sit together and chat while working on our respective projects. There’s something really cathartic about seeing the fruits of your labour. Often when you’re in the depths of mental illness you’re thinking a lot about how you’re not doing anything with your life, you’re not producing anything worthwhile, but I think having tangible evidence of your art can really help this. If you’re a perfectionist or don’t consider yourself artistic, at times it can be hard to get out of your head. It’s important to remember you’re not (necessarily) following this process to hang your art in a renowned gallery or to publish a memoir. The act of doing something completely free and open-ended is enough.
Focus on the process, not the outcome
I think one of the most negative indicators for mental health stands beside people that are really outcome oriented. It’s incredibly easy to become attached to a certain result or end goal, and when that’s not something that necessarily eventuates, people spiral.
For recovering alcoholics, they often talk about this idea of ‘falling off the wagon’ so much that it’s commonplace; not necessarily as an expectation of those beginning their journey of sobriety, but more in the awareness that it does happen to a lot of people. The same kind of principle goes for a lot of mental health related conditions—whether that be your relationship with food, other people, self harm, sex and porn or something else entirely.
A couple of years ago I was nine months clean from self harm, and then, one day, I relapsed. When I was in that space it was difficult not to see this as some ordained failing, an indication that I would “never get better”. I felt a lot of shame around that. But when I stepped back and looked at the process, it was clear that while maybe I’d ‘fallen off the wagon’ it had never moved. I wasn’t chasing after it: it was right next to me, all I had to do was brush myself off and hop back on.
I’ve now been clean from self harm for nearly two and a half years. The conscious choice to focus on my lifestyle changes and thought processes rather than attaching myself to a specific outcome (i.e. “I will not ever self harm again”) has allowed me to be kinder with myself, and see the virtue in my efforts. I think this is a concept broadly applicable in life: to failed exams, romances, lost jobs. If you’re able to walk away from a perceived failure, seeing the effort you put in both before and after it happened, you’re in a good place to grow.
Take ten minutes, peel an orange
When something awful happens, it’s generally our natural tendency to want to deal with it right away. Negative experiences or sheer misfortune happen all the time. Often, instead of sitting with these events, allowing context to colour our experiences, we jump into action to fix what we perceive as a problem. I’ve found taking ten minutes out to be the sweet spot for allowing me to step out of my head and view the moment more objectively, but you can always take longer if you need to.
If you’re going through something overwhelming, I would recommend trying one of the following activities:
- Peel an orange and eat it slowly in the bottom of your shower so all the juice can go down the drain.
- Lie on your bed or on the floor of your room in the starfish position. Watch the ceiling.
- Watch the final scene of Titanic on repeat (brought to you by our lovely Features Editor, Nancy). Watch Bojack Horseman Season 6, Episode 11 (brought to you by Netflix).
- Plunge your face into a bowl of cold water and scream into the void. Alternatively, make yourself a smoothie, and scream while the blender is turned on.
- Put on your favourite playlist and dance around your room. You’re performing to a sold-out crowd. Every dance move you have is the best dance move in the entire world.
Unfortunately, the ten minutes out might not be applicable in all areas of life. If you’ve rear-ended someone and caused a car wreck, you probably shouldn’t start dancingthis is probably the kind of stress you want to deal with right away. But a text from your ex situationship or a bad grade on an assignment class you thought you did really well on doesn’t require any immediate action. In fact, after taking your ten minutes, you might find there’s no action you need to take at all.
