It's time to change the way you think about self-help

A woman meditating
If you feel sick, you go to the doctor (or Google the symptoms and immediately believe you have the plague). If you feel unfit, you drag yourself to the gym (or try a few half-hearted lunges). If you feel bloated, you lay off the jacket potatoes for a few days. Yet if you feel sad, low, anxious, stressed or insecure, you just live with it. 
Why?
These emotions can affect your whole life, making everything seem harder, gloomier and less achievable, but there's still a stupid stigma attached to self-help. While it's totally normal to care about your physical health, it's still perceived as weird to care about your mental health. Which is rubbish. It couldn't be less weird.
We spend all day in our heads. We never stop thinking, plotting, day-dreaming or worrying. So doesn't it make sense to want to understand the way your mind works? To want to know when your thoughts are playing tricks on you? When you're worrying about absolutely nothing? Or when your mind is rocketing down a well-worn path to Thumping-Heart-Sweaty-Palm City?
Learning to recognise negative patterns in your thinking and then learning ways to change these patterns is the best thing you can do to live a happy and healthy life – bar nothing.
But self-help can seem intimidating, worthy or preachy. Which is why I've launched a new Instagram video project called BiteSizedPsych: one-minute-long videos that cut through all the guff to deliver simple tricks for combating insecurity, anxiety, stress, unhappiness, procrastination and low self-esteem.
Stuff like, "never press snooze on your alarm". You don't ever snooze, you just lie there and start freaking out about the day ahead, or you just count down the minutes until you really do have to get up. And the longer you lie there the harder it gets to leave your soft warm duvet. Yet if you get up straight away your mood will lift naturally because you're facing the day and taking control. Snooze is evil for worriers. Ban it and you'll feel a bit better first thing in the morning. Try it for a week – just one week – and if you don't feel better I'll eat my new hat (okay, I'll just nibble the brim).
Self-help doesn't have to be boring and it doesn't only come in brick-sized books written by people who wear hemp sweaters. It can be interesting, relatable, positive and even pretty entertaining. And it actually helps.


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