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.