Life in lockdown essentially is waking up in the morning, finishing household chores, start your workday at 9 AM sharp, cook your meals, eat, sleep, indulge in a couple of hobbies & repeat. That’s about it. The thrill of looking forward to a day full of meeting colleagues and learning new things at work is missing in our day to day life. The “what’s next” feeling is slowly diminishing. Forget nighttime when we ponder on things we should do, things we should have done, things we should have done differently and so on. Since the work pace has slowed down, these thoughts are now plaguing us during the daytime too.
If this is the situation of people living with families, I cannot fathom what people living by themselves are going through! Times like these can be very testing. Our mental health might be taking a toll during the unexpected free time we have been given until the next unforeseeable future.
Mental health is a serious issue. We as an individual must recognize the symptoms of what we are feeling. When in doubt, keep asking yourself: how do I feel? If your conscious gives you a positive response, you are in the right frame of mind. If it is negative, first acknowledge that something is wrong. Take the first step in healing your mental health. It is Ok to feel wrong too. You are allowed to feel bad for whatever wrong is going on in your life. Anybody who says otherwise, they don’t know the first thing what you’re going through.
Grieving for the things or people is part of the cycle. Spending five minutes or five days in this stage, does not matter and again no one can tell you how long you need, to come out of this phase. The acceptance should come from within. And it only comes when you have grieved enough.
Talking about it might make you feel better, but it is not. Your anxieties might come across as silly to someone. When you mention it in the passing to your sister, she might even laugh at it. You alone know the seriousness of the issues you have and how they are affecting you. Your closest family and friends might tell you they are there for you when you need something to talk about. But are they, really? More often than not, it is our closest family and friends’ remarks that impacts us most. For we have learned since we were very young to rely on our friends and family. So, remember, it is not important to talk. Most important thing is to know yourself. And you know yourself better than anybody. You yourself are the best judge of your situation and you yourself can come out of it unscathed.
Self-motivation is the right kind of motivation. You know what you want from your live. You need to put that up on your goals chart and plan how you want to achieve that. At any give point in time, you feel demotivated, the pep talk you give yourself has more impact on you than any other person trying to motivate you.
There are lot of methods that can pull you out of depression. All of us have a set of happy places. Go take a ride to your happy place. Spend sometime there, get your mind to the happy place. Some of us have happy memories. It is just like in Harry Potter: Prisoner of Azkaban, you need to re-visit your happy memories to ward off unhappy thoughts. This is tried and tested by me, so I can guarantee that this works. To some, we have few happy songs, we only need to listen to them to lighten our mind. Choose your happy thing to do and pull yourself out of depression. There is a brighter side for everything!
We humans tend to over think everything and complicate them. Taking your life is not a solution. Each problem has many outcomes, suicide is not the last resort. If not this career, another. If not this option another. If it is hard to hold on, let go! It is that simple. Choose life, choose happiness, find things you love to live for. After all, you live only once!