Congratulate yourself every day...
We are many of us extremely familiar with those things which folk have to do which form a key part of basic mental health – e.g. get up in the morning, literally ensure that we get out of bed, take a shower, make breakfast, etc.
Then there are the activities beyond that which are as mundane as they are functional - tidying, cleaning, doing the laundry, putting the laundry away, ironing, mowing, doing the dishes, mobilising to go to work.
For someone going through either depression or some other mental-health battle such as M.E. - any one of those activities - if achieved of a day - can be considered a complete coup, literally a major win for that day.
It then occurred to me – that we all take for granted that we successfully execute a plethora of these types of activities every single day. So suddenly these activities are simply mundane, insignificant and ‘easy’.
However – if we take the embattled brain as the yardstick for whether an activity is easy or not – then we are each of us every single day conquering mountains and defeating demons.
I just want you to stop and appreciate that
There is a version of you which could well be battling with these things – had your life turned out slightly differently.
However – you get up in the morning, mobilise your however many kilograms of biological matter and crack on with your day with little thought to the inertia that you’re technically overcoming every single day – the inertia which can prevent some of us from functioning at even the most basic level.
So this is a reminder to congratulate yourself and appreciate yourself for maintaining whatever mechanisms you’re clearly maintaining – to ensure that you do each day remain functional and arguably therefore happy to that degree.