Hey everybody :)
My name is Nadya and I’m happy to introduce myself to everyone as the new co-blogger for Mental Health Mondays. I will be blogging alongside Micky so we’ll be alternating back and forth week to week with who is posting. Between the two of us, hopefully we’ll be able to cover a wide-variety of mental health related topics, and some stories and tips on how to better develop a positive state of mental health. If you ever want either of us to focus on something specific, feel free to just post a comment with a suggestion. :)
I’m originally from Ottawa but I now live in St. Stephen, New Brunswick where I attend St. Stephen University. I’m studying the Humanities in general, but plan to major in Literature. My friends who know me best (well, actually, even just those who have been around me for any extended amount of time) know that I have not always been the best person at dealing with stress. I love being involved in a lot of different things and sometimes get too caught up in what I’m doing and find myself unable to make the time to take a step back, or even to take a breath.
That being said, I really don’t think [or at least I really hope!] that I am the only one who struggles with getting too caught up in what they’re doing that they “forget to breathe.” So I’m going to try to find and share a bunch of different ways on how we can make the time to take care of our mental-health; how we can find ways to ensure we are staying healthy and remembering time to breathe. Hopefully, the thoughts shared in my posts can be combined with the comments/feedback from each of our viewers in order to create friendly reminders and useful ways to take care of ourselves.
While I will get into more details with each of my posts to come, I wanted to start out by giving a basic tip that has recently proven to be….well, pretty much crucial to maintaining my sanity: Journal writing.
Now, I don’t necessarily mean doing a “Dear Diary” entry at the end of every single day (although, who knows, that may work wonders for you!) But I do think that keeping a journal of sorts—it could be filled with scribbles, jot notes, poetry, drawings, songs…anything you want!—is such a great way to not only help process through the day-to-day emotions that we experience, but it also helps us experience some degree of “healing” from the particularly painful moments. I know when I’ve had a bad day and I write about it in my journal, it almost seems as if, through writing it on paper, I’ve forced the negativity out of my system. But I don’t just use my journal as a form of ranting…I also use it to write some poetry, some general reflections of the day, and I always try to pin-point ~3 things from that specific day that I did that made me happy. It could be something huge like saving the world (ahem......I was an Incredible for halloween, and believe it or not, superheros are still on my mind) or it could be something really small like offering to get a cup of tea for my housemate.
So, while I will get to covering more specific topics in the weeks to come, I want to hear from you to see what you think about the benefits of keeping a journal (maybe someone has a cool story to share?), and even just any comments about making time for yourself in general—I would love to hear them! Here’s a website that I think gives a few fairly good reasons on the value of journal writing: http://www.appleseeds.org/100_Journaling.htm
Why don’t you check it out and let me know whether there are ones that you agree/disagree with? Some of them are really great in my opinion, but others ...not so much...... so let me know what you think!
Now, if you'll excuse me...I have some journalling to do before I head to bed! :)
Love,
Nadya
No comments:
Post a Comment