Fighting for Mental Health

I’ve been feeling mentally and physically drained. The other day, in the middle of my infrared sauna session, I felt an overwhelming surge of emotion. Out of nowhere, it hit me like a ton of bricks. I don’t even know why I was feeling the way I was feeling, I just was. But Instead of sitting with my feelings and trying to understand why I was feeling this way, I tried so hard to numb myself with distraction - I quickly reached for my phone to turn on a podcast, when suddenly I got logged out of my Apple ID account, which of course I forgot the password to. 

At first, I was annoyed and frustrated and then I quickly reminded myself that this is all happening for a reason. I needed to put the phone down and take a break from it all, podcasts included, and just take this time to really be with myself and sit with my feelings. Well, long story short, that lasted no more than 10 minutes. Instead of accepting the fact that my phone wasn’t working, and spending that time with myself to get clear on my emotions, I rushed home and spent the rest of the night desperately trying to reset my password.

This experience really opened my eyes to how we are all conditioned to behave this way, to run away from our feelings and emotions. We’ve all been programmed to think that it’s not okay or normal to feel anything other than happiness. We were never taught to sit with our feelings. As soon as we feel one ounce of sadness, anger, stress, frustration, irritability, exhaustion, we’re so quick to numb ourselves with social media, tv, work, alcohol, food, drugs etc. instead of tuning into our bodies and listening. Society puts us in this box and tells us that we all need to be a certain way at all times, that anything other than high energy, happiness and positivity is wrong, so we associate the opposite feelings and emotions with weakness and negativity. 

Funny thing is, after spending all night on my phone, I woke up the next morning with an awful soar throat and a low-grade fever. Mind you, I’m someone who rarely gets sick. I don’t know about you, but I believe in signs and yesterday the universe was speaking to me loud and clear. “SLOW THE EFF DOWN, EVELYN” it screamed! “Take a second and just be with yourself, rest, with no distractions.” So yesterday, I spent the day doing just that - laying low and actually taking the time to process all of my feelings and emotions. And this morning I woke up without an alarm, feeling clear, light and refreshed.

Basically the message I’m trying to convey is that no matter what you’re feeling, it’s always valid and it’s always real. You’re human after all. You may not understand these feelings at first, and that’s totally okay. But give yourself the time and space to process these emotions, to really understand what’s going on in your head and in your heart and to actually recognize what you can do to shift those emotion and feel stronger. 

I want to thank Jeannette from @shutthekaleup for inspiring this post! Her recent instagram post on mental health really hit home, and I too wanted to shed some light on this incredibly important topic that is rarely talked about. 

Thank you for reading and following along! Wishing you all a beautiful day!

Lots of love!

Xx

Evelyn