Thursday, May 30, 2013

Mental Illness....look for the positive not the negative!

Being someone who has experience with depression and anxiety, I have found many tools and techniques to help better my life. Today I want to talk about something I did that helped me with treating and understanding my sickness. Hopefully this will help some of you. 

When I was in my darkest times I found myself always looking up on the internet depression symptoms, anxiety descriptions, mental illness facts, which would lead me into negative thoughts and feelings. I would end up reading peoples stories on the internet about their struggles and how they were negatively affected. I found myself worrying I was going to turn into these people and started to relate myself to everything negative I read. I was unaware I was feeding my depression/anxiety with this research. I was told by a friend to stop using the internet to research my sickness unless I only search for the positive. Great advice!

I started going on to YouTube and I found success stories about people just like me. I found videos of everyday average Joes who live with mental illness and their techniques they use to better themselves. Instead of just looking up depression treatments on Google I looked up people who have survived and read their stories. When you look up depression/anxiety treatments on Google you will find the following:

-Exercise
-Meditation
-Therapy
-Medication
-Diet etc......

The above are all true, but reading those words did not help me. Hearing peoples success stories of their personal struggles helped me. Hearing how they used that list of words to help themselves motivated me to help myself. Seeing peoples enthusiasm when they have found what works for them is so encouraging.

So my unprofessional advice to you is go on YouTube or Google or any other search engine and instead of looking up depression symptoms or anxiety statistics etc. Look up depression success stories on you tube, or celebrities who have beat mental illness articles or look up anything with a positive spin on it. When researching about mental illness be sure you do not get sucked into the negative always look for the positive.  


This tip can help you find a little freedom x