Five Things that Help Me Cope Up
- sbjct
- Aug 1, 2020
- 6 min read
Updated: Aug 20, 2020
In the past few weeks, I struggled a lot on maintaining emotional balance. Mainly due to stress, pressure, loss of interpersonal contact, series of betrayals, sad news, etc. I knew very well that there is no or very little emotional support coming, assuming that everyone else is also struggling. And even if others are not really struggling, a rational person would rather stay away from than get involved with depressed people. So, self-help is very important.
I'm gonna share things that help me keep sane and offer me some kind of reassurance that I'm still human and alive.
DISCLAIMER: All merchandise in this blog post are NOT sponsored.
DAYLIO App
Daylio is like a habit and mood tracker. You can set reminders so you can log your emotions and activities. You can add multiple logs in a day, too. You can also set goals and their frequency. It also records streaks and statistics of moods, activities and goals. It is free to download and offers sufficient functions for the free version. But if you want premium access, it comes with a small annual fee. (Sorry, I forgot exactly how much, because I subscribed at a discounted price.)
Out of all trackers, I find this most useful and pleasant. I tried bullet journaling before, too, but I now prefer the digital platform for more efficient database management and faster functions. For my account, I log every morning after breakfast, afternoon after lunch, and night before going to sleep. Aside from moods, I also keep track of the kinds of foods I eat. As of writing, I have set two goals: meditation every day and online learning at least three times a week.
Check out the app on Google Play and AppStore.
Moodpath App
Moodpath is like a virtual therapist. Moodpath asks sets of questions every morning, afternoon, and evening (which I call check sessions). This helps the app analyze mood (and behavior) patterns and stability over 14 days (initially). The less check sessions you skip, the more data it accumulates, the more accurate the results will be. After the first 14-day program, the questions still continue to monitor progress, update statistics and results, and improve the recommendations. Just like a therapist.
One thing I like about Moodpath is that you can remain anonymous while using the app. You are assigned a unique Moodpath ID, and your activities are encrypted and secured between Moodpath and you. You can send your code to a practitioner at your freewill using your code. Moodpath also offers an anonymous Mental Health Hotline. The hotline for the Philippines is (02) 804 4673, or the Natasha Goulbourn Foundation.
It also has podcasts, lessons, courses and readings about depression, anxiety, mindfulness, and other relevant mental health aspects. There are free courses, and also member-only courses. Membership is P1,200 per quarter. The free functions of Moodpath are sufficient. But, if you are serious on learning about your mental health and healing, P400 per month seems a fair compensation for 24/7 virtual, professional, secure and convenient sessions.
I would like to share even censored screenshots with you. However, this message pops up: "Can't take screenshot due to security policy." I hope you understand now how seriously Moodpath takes data confidentiality.
Check out the app on Google Play and AppStore.
Samsung Health - Mindfulness Series
For Samsung users, Samsung Health is a cool app which caters a lot of functions, and can even be linked to other smart devices. I used to record daily sleep, food and water intake to Samsung Health before, but it just didn't work for me. More like, I wasn't able to sustain myself doing it every day. Lately, I discovered lots of cool stuff in the Discover menu, which include workout, meditation, self-care and sleep-enhancement programs.
For a starter, I tried the "7 Days of Calm" and "7 Days of Calming Anxiety" Mindfulness programs. I took one course per day before I sleep. It greatly helped me calm my mind and remove accumulated unnecessary feelings at the end of each day. One thing I learned about meditation is that, contrary to belief that meditation makes someone escape the present and physical world, meditation is actually about being aware of the various factors of life and accepting them. Mindfulness programs helped me take a calmer approach on things. I used to be actively angry all the time.
So, in this blog, I listed three apps. Technology sure is amazing. It can either break you or help you, so choose how you use it.
Check out the app on Google Play and AppStore.
Tea
I started drinking tea last year to bring some caffeine to my body. While auditors are known to have coffee running through their bloodstream, I cannot take coffee. Later, I learned that even black tea makes me palpitate. That's when I realized that caffeine is not a key success factor in achieving efficiency and effectiveness. More than being hyped up, I actually needed to be graceful and serene even more.
So, I switched to herbal tea, frequently jasmine. While jasmine tea is not specifically a stress-relieving tea unlike chamomile and peppermint, herbal jasmine tea is still useful in warming me up. One more reason I switched to tea is to increase the antioxidants in my body. I feel my body already degenerating, especially cardiovascular. Overall, tea is healthy.
The tea photo above is iced jasmine tea. I usually drink hot tea. One day, I tried to take it iced. Two teabags, one teaspoon of sugar, one lemon, one liter of water. Guess what, it tasted funny. It tasted like flowers. Of course, it's jasmine. *Uncle Iroh tone intensifies*
Social Activity Changes
Something a lot of people don't understand about me is that I represent myself as an introvert but I am very vocal in social media. I actually can't explain this well enough, but through constant interaction with me, you will realize how un-interactive and unresponsive I am. The best explanation for this dual personality that I can provide is personality rebranding—I would like to represent myself in another kind of person so I can blend with all kinds, even if it's just pretend.
But as any lie, forcing myself to exhibit a false personality is terribly exhausting. The quote "If you can't love me at my worst, you can't love me at my best" comes in, but honestly, I don't care if other people love me at my worst or best. Even with dual personalities, I honestly don't care anymore what people think about me. I have little regard to what others think about me because my social compass has always pointed to solitude. All I know is that I'm tired of pretending, because pretense for acceptance is for losers. All those years I struggled to be accepted, I should have used that time to actually build my stronghold to be good and secure on my own.
So, in order to save myself, I re-engineered my social activities. At first, I deactivated Facebook to minimize my online time. You know, even when I'm deactivated in Facebook, I'm still lurking in Twitter, but the time I consume is greatly reduced. When I came back, Facebook has become a pseudo-Reddit, with all kinds of Facebook interest groups where you can mingle with strangers all over the world. I joined various interest groups which represent ecology lovers, bloggers, otaku, my MBTI group, etc. In summary, I see less bad news that I don't need, I see less content from people I don't really want to see, and I see more original content memes from strangers who just want to have fun with other strangers. It's not much, but it's one way of changing ways.
I burned some bridges. I don't believe that it's always better to keep your distance than cutting ties with people. Of course, there are many relationships that deserve a cool-off, not outright break-up. But for most people in my life who I don't really know, who do not contribute to my well-being in the past and present, who constantly pull me down, who betray me, why keep? Keeping them just makes me feel bad, because it's as if I am reserving a relationship just in case I need them in the future. Keeping them will only give me a contingency that I might need to produce another fake version of myself just in case I need them in the future. So, I have to burn bridges, in order for me not to need them in the future. Sometimes, cutting ties and burning bridges saves a lot of your sanity, or at least my sanity.
I'll keep reasoning out my decisions because, after all, this is my own mental health I am trying to save, and not someone else's. How emotional can this get.
Lastly, with lessened Facebook activity, I placed more attention on my LinkedIn profile and subscribed to useful readings through Quora and Medium.
That's it, for the five things that help me cope up. Healing is so hard. Healing is so slow and so long. Healing takes a lot of time, but I hope not as much time as what happened for me to be this broken and jaded.
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