Support your mental health by starting and ending your day with kindness

For the past year I have been dedicated to my own personal well-being. I’ve practised daily yoga. Written blogs about well-being to put out into the world but also to follow myself. I’ve cut down my over stretched workload. Then along comes the virus from hell and my life – all our lives – start to unravel before our eyes. A week ago, I noticed something I hadn’t felt in a long time; a strange weight or pulling in my chest. Sometimes it would feel like a pain. I didn’t quite recognise it at first until my husband told me it was stress. Well hello old adversary! We haven’t met for a while. Not matter how well my foundations of well-being have been laid, I am still susceptible to stress. I’m human (and self-employed!). I know we have all experienced a rollercoaster of emotions over the past weeks. We are a community joined together by an invisible nemesis. Every inch of our lives is affected by this crisis. We are all finding it hard to manage.

I’ve dug deep and worked harder than ever to practise my @superkindme philosophies. Or more specifically I have narrowed them down to just two daily ideas that work (in the main) for me. I say ‘in the main’ because we are all going to have bad days, right? If I try too hard to fight against my volatile feelings with inappropriately timed messages of positivity, I might end up making myself even more frustrated. Some days we need to grieve, we need to worry, because through these feelings we can experience the jubilation of positive thinking on all the other days. It's about coming back to kindness in every way. Be kind to yourself. Know yourself. Give your mind and body what it needs, and sometimes it needs sorrow, but at an appropriate edge. Not too far; just enough to feel the difference. With that in mind, here are my two @superkindme daily (and easy) ideas for managing our mental health during these difficult times:

1. Start the day with kindness: most of us have a bit freer time on our hands right now. I hope, therefore, you are able to give yourself an extra five minutes in bed before starting your day. I say this because we all know what’s it’s like to ‘wake up on the wrong side’, right? It often takes a while to get going in the morning for some of us. Others reach right for the phone to check their messages. Some can only think of coffee (or a bladder call). It’s often not until a while later, we connect with ourselves inwardly and notice things. Maybe you woke up with a headache or you still feel super tired (and you are yawning for the hundredth time by 10am). If only we could check in with ourselves briefly before we start our day, notice how our body and mind feels, we could possibly start our days with a more focused, more centred attitude. Try it tomorrow morning. When you wake up, allow yourself a bit of extra time in bed – just a few minutes is fine – ensure you are definitely awake and then do a check from head to toe. Ask yourself how do I feel today? Take stock. Just observe. No judgement. Then (and only if it feels right) set yourself up for the day. Quietly whisper (in your head works too) a goal for the day to do with your mindset. This could be anything that feels right. Yesterday mine was “Today, I am calm”. I like using “I am” instead of “I will” as it feels like a certainty already. It’s happening, rather than the idea that it might.

2. End the day with kindness: when I feel stress, I don’t sleep well. I’m sure that rings true for a lot of us. Or sometimes I do sleep but my dreams are erratic (they often involve being chased, ha!). A good night’s sleep is a gift. So much healing and repairing is done in the mind and body when we get a healthy amount of shut eye. So, my second daily idea is about setting yourself up for a great night’s sleep to feed into the next morning like a constant circle of mindfulness. When you have got into bed for the night, again, take stock. Like a body scanner, run your mind’s eye from head to toe and observe. See what comes up. Are you aching anywhere? Are your thoughts jumping around like a monkey from tree to tree? Don’t judge yourself; simply observe. Once you have completed your internal survey, take (at least) six deep breaths. Let them be the biggest breaths you’ve done all day. In through the nose and out through the mouth, nice and slow. Your breath is a wonderous thing. The nectar of life. In your breath, remember you are alive. Let everything else go. And look forward to a new day.

Give it a go if you would like to, and allow kindness and calmness to settle into you, for at least these short amounts of time during the day. The rest of your day might be spent experiencing unpredictable emotions and orientating yourself through new government guidelines, whilst starring dolefully at your depleting bank balance. But – you can be in control of how you start and end your day, and this can have an impact on the rest of your day in a positive way.