Mental Chatter

If a friend spoke to you, like you speak to yourself, how long would that friend be in your life? Do you think that self-talk can impact your day? Week? Life?

 

Most of us are in a constant state of mental chatter. This buzzing in our heads can either be positive or negative. Just like when training for a sport you are either doing it proper or improper. There is no possible to way to build your butt muscles if you are doing sit ups. No possible way avoid back paid with poor squat form. Similar, there is no possible way to build your confidence if you are focusing on the negatives.

Mental health is so important yet so underworked. We do not take care of our brains like we take care of our bodies. I have been doing physiotherapy for seven months rehabbing my knee and I have gotten no support for any of the stressors in my life this winter. I go to a chiropractor twice a week to help my hips and I don’t even check in with myself that many times in a month. The mental aspect to any sport is about 80% to 20% physical ability. So what do we do about this? Block the hard stuff out in order to cause no distractions or deal with the problem so there is none there in the first place? This same statistic should be fairly close with life success as well. Yet what do we do? We ignore our own self-talk for what? To appear normal at our Monday to Friday jobs? There are 168 hours in a week and we spend 36-40 of them at work. That leaves around 130 hours that we can do anything we want and typically we are unable to find one hour a week out of the 130 available to check in and see how we are doing.

 

It is hard though. It is hard talking about your emotions and admitting you have them. No one likes to feel sad but ever more then that I think that most of us hate the shame that comes along with negative feelings. So the natural response is to say we don’t have them. I was the Queen of this. I had myself convinced that I didn’t get sad to the point it was borderline psychotic. No movie could make me cry and no one could hurt me because I was in total control of my emotions. Then, life happened and it forces you to feel sad. Now I had no idea how to deal with this foreign emotion and I was a mess. If only I had allowed myself to feel like a normal human being then I would have been so much more equipped to handle it. I see this happening all the time. Maybe on not as large of a scale, but we are not helping ourselves and we are definitely not helping each other.

That mental chatter that we constantly have has a larger impact on who we become then any parent, sibling or friend ever could ever influence. Yet, we allow ourselves to be swallowed by self-hate and we somehow expect it to all work out. We are a population hyped up on anti-depressants because it is an easier choice then accepting who we are. I have depression, I was on meds, and I chose to go off of them and learn to cope with my disorder. Do I have days that are down and days that are up? Always. For me, I decided that my mental disorders were not going to define me. I was not going to be just another person who got stronger meds every year, I was going to teach myself how to love myself. It is hard. It is the hardest thing I have ever done. I struggle every single day with not feeling good enough for my family, for my friends and for my boyfriend. They tell me I am enough and I know they are not lying but the thing about depression and schizoaffective disorders is that even though I want to believe them, I can’t some days.

Most of us don’t want to work towards sound mental health though. We want to go to the gym to get a tiny waist and big ass so we can put it on Insta but we refuse to put the work into something that makes up 80% of our personal success (I could totally make an argument for a larger percent but I’ll stick to what I for sure know.) The external body that we hold our personalities in should not be the deciding factor if we love ourselves or not. I struggle with this but I know, most of the time, that my mind is my best characteristic. I am not loved because of my weight, my hair, or the symmetry of my face. I am loved because I am empathetic, ambitious, brave, determined, emotional, friendly, generous, independent, loyal, versatile and sassy. It has taken my years to be able to list good things about myself without immediately saying something I am poor at. I will feel nothing less than proud that I have went from being suicidal to being able to write a blog about my weaknesses AND my strengths.

However, I will also feel troubled that there are still people walking around that hate themselves. I can’t stand the thought of a human being feeling so poorly about who they are or what they can accomplish that they do not want to be here anymore. I have no idea how to help everyone, I am still trying to help myself, but I want it to change. I want to help it change. I just have no idea how to start.

Much Love,

 

Megan