So, I recently had the fun experience of sleeplessness. This had hit hard as I work graveyards full time so, not being able to sleep during my designated sleeping hours did not make my job fun. Thankfully this only went on for a short period and I had figured out what I needed to do and I got sleep. For those who struggle with a variety of mental health issues from Insomnia to anxiety to bipolar, it’s fair to say that sleep depravity does not help general health and can worsen existing issues. So on my latest adventure I thought about buying a sleep aid of some form. I had realized however that I also would need to have something to help me stay awake because the sleep aid might work too well, and I would be tired after I woke up because I would not have time to sleep long enough. After venturing out to the local gas station I saw combinations of caffeine pills and sleep pills I thought about buying some. The sleep pills were cheap and had all kinds of deals and came in small amounts of pills so that I wouldn’t have to buy more than I needed. While caffeine pills came in large amounts because naturally we need all we can get right? Well after a moment of probably the best idea I had I decided to wait to purchase these until I had done more research, so I figured I would just go with melatonin and some energy pills, because the melatonin probably wouldn’t be as strong but might offer some help, and caffeine should be fine. WELL, upon the research I started, I saw something that I already knew but in my no sleep state of mind I had not thought about it. You never should mix staying awake pills and going to sleep pills, this will cause a dependency and it is very hard on your body and bad for it. So I never took the caffeine pills because I needed to sleep more than I needed help staying awake. But as I continued even more research, I learned I had made a distinctive right choice that melatonin is a good help for natural relief with sleeping but many other sleep aid pills can be as addictive and are as addictive as hard drugs and cause dependency very very easily. So a word to the wise, do not buy over the counter sleep aid pills but talk to your doctor for help. What I did was actually better for me personally, I never ended up using melatonin but I found that my personal time of prayer really got me into a better place and I believe I was just stressed and couldn’t relax long enough to sleep. I also found that cutting down on screen time before bed although it’s very tempting helps the mind to shut down easier for bed time.

Thanks for reading, don’t forget to share this post with someone who may need it. Share to social media, like the blog facebook page. Feel free to make a donation to the site and help this site to run! thank you so much for reading and remember you make a difference

-Donny

Sitting in the restaurant. A fork you dropped hits the plate so loud that the guy in the kitchen looks at you from across the room, he begins speaking to the others about what happened. As you look back to the food you notice three boths over some people you went to school with, one is looking back to see if it’s you and this makes you uncomfortable. Sweating you begin to try to eat, as you move you have a nervous twitch…now more eyes are looking at you, you can feel it. You hear the people talking about you and laughing remembering how weird you were. laughter explodes out of the back corner as someone that usually sees you in the grocery store thinks that your food choice is so funny with your weight you are. That co-worker saw your car outside and got back in their car. They left because they didn’t want to see you. The waitress was trying to talk to you, she got concerned when you didn’t talk back, she’s mad as you can see. You know that all these people are talking about you and you can hear each conversation, until… The person in front of you asks if your food is okay, the waitress just brought another fork for them as they had dropped theirs on the ground, when they spilled their drink…

This seems extreme to some and it is. To others this feels like everyday, and some may not know this feeling at all and find this writing to be odd. The truth is, that it is abnormal. This is the feelings of paranoia deeply rooted in the social setting. There is a strange and scary moment sometimes in a persons life where they realize that some unstoppable evil or undesirable situation is happening to them, and only them, because they are themselves. People who suffer from a wide variety of issues could also be suffering from something like this as a symptom. The truth that no paranoid person wants to hear or can really hear sometimes is that; regardless of what the delusions say or the paranoid thinking says, they are not the center of the world. we all can relate to being the star of our own life and show, but the hard truth is that we are not the star of everyone else’s. True that sometimes eyes are on us and we are being watched or given attention, but not all the time. Sometimes in the paranoid place we can’t even observe what is actually going on in the moment around us. We are simply too caught up in the false focus of ourselves. One thing that can help pull you out of this moment is the “so what”. This refers to the state of being that is easier to talk about living then it is actually living, but in this state of mind your answer to all of the eyes on you is “so what”. Sometimes I have found that intentionally being yourself and unapologetically letting your inner desire to just be the strange person if you have one, can actually help to combat this paranoid thinking and help with the overall anxiety of it. The fact I have learned is that people suck sometimes and sometimes your great, if people are watching you and staring, give them a show. See in those moments who is actually watching you…or at least who would continue to watch you if anyone really was. This can be tricky as sometimes this can worsen anxiety and sometimes this just makes us act too socially unacceptable. Personally this is something that I have learned that has helped people. We all have our own journey but this is something to be considered for those who feel ready to kick out that paranoid anxious combo in the social setting.

Thanks for reading, don’t forget to check out the rest of the website and follow and subscribe. Share this with someone who needs it and remember if you need help to reach out to those around you and ask. Send in your stories or personal testimonies of mental health recovery experiences or mental health experiences and you might get it featured on the site. Love and blessings to you all

-Donny

Post-traumatic Stress Disorder or PTSD, is a disorder that is hidden from sight until one is triggered. PTSD is a long ugly disorder that has haunted people realistically since the beginning of time. Though it may seem that people believe mental illness has gotten to be more prevalent in recent years for some reason, there is a reality that PTSD specifically is a disorder that has been in society untreated for all time. To start with the most recognized cause of PTSD, we would talk about veterans. People who have served in the military would be the first guess for many to identify a group of people who statistically have PTSD. People in war can see the worst of humanity and in a sense even people who are not diagnosed or people who do not struggle with the disorder in a clinical way can be described as “not being the same” upon the return from duty. I personally thank those who serve every chance I get because I truly am thankful for what they do. Knowing that people even in my own family had returned home from wars and just didn’t live the same life, pains me. To see veterans in the street who drink away the pain, pains me. But one realization I had to come to in my own life was that PTSD effects a lot more than just veterans. Police, EMS, nurses, doctors, firefighters, and rescue workers all can suffer in very horrible ways that do not get a lot of attention, sometimes sadly people are just told they can no-longer work in these fields and they then struggle with no support offered. That is why it is super important to check mental state and encourage support to anyone who endures high levels of stress in the field of work, or life. In fact PTSD has been discovered in those who have vivid hallucinations and delusions. PTSD can also come from things like accidents, robberies, stalking, sexual abuse, rape, muggings, kidnappings, natural disasters, witnessing death, and near death experiences. In my experience PTSD and it’s symptoms are viewed as weakness or inability. My two cents is this: some people can witness horrible things and be under intense stress of combat or violence and never really look back or feel bothered, that same person may be a passenger in a vehicle and almost get killed in an accident and never mentally be the same. This is because everybody has different thresholds of anxiety and fear. For some, being in control of the situation or out of control makes the experience less impactful but it is easy to imagine all people in some way have a mental weakness. Take this example, I personally do not have a fear of speaking in front of people, in fact I enjoy it and find it easy after you get going past any initial anxieties. Some people fear public speaking more than death, but interestingly enough, I have found a crowd to be encouraging and a small group to be discouraging, because if 1 person likes what I say out of a group of two, then half of the people didn’t like what I had to say when I spoke. Not only this but a smaller crowd is a different setting and for me is more uncomfortable. This is not a moment to talk about myself as much as it is to make a point, I would be more encouraged in front of a thousand than fifty people. In the same way some people are not mentally effected the same way by events and stresses than others. But at the end of the day PTSD is not a disorder that gauges the strength of a person, but it is the disorder that gauges the experiences and effect life has had on the individual and what hurt them more than physical injury. A sad truth is for some time it seems people will always be told to get over experiences rather than working through them. Someone close to me actually gets nervous whenever someone reaches into a bag because someone had threatened to stab them before after pulling a knife out of a bag. Some women and men will always struggle to be truly intimate because of sexual horrific events that have happened to them. Sometimes the once happy nurse left a shift and never went back to work as someone had not been saved from death on their watch. The biggest issue is that in these situations we often find it more difficult to talk about the trauma and work through it then to just be haunted by it. It gets worse before it gets better sometimes, that is the truth in recovery. But opening up about these issues can set us free from them, or help us to cope better. It’s a rarity that the things that have traumatized us have been 100 percent our own cause, but never is it our own cause that we are unable to process the trauma.

Hello, Its friday. Which for some means its the weekend and it’s time to kick back and for some it means overtime work. I have made a few different posts with thoughts on resting and recovery. But this particular post is more of the personal story and wisdom I can share in my own recovery. It is important to keep busy, to achieve great goals and to always give the most that we can give to our obligations. But there are times that I believe the person who struggles with anxiety can’t live completely without it. Sometimes it seems that those who struggle with anxiety or over stressing for long periods of time can adjust to that stress and anxiety. It is not healthy most of the time but it does happen. The difference is eustress. eustress is actually a form of stress that a person feels called good stress. like it’s the good things in life happening, the promotion, the wedding, the child being born…I say these things and some people even know remember these events as being the happiest in life and maybe the most frightening or stressful. There is a certain nature to humans where stress can benefit our survival instincts and help us to navigate intense situations but prolonged experience of this “fight or flight” type of feeling can leave us depressed or even weaken our immune system. One idea that has helped me to find rest even at times or in situations where resting was unimaginable was this. Crisis or emergency does not need breaks, but I do. A reality of working non-stop is that eventually you will need to sleep and eat and rest your weary mind. you can’t operate without these things. And for those who have ANY sort of condition, a total failure of coping skills could happen without proper care and rest. Your symptoms can become unbearable and you can loose the ability to think rationally even in the small moments where it may be possible during irrational episodes. That is the difference sometimes of a psychotic break, is that all skills and functions can be totally lost for a period of time because your brain in a sense has forced you into shutdown mode. The best advice that I ever received from a friend who worked in a church and had another full time job was this,

“the church is always burning down, work is always having a crisis and somebody who depends on me will surely need me again. so having my phone off for a few hours and resting is either going to let what will happen when I physically can’t be there and everything will be ruined and its all over, or everything will live to see another day.”

The idea that the crisis has to be averted or the building is burning and we have to do something about it, is sometimes true and we should not ignore our obligations and responsibilities, but it is also our responsibility to make sure we are physically able to do these things for as long as we need to or have signed up to, it’s our responsibility sometimes to say no. Say for example you are on your way to your vacation and your old neighbor calls and says their house is on fire, it’s not work and we should help out when we can and it would be a good thing to do….but maybe ask them, have they called the fire department…cause running back and forth with a bucket is not really effective. We sometimes really can’t help or fix the crisis but we merely put a bandaid on it or hurt those who are depending on us all the time because we wont always be able to be there all the time. And not resting and not self caring is a way to not be there a lot quicker. So remember always know when to stop and let inevitable happen while you recover for when the next time in inevitable happens, because it always will.

Thanks for reading, I will be breaking for this weekend I believe and catching up on some of that rest myself. Please share this post with someone and share on social media, dont forget to subscribe and checkout the rest of the website and other blogs. If you have a story you want to share feel free to send it in to the contact on the contact page and it might be featured on the website! remember you have a voice, you have a choice, you have power, and you are inspirational.

-Donny

“Wait the hospital administrator?…well they must not really suffer from it, or maybe they were just on drugs…I’m sure that has only happened a few times”

No. simply put, the answer is no. Many people deal with psychotic symptoms every day, the last time I checked I think prevalence of schizophrenia alone was 1 out of every 100 people in america. That’s a lot of people, and schizophrenia is certainly not the only illness that has psychotic symptoms. but it doesn’t sell movies to be a schizophrenic guy or bipolar woman that struggles with illness, but goes through treatment and recovery and has a stable job and lives a relatively “normal” life. People don’t pay attention to the car dealership owner that suffers from PTSD and has multiple personalities. Because it’s not interesting, to most people more than a slight conversation about someone they might know in passing. But there is a larger community out there of people with this story who live day by day passing the man screaming in the street who realistically are fighting the same battle, but with different levels of care and resources. I will not lie and say every person who is suffering is safe all the time even in a psychotic break…that would not be true. The fact is that sometimes people are not safe to be around with or without diagnosed psychotic symptoms, or depression, or psychosis, or explosive anger disorder. People commit murder and crimes and mass murder every day without diagnosis around the world. Even genocide has been committed without a diagnosis. Social psychology could explain some of this, or at least make educated guesses. But the truth is there is more perfectly “normal” and “sane” people who would otherwise be labeled “loony” or “dangerous psychopathic” people living around you, in your community then you know. This information is dually purposed, to let those of you struggling know even further, your not alone. This also hopefully sheds light to some on the reality and prevalence of psychotic symptoms and diagnosis or lack of it around them. But again people with issues like this DO need treatment. This is not something that is well handled or helping with good quality of life without treatment. treatment ranges a lot of ways as for what works for people and it’s important to know what works for you or for those you are trying to help and what doesn’t. Know that one way to make these things better is to learn and educate others, and to work together and put aside differences. find humor in things and don’t hold grudges. Some people have their own trauma due to other people who struggled with illness, that is a fact. And sometimes those with illness are traumatized by people who don’t struggle or even treated them differently or with abuse because they were vulnerable and not mentally well. The main thing to remember is that not all people with psychological disadvantages are people that are “psycho”. I encourage you to look up this information and talk to those around you.

Thank you so much for reading. don’t forget to subscribe to the blog and share this post or another with someone or on social media. thank you to those who have already subscribed or been readers. Continue on in your journey and don’t forget if you want to share your story to send an email with your story to the email on the contact page and your story could be featured on the site. Love and blessings to you all. You have influence, you have power, you have impact, you have choices. You are inspirational.

-Donny

I have spent many years I think as an underachiever. Much of the problems in my life and issues I dealt with made me particularly not care about much other than the time I enjoyed immediately and I didn’t worry too much about the next…well I did, I worried a lot, but again if everything is a life or death situation then eventually you start to feel like nothing is. I think somewhere along the way in my recovery from everything, I found that being an overachiever was best, that maybe I was trying to accomplish and catch up to everybody else in what little time I had because I felt so much of my time was wasted on being…well crazy…as I would have described myself. But the problem that I have come up to is that my body still needs rest. A big part of the founding blocks of starting my recovery was learning mindfulness. Take for example a bag of chips. I could destroy a bag of hot Cheetos in a minute, but why? I had no reason to eat fast, and in fact I don’t think I wanted to, I just felt the desire to enjoy the chips quickly and rest before I didn’t have time to rest. So I was in a hurry because I knew I was going to be in a hurry, which means I was working to relax which is a contradiction. You can do relaxing work but you can’t have relaxing be hard work, because that is not really relaxing or rest. That is living in moments that haven’t happened yet, that is sometimes destructive to our state of mind and mental health. You see you can be an over achiever and you can put in long hours at work, but what for? Is it to enjoy life on the horizon? That is not bad in theory but ask yourself when is the horizon? When does the work stop and the life get enjoyed, when does the present moment become the moment we focus on and exist in. I hate being late…I HATE being late.

“How’s your anxiety today”

“Considering that I’m two minutes late? I feel like flying into the sun”

It is true that success and being punctual go hand in hand, it is true that a foundational brick in recovery is goal setting, short term, mid term, and yes long term. But our planning and scheduling needs to be held in a place where we still function as best as possible presently. Because you can’t dig yourself out of a hole your trapped in if your building the boat to get off the island, and your boat will suck because you were buried and trapped the whole time you tried to build it. And sometimes just sometimes, there might be something you needed to see or notice while buried in the hole, like maybe the satellite phone that was sitting next to you with instructions on who to call if stuck on island…but you covered it in sand digging yourself out of the hole because you did the first reactive thing. We have a tendency as people to try to solve the immediate issue with the first thing that enters the idea chamber, and sometimes you have to react, but sometimes you need to be proactive or even observant before taking the next action because what’s done is done, that doesn’t mean do it more or make it worse but simply wait and see what can be done to solve or complete the task efficiently. Being mindful is not just a guy meditating on a mountain type thing, it’s an everyday thing. Being mindful will reduce anxiety and can be used as a grounding technique. When everything in life is chaos and you can’t get anything to stop, i challenge you take a drink of something, eat a piece of fruit, but not quickly. Stop and look at the fruit, study it, hear the sound it makes as your fingers are holding, what does it smell like? Have a small taste, even if you could eat the piece in one bite have a small small taste, and let the taste sit in your mouth. What did you notice about it? What does it remind you of? How often do you see this?… I will stop here but mindfulness is an individual process, this is what I tried but this can be done with a different process, different questions and steps but the point is to stop and notice all over again all the things of something that you have. And through the process you may find yourself sitting and resting and not focusing on much else and maybe you will notice how more beautiful or understandable everything is around you. The reality in life sometimes is that we have to truly stop and rest and live present in the moment and not focus on the next or the past to truly enjoy what is happening.

Thanks for reading, don’t forget to subscribe and share with someone. Please if you haven’t already check out the other posts and the rest of this site. For know peace and love and blessings to you all. And don’t forget you have a voice, it needs to be heard. You are inspirational.

-Donny

OCD is an odd disorder that many people don’t truly understand. This is a disease that really hinges on more of a curse than a medical diagnosis. OCD is a disorder that is fueled by anxiety, but the anxiety is caused by things not being done in a particular fashion or things possibly not being done in that fashion from what I have experienced. I have had family members that could not sleep unless the stove was checked before bed and all of the knobs had to be touched and sometimes turned on and off to ensure that they are truly off. If they couldn’t remember if the oven had been checked that particular way…then it was checked again. But this seems like a small thing, until it grows into waking up periodically throughout the night to check the stove again, in the same fashion. being unsure that it was done and then checking it again. OCD does not always start out as someone who cant handle things not being done a certain way or having an extreme phobia of being touched to the point of needing security to prevent unwanted touching. But OCD can grow from little nervous habits into full blown disorder and the loss of ability to function in everyday life. I remember my first encounter with OCD learning that someone I knew washed their hands until they bled, and it happened everyday. But it seems that OCD is a disorder that attacks our anxieties and even phobias. In a sense, if you see a bug and then have to get undressed and shower and change clothes because you can’t rest because there has to be bugs on you, this would be a form of the obsessive compulsion. One thing that I do believe is that this obsessive-compulsion exists in many more people than is realized and many people may have it themselves and not really realize it. But the difference between a medical issue and a weird habit is the “it depends” factor. “it depends” on whether you are caused distress and cant properly function in areas of live because of the symptoms. For example, if you cant sleep at night unless your shoes are in your closet with the shoe laces inside the shoes and tied properly…but this doesn’t effect you in anyway outside of that, and its a habit you have always had but you cant sleep unless its exactly that way; that most likely wont be an issue unless you don’t have a closet or laces or a shoe thief comes into your house and steals your shoes and now you cant sleep until they are found. Sometimes I believe that we get so caught up in looking at others weird behaviors and ways they act we forget our own even weirder behaviors. One thing that is important to remember if you have chronic OCD is that it is an illness or disorder like any other and that you certainly are not alone and there is help. OCD can actually really be damaging in peoples lives but sometimes something like therapy can help people work through the issues or desensitization…such as letting the unwanted thing(s) happen like eating at a different place or using a public bathroom, or leaving the house unlocked during reasonable hours. These of course are things to be done in small steps and with a care professional, but sometimes the things we fear don’t keep us safe or better but can make us worse or trap us in.

Thanks for reading, Please subscribe or share with someone you know or on social media. Check back in for more updates to the website and more blog posts. If you know someone struggling with OCD encourage them to share their story or if you are yourself feel free to send it to the email on the contact page and see if it gets posted. You have a voice and it needs to be heard. Stay strong. you are inspirational.

-Donny

Many times in my life I can think of decisions I made that took way too long to make. the number of minutes even hours. trying to decide things that ultimately did not help improve my life or significantly change it in anyway, but it always felt like it would. The reality of some people living with severe anxiety or other anxiety ridden illnesses, is that every decision feels like a big one, and after a while for some of us this becomes too much to handle and it seems like maybe none of our decisions are all that important. The human body can only take so much stress and anxiety before it hits a breaking point of non-functionality. I was a person who stressed, who then stressed about stressing, and then was stressed because I couldn’t stop stressing out, so I was stressed out trying not to get stressed out… This experience is called circular thinking or “Imgoingtoexplodeitis”. What was interesting about all my anxiety is that I spent so much time and energy trying to make the good and right decisions all the time, I hardly ever made the actual right decision. I spent so much time planning out conversations I knew I would have to have and how to approach them, that when it came time to speak and the other person started talking, I felt like I couldn’t really listen to them because I was so focused on what I wanted to say, and I also felt lost when the conversation was not going the way that I envisioned..

(them)”So do we want to get hamburgers or chicken?”

(Me)”I will pay you back when I have the money!!! I CANT pay you with nothing!!….oh I thought you were asking about the….lets get burgers.”

I think that in society we set ourselves up too often for the expectation of perfection, and this is something that I learned when evaluating my life with anxiety. Every kind of situation was a life changer and if I chose wrong my life would be ruined forever, and there was no other kind of outcome I could foresee. Though it seems I never came to the realization that the correct choice didn’t make life the best perfect thing ever either because I always had to come to another decision soon after that would be life altering. This is also why I became such a creature of habit, because whatever decisions I had made before about something such as: where to eat, what to order, what brand of shampoo, what person to be with what days, what friends or people to talk to, what roads to walk or drive, what seat to sit in, even down to what bathrooms to use, and what choices such as bathrooms or foods or seats to not choose because they held dire consequences of the unknown. One day I came across a quote that I got I think from social media. It was a man on a bomb squad who for years was the bomb defusing team member. He would naturally have the most risk to a mistake as he couldn’t have a blast shield in front of him fully. He was also closest to the bomb. He had done this for years and loved his job and loved being able to help, but when asked how he handled the stress of the job, knowing what risks he was taking so often he replied with ” well I either cut the right wire and the day is saved, or it is suddenly not my problem anymore.” I found this quote inspiring and thought that it was the greatest way to live, and at times its still a great source of wisdom. My fear that the world would end, or a bomb would destroy us all everyday met it’s match, well its either not gonna happen, or it happened…But accepting that these are things I cant control because I’m not God, and I’m not the military defense against missiles and in fact I spent most of my days inside, I wouldn’t know it was going to happen when it did and I wouldn’t be able to stop these things even if I did know. The take away is not the idea that nothing matters, it’s that we can only control what is directly in our control. I can vote, I can pray, I can stay informed and I can live my life to the fullest, but I cant hold a crumbling earth together. If you have ever thought about living life carefully, or if that is all you can do, I like the breakdown of the word because I feel like it gives a good definition to healthy living. Break down the two words care and full. It is always unwise to say ‘I will die anyways and do the risky behaviors that are going to get you hurt almost every time, this is a disorder like anxiety except probably the polar opposite, (unless you have anxiety severely of missing out on anything in life even if it’s dangerous). But living a healthy life with care could be better described as thinking about decisions and not taking for granted the life we have been given. Keeping up and maintaining our well being and resting, eating healthy foods, working out, and asking ourselves how long we need to make decisions on options in life, ask yourself “How will this effect me tomorrow? In a year from now? Five years? At the end of life?” eventually some choices will come more naturally from what I have experienced. But for the decisions that don’t need that much thought or the decisions that we make that are so different, this is where full comes in. We should try to live life in fullness. The life we regret is usually not the life that we lived to the fullest experiencing new things and trying things out and enjoying what we never would have if we didn’t venture out, but regret usually comes from what we never got to do, or what we didn’t say. People at the end of life I don’t believe ever really wish they had spent more time at work or the office or sitting at home alone, or sleeping. But they wish they had got to experience more or be more full in what experiences they did have. Typically to do something carefully would mean to do something full-of-care. Which is good but for today’s post and for what I gained out of my experience is to live with care and live life ‘fully‘.

Thanks for taking the time to read this post. more will be coming every week. don’t forget to check out the website as new updates are being made regularly to improve it, send in your experiences or stories or articles you found related to mental health issues and don’t forget to share this post with someone who needs it.

-Donny