Yesterday was Mental Health Awareness Day, so I met up with Sophie in her lunch break to ask the question:
What do you do to make yourself feel better if you’re feeling low?
Sophie works part-time as a Barista and studies Psychosocial Studies at Birkbeck University. After a few moments of contemplation, she starts:
Well…the best thing I’ve found of all is sleep. I’ve tried so many things over the years and sleep always seems to work best for me.
I reply: “Do you mean making sure you sleep well and enough every night or sleeping off the low mood when it comes?”
A bit of both, I think. I’ve definitely found that getting enough sleep seems to improve my mental health more than anything else, but I also mean that when I feel really down in the dumps, I try to accept that that’s how I feel at that moment and allow myself to sleep it off. Like, you know when people say, “Sleep on it or go to bed and you’ll feel better in the morning,” I’ve generally always found that to be the case.
I think Sophie’s point about accepting how you feel and allowing yourself the time to rest and recuperate is really important. Feeling down can be exhausting after all and you’re likely to be in a much better place to cope if you’ve slept well and replenished your energy stocks. But I also want to know if there’s anything she does that can make her feel better while she’s awake.
She laughs:
Going for a walk or run is always good for me. Getting outside and blowing the cobwebs out, y’know? Fresh air can really help to clear your head I think.
Also having a chat, meeting up with a good friend and talking it over and externalising it. I find that super helpful. It can be hard to reach out in those moments but, if I can, it always makes a difference. But only if it’s with someone that I really trust.
If you need it, then therapy is obviously really important as well. I come from a family of therapists so it was always there and I sort of always felt familiar with it. I wanted to go to therapy for a long time but because I travelled and moved around a lot I put it off a bit. I think travelling around so much was part of not wanting to accept that there were things I needed to address. I was doing detrimental things like not committing to therapy that I definitely needed, but now I have I’m feeling a lot better.
Check out our article 7 tips for talking effectively about mental health for advice if you’re struggling, and who you can contact.
