Hello Tomodotchi’s,
If you follow us, you know that we are going through some mentally challenging times. Our doctor once told us that some of the most challenging times come from a change in your living, financial and or family situation. Well, my dear Tomodotchi’s, currently we are going through the trifecta with major changes occurring in all three areas! Fortunately for us, we knew these changes were coming and we were able to prepare for these hard times. While, we wouldn’t say we are particularly thriving during this time, the prep work we put in has really helped our anxiety! We know that we won’t all be fortunate to have time to prepare, however, we hope our experiences may provide you some ideas and encouragement for preparing and overcoming the obstacles in your life.
Plan ahead with your Wellness Team!
As a part of our wellness journey, we have 3 core pillars in our mental health plan. Medicine, Therapy and Techniques are what get us through the majority of our hardships. Now to be clear, when we say medicine, we mean Doctor prescribed medicine. Do not self-medicate or self-prescribe medicine, always see and consult with a medical professional! Disclaimers out of the way, when we know difficult times are coming, we grab an appointment with our doctor. We discuss the hardships to come and plan our medicines accordingly with their wise knowledge. They are practiced and know how to plan with you. This has been absolutely critical in getting ourselves fine-tuned to have the best chance at success during these challenging times! Good doctors are a part of your wellness journey and they can help you prepare for overcoming obstacles in life.
It’s also huge to meet with a therapist! Doctors are fantastic, but in our experience, not too many of them engage in the therapeutic side of mental wellness. For this, we’ve found a good therapist helps us. As a bonus, we find that it’s easier to meet more frequently with a therapist. They are there to lend a gentle guiding hand through your difficult times. If you engage them ahead of time, they can help you discover techniques that can help ease your mind and plan strategies to use during heat of the moment. Therapy is fantastic in helping us feel validated, heard and to get an unbiased perspective. Personally, we have a bad habit of invalidating ourselves. These invalidating thoughts stop us from moving forward and positive thinking. We’ve found that therapists are great for validating us and helping us move forward. The unbiased outside view can really provide some much-needed perspective!
Practice awareness and don't believe your anxiety
Awareness is something that needs to be practiced frequently and often. It’s a skill that is incredibly difficult to master and we’ve found that it’s imperative to our mental health. In this case, we want to focus on the awareness of our anxiety itself. This is the ability to recognize when it’s your anxiety speaking to you or making you feel a certain way. To do this we like to give our anxiety a persona, and while it is a part of us, we are better able to separate it from our conscious healthy, happy self. This allows us to better understand when our anxiety is speaking to us and to recognize when it is lying.
In your best times, your anxiety may be just a tiny voice in your head. It’s during these times that we need to practice being aware of it. For us, it is because during the good times, we are best suited to fight back and rationalize against it. Just practicing distinguishing its voice helps us to be aware when we are hearing it in our stressful times. After all, during the hardest times, our anxiety is really good at mimicking our own voice! Our anxiety lies to us, it wants us to feel alone and to do nothing. This is why we practice being aware of the voice of our anxiety, so that in the darkest times we can recognize and fight back against its lies.
Prepare by surrounding yourself with positives
Another key aspect of awareness is understanding things that positively and negatively impact your mental health. When we know that hard times are coming, we like to lay out groundwork that positively impacts our mental health. We do things like telling friends about the hard times to come and our fears. This way they know how and when to check up on us! We lay out positive reminders like happy photo memories, we play our favorite TV shows in the background and put our fur babies even closer to us than normal. Things that we know can help bring us back when we are having dark negative thoughts.
Vice versa, this is also a good time to put aside the negatives. It’s helps us to put away the social media and to say good bye to negative influences. For us, nothing can make us feel worse than comparing ourselves to others on social media or seeing bad news and drama plastered on people’s walls. Challenging times are hard enough, there is no need to add obstacles to your path!
Another trigger for us can be negative people, the folks who invalidate us and make us feel weak and small, most of the time unintentionally. Recognize those people and use your hard time as an excuse to not engage with them! Your anxiety doesn’t need allies, so it’s important to really recognize what doesn’t help you and to overly surround yourself with positive influences!
Conclusion
Challenging times will always be difficult as they are unavoidable. If you are fortunate enough to be able to prepare for these times, then planning can be paramount to your success. If you are thrown into challenging times, do not fret, this too shall pass and you absolutely will overcome. These steps can be performed at any time and they have worked wonders for us. Again, while we wouldn’t say we are thriving or doing amazing, we can say that we have been able to fight back against our anxiety better than if we had not prepared. If you are about to or going through challenging times, just know that we are there with you and that you are strong and enough to get through it! Above all else, remember to be kind to yourself.
TLDR;
Life is full of challenging times and obstacles to overcome. For those that we know are coming, it can be beneficial to prepare ourselves mentally. Planning ahead with our wellness team, practicing awareness and surrounding ourselves with positives can all be beneficial for our mindsets during hard times.
Join Our Community and Newsletter!
Get weekly updates, special deals on our products, infographics about mental wellness and self-improvement, journal prompts and stay up to date on each blog post!
Extras
As an added bonus for our readers, we like to include a game of where are the Tomodotchi Pets. They’ve been hidden in 2 of the pictures within this post. Can you find them all? See below for what they look like!
1 thought on “How We Mentally Prepare For Challenging Times”
Pingback: [ 3 Lessons] Learned From Our Mental Health Break - Tomodotchi