Mental Illness and the Lifestyle

Hey guys. Harvest here!

So I have been working on getting past my mental illnesses in the lifestyle. I have heard and read many things about mental illness in the lifestyle as well. I see that there are a lot of people who don’t truly understand that you can be severely hindered by your mental illnesses.

I don’t like to say “I am a paranoid schizophrenic” because that means it owns me if I say it that way. I do not let my illness own me. I want to be the owner in this case. I want to be the one who says how things go. I take medicine to keep it from being as bad as it can be but I still have my bad days.

Do I think that my illness has me trapped? No, I certainly do not. Even with all the medications I take, I still am the one in charge. That doesn’t mean that I do not have hallucinations and the voices. I hear them and I choose to ignore what they say. I don’t want to be –that- person.

There are things you can say that really get a person down. When you are having a bad day, you don’t want someone harassing you about if you took your medication or not. It’s not fun to have to rely on meds, but you don’t need to push a person around about it.

My Owner makes sure I take my medication properly each day. He helps me remember and when I need help he gets my medication for me so I can take it if it’s not in my direct area of where I am.

What I want you to take away from this is that no matter what, you are strong. You are capable of conquering your own body. It may not seem like it, and you might have a really hard time where it seems impossible to beat. But you just have to wait it out because it does get better.

One technique that I find helps me out the most is meditation and breathing exercises. When I have a trigger come up with my misophonia (a hatred of noise) I just do as much breathing exercises that I can stand. I count backwards from ten and try to not listen to the trigger. I also turn on my pink noise generator on my phone or my mp3 player to tune out the sounds. Living with misophonia can be very hard and people don’t understand it because it’s still a relatively newly discovered mental illness. It can be seen in people who can’t stand chewing sounds and going into blackout rages when they hear them. I used to not be able to go to restaurants because I would just get so mad at people when they chewed with their mouths open. It was, and still is, a very hard thing to live with.

If people were to understand mental illness more, the world would be a better place.

Here are some helpful links to help:

--The suicide hotline: http://www.suicidepreventionlifeline.org/

--Depression help: http://www.webmd.com/depression/guide/depresssion-support

--A good site to ask for help and talk about your days: http://www.dailystrength.org/

I want to hear some of the things that you do to deal with your mental illnesses. I want to see how you act. Drop me a message or a comment and we’ll see how you do. I would love to hear from you all.

Thank you guys!

-Harvest Hellion