Mental Breakdown
There can be several reasons and causes for a mental breakdown. But when it comes to coping with it and actually overcoming it, you need one thing most – your willpower, your determination to come of this troubled state of mind and a willingness to resume your normal life. Mentioned in the paragraphs below are some things that you can do to cope with and then overcome a mental breakdown. Read on for a healthier resurgence and happy living.
To cope with mental breakdown, you need to follow these steps:
1) Understand your state and learn to accept it
2) Seek the right treatment
3) Seek support from people around you
4) Set realistic goals
5) Expect and learn to deal with setbacks
6) Keep track of your progress
These methods are explained in greater detail below:
1) Understand your state and learn to accept it
First of all you need to understand that not every situation is under your control, whether adverse or beneficial. And you also cannot control every other individual who can trouble you. Many of us struggle to control everything around us; keep failing and keep trying. This result is tension, frustration, anger and finally depression, which ultimately leads to a mental breakdown.
To avoid getting into this grind, you need to learn to accept some things, if not all, as they come. You have to tell yourself, it just happens and you cannot avoid it. Look around, there are a lot of others who are facing the same situation as you, do they all react in the same manner as you? Are all of them suffering from a mental breakdown? Not certainly. Some of them have learnt either to deal with it or to adjust to it; so can you. Some of them may have even overcome it; so can you.
Mental Breakdown
When you know that there is definitely trouble coming your way, take a break from your intense focus, relax; take a deep breath and say to yourself – ok its coming, now let me look at how I handle it. This form of acceptance is the first step towards –understanding and finally deducing ways to cope with the problem. The willingness to accept the unavoidable can put you in a buffer zone wherein you get time to prepare yourself to brace for impact. Then you go through it with a single aim of emerging at the end. You have then prepared yourself mentally and have taken the first step in coping with mental breakdown.
2) Seek the right treatment
There is a range of medicines under allopathic treatment to help you cope with your condition. If you want to try alternate medicine then too you have a range of choices at your hand. Acupuncture, aromatherapy, homeopathy, spiritual healing, meditation, yoga, normal physical exercises, massages, reflexology, color therapy, crystal healing are all the ways you can try. But if you are not able to decide, then take the help of a psychiatrist or a psychologist first. They can either give you medicines or help you select the right kind of therapy according to your level of comfort.
Allopathic treatment may involve anti-depressants which can have certain side effects or can be addictive. Treatment with aromatherapy, massage, herbal therapy, or even meditation can be very effective. Therapies that include building your self confidence and reinvigorating your mind and body to deal with and overcome your state of breakdown are the best ways to cope with your situation.
Sometimes though, doing a rather active and rude exercise like shouting out loud, or running fast through at an open ground, or hitting a punching bad at a gym can release pent up frustration and bring you instant relief. But you must not make this a habit or, make the mistake of considering this a long term solution to cope with mental breakdown. It can only be dealt with and overcome through a calm, analyzing and balanced mind. You need to develop that attitude if you lack it. Read or watch movies or do a similar activity that will help you develop this attitude. Once you have it, then you will be ready for the next step.
If you are addicted to smoking, drinking or some other form of abuse, then give it up. You will never get anything healthy or beneficial out of these. Moreover these will only waste your precious money which you can rather use on buying a nice book, watching a movie, or going on a tour, etc. If you can’t think of anything beneficial to do, then try to keep your surrounding clean. Watching and living in a clean place can be very satisfying and will urge you to adopt clean habits.
3) Seek support from people around you
It always helps to seek support from the people close to you, especially your family and some of your close friends. Your supportive family is the best place to start looking for help. Share some of your thoughts about gloominess and ask them for advice. Ignore chiding remarks, hurtful comments and accusations. There will be someone who will be supportive and be ready to listen to you. If somebody listens to you honestly and you talk to them without hesitation then it acts like a valve to release pressure and frustration from your mind. Doing this over a period of time will automatically help you overcome your mental breakdown. If you are surrounded by people with an antagonistic attitude towards you, then you need to find new friends. Go out to a public place. Look at people. Observe how they deal with their problems and situations. You can also use the Internet to find answers to your doubts. Sometimes you can get lucky and can get genuinely sound advice.
Alternatively you can enroll into therapy classes that teach you how to bring back happiness in your life. When you have supporters who are willing to listen to your problems and help you choose a path towards solution, then you must make good use of it. Wailing in loneliness all the time is not going to help you in any manner. When you wail and lament about your breakdown, you trap yourself in self confinement; in a prison created in your mind and from which only you can release yourself.
Get yourself into some kind of activity. Exercises like jogging, running, fishing, gardening, dancing, singing, swimming, cycling, or a hobby that you enjoy. All these will bring about a mental relaxation and a sense of accomplishment. Such activities will also help decrease the amount of harmful hormones in your body and replace them with mood elevating hormones. This will act to balance out and ultimately overcome breakdown. If you like to go on long walks to explore nature then that is a nice way to relax. Not only will you feel refreshed and relaxed, it will also release some of the frustration and make your body healthier. Suffering from mental breakdown can be very taxing on your body and it suffers as much as your mind. Hence a little exercise will be very beneficial to your health. If you were the social type, then you can join a philanthropic activity and help others who are less privileged than you. Helping someone in need can be very satisfying. The best reward you can get from them is to see a smile of their faces. That smile will do wonders to you. Sometimes helping an elderly or a child can be very satisfying. A look of gratefulness in their eyes can be equally fulfilling and you can then be satisfied that you have done a good deed.
4) Set realistic goals
You can set yourself some goals to achieve. But these must be realistic. There is no point in doing something that will only add to your tension, then lament about it. Be pragmatic and try to do one thing at a time. Set short term goals that you can achieve with a little effort. Then add these up to set up yourself for a bigger goal.
You may be troubled by a lot of things around you. Try to solve them one at a time and choose the easiest ones first. That way, not only will you feel happy and boost your confidence, but at a later stage, you will notice that you have fewer problems to solve. This is the easiest way to solve problems and overcome difficult situations that have caused mental breakdown. And this is also the most sensible thing to do.
5) Expect and learn to deal with setbacks
Setbacks and failed expectations sometimes become part of some people’s lives. They find it frustrating to deal with repeated failures. It’s natural that at some point in time they suffer a mental breakdown.
When you are going through a phase of nervous breakdown, you must be practical. There are bound to be setbacks in your attempts to set things right. However you must not loose heart and instead use an analytical approach to solve the problem. If you get bogged down thinking over failures and slowdowns then you are only delaying your chances of finding solutions to your problems.
6) Keep track of your progress
Maintain a dairy. Pen down your thoughts and read them when you have free time on your hand. Recording your mood swings and reading them later will give you an insight into your own mind. It’s like going through a session with the hypnotherapist. Such records also help you keep track of what’s going on in your life and what you have been able to do till now. A diary can be a nice tool to show how much you have progressed over time and where you have failed.
A written record of the state of your mind and recorded in your own style is a nice way to find how much effort you have dedicated, the methods you used, the solutions you chose, the situations you faced while implementing these solutions and finally the outcome of your effort. Moreover you also get an idea of your mood swings.
You must be honest in your effort to record your thoughts and then analyze them at a later date. If you cheat, then you will only be cheating yourself. That way you won’t learn a thing and probably make the same mistakes repeatedly. What could have been a nice way to emerge out of mental breakdown could altogether fail and set you back by miles.
Mental breakdown can be torturous to the effected individual. But there are ways to cope with it and turn around the situation. The methods mentioned above are some techniques that can prove useful if you are willing to apply it wholeheartedly. Its up to you to emerge out of the darkness of a nervous breakdown. And you can if you have the will. You just need to try a little logically.