I took everything 2020 threw at me, and still found happiness.
When I started writing this piece a couple of weeks ago, it looked and felt completely different. It was coming from a place of pure positivity and complete happiness. I was in such a good place & had an amazing summer despite everything that was going on. I was actually excited at the thought of some cosy evenings, candles and treating myself to some 10/10 wine.
Then out of nowhere everyone I know seemed to have one of the toughest mental battles we’ve had in a while. Why? Try throwing the ambiguity of new lockdowns and the reality of changing plans at anyone. Plus the dark nights drawing in. Plus the tricky life events that we all face on a day to day — it’s not easy…
For me, every winter feels like a marathon. Each October, I try to plan and prepare perfectly to stay mentally positive over the winter. Each year the aim is to get to February without hitting a mental brick wall and slipping into winter depression.
So here we are again, in October, about to face the marathon of our lives. This time it’s even harder. I’ve already had to run one mental marathon in 2020 to get to this point, and I’m still recovering.
I’m really not sure if I’m ready to go again, but the world has signed us all up for the most difficult winter we’ll probably ever experience. So we have a choice — run the race, or give up now and accept 6 months of sadness. Well, I’m choosing to run & hoping I don’t break a hip along the way 😅
I started writing this for me, as a reminder of how far I’d come & so that I could reflect on how amazingly well I did during the first half of this year. Despite everything that 2020 threw at me, I remained genuinely happy.
I hope that anyone that reads this recognises that there are a lot of us feeling daunted by the months that lie ahead, but there are things that you can do that will be in your control to help stay positive.
For a bit of context, I have always been a lively bubbly person. I love going out and having a good time, I love spending time with my friends and family and I love being focussed and smashing everything I do in life. As usual, I often don’t outwardly display the behaviours you would associate with depression.
But, like ⅓ of the UK, I suffer from winter depression, most commonly known as SAD. For me, the pattern is usually that I am pretty happy until February, and then out of nowhere, I start crying most days and my mind turns into my worst enemy. One of the elements that I find the hardest, is struggling to tell which thoughts are depression and which thoughts mean that something isn’t right and needs to change in life…
This feeling won’t be uncommon — with women being 40% more likely to experience this condition, I can guarantee that a lot of my friends are in the same boat. But the crazy thing is, we didn’t really talk about it until recently.
In 2019, it all got a bit much for me. My thoughts were a lot worse than normal. It was relentless. I lived with negative thoughts from the moment I woke up until the moment I went to sleep. I couldn’t enjoy or focus on anything I did. I would go for days and nights out with my friends, and not really be there mentally. I would sit at my desk at work and stare at my screen for hours, hoping that no one would speak to me. I wanted to stay in my own mind, playing through all of the negative scenarios I could think of, as if I deserved to feel that way.
I recognised that this was worse than normal and I was lucky enough to be able to get counselling. With my counsellor I started to work through how I had gotten to that place.
In 2018 I started living on my own for the first time. I distanced myself from some friendships that were no longer good for me. My relationship, which had been amazing until that point, started to change.
The most obvious thing now that I look back on it, is that I didn’t deal with any of those factors at the time. In 2018, I naively thought my life was fantastic. On paper, I had bought a flat, was in a relationship, had loads of amazing friends and I was smashing work. I didn’t take time to consider that there could be anything wrong.
I received CBT, and started to work through each one of these events and how to process my feelings. I slowly but surely managed to get out of the rut by challenging each one of my thoughts and proactively putting in place things that I could focus on each week that would make me happy.
4 months later, 2019 threw another curve ball at me. I managed to break my hip running a half marathon. I had to completely change the way I lived my life. I couldn’t drink or go out. I couldn’t get around on my own — I always needed help. I couldn’t put my all into work anymore. & most importantly, I realised how fragile we are as humans.
This was probably one of the best things that ever happened to me.. It forced me to pause and reset. It forced me to work out what I could do to keep myself happy when I was watching everyone else was having fun. It forced me to understand what it meant when people say that ‘we should treat our mental health like our physical health’.
My goal at the time was to go hiking 4 months later in Canada. To hit this goal, I had to give myself a chance to recover and heal. I had to learn to slowly build my strength back up. I had to appreciate what it takes to constantly work on some simple exercises to get to where you want to be. I also had to get used to explaining to everyone what had happened and openly talk about my health. By focussing on the goal and taking all of my recovery seriously — I managed some of the most amazing hikes.
As I approached winter 2019, I took a lot of these lessons and knew that I needed to apply them to my mental health.
I needed to get over my own fear of being open about how I felt. I needed to take the time everyday to focus on the exercises that keep your brain mentally fit. I needed to ask for help when I was struggling.
So in October, I took my SAD lamp to the office for the first time. Even though everyone hated it (no apologies here), it was a better option than facing months of tears.
I stocked up on positivity diaries and made it my mission to write these every single day, good or bad.
I kept practising all of my CBT homework, making sure that I checked in and understood how I was feeling every week. Every time a negative thought would enter my head, I would challenge it, understand why and understand what I can do to take action to make this better.
I started taking vitamin D tablets everyday.
I started focussing on small things, like what 3 things do I want to do in a week to keep me happy.
Thankfully, it all clicked into place. For the first time since I can remember, I did not spend February crying. As we faced the certainty of entering a lockdown, and knowing that we would be away from friends and family for a long period of time, I remained positive and happy.
As we all hoped 2020 wouldn’t get any harder, I lost 3 of my grandparents within the first 4 weeks of lockdown. A month later, I left my relationship. I was emotionally broken. I cried in a way that I hadn’t experienced in years. Every weekend, when I was just about processing one loss, another one came. That amount of change and heartbreak was bad enough, but living on my own in lockdown meant going through all of it without the face to face support from the ones I needed most. What I did do though, was ask for help. I kept my friends and family close. I was open about how I felt. I processed each one in my own way. My friends and family were incredible and I took my time to cry, I took my time to process my thoughts and I took time out to enjoy all of the amazing memories that I had been so lucky to experience.
The craziest thing was, through all of the sadness, I still felt happy and hopeful. I felt positive and confident for my future. I felt grateful.
I didn’t really understand why. Maybe it was denial. Maybe it was because I hadn’t been able to process it properly as the world was just too crazy.
5 months later, I feel pretty confident in saying that it’s because I’d taken care of my mental health.
I did some research to try and explain why I was feeling happy and if I was maybe not dealing with things properly. & I confirmed what I’d known for years, but had never effectively controlled until now.
Happiness works as a trend line, we all have a natural trend that we follow. Big events, like marriage or having a baby, allow us to experience peaks above our trend line. Events like a death or losing a job, means that we experience sadness below our trend line. But, no matter what, we usually always bounce back to our original happy levels.
What I’d managed to do from October until April, by spending 10–20 minutes a day focussing on my mental health, was to increase my happiness baseline from where it had been to a new level. I was also able to understand what made me happy, which meant that when I faced setbacks, I was able to process and address these and take steps to recovery back to my normal trend line. I spent the whole of the lockdown period focussing on myself and what I wanted to achieve. I found that when influencing the factors that I could control, I could stay genuinely happy and actually enjoy 2 months on my own.
The fascinating thing that I found, is that we are in control of about 40–50% of our happiness base level.
Granted, biology/genetics cater for 50% of our happiness & often mean that a lot of us sit in the space where we do face forms of depression, and sometimes these can be out of our control and require medical help. But what is reassuring, is that 40% of our state of mind can be influenced by ‘intentional activity’.
When I experience my worst states of mind, and I am not sure which thoughts are depression and which are due to factors that really are a problem and need to change, it seems that most are likely to be due to my thoughts. Only 10% of our happiness comes from life circumstances that might need to change. That is pretty crazy.
This means that we can all work towards a higher baseline of happiness. Yes, there are absolutely moments and events that can make this a lot harder than others. It is also not a linear journey. I am aware that I always need to stay on top of that 40% and work towards making it as great as possible, hence I am sitting here writing this today.
But trust me — it works.
Matthieu Ricard explains it so well here.
If I told you to try taking 10–20 minutes a day, to stay on top of your mental health for the next few months, and make the rest of 2020 as good as possible — would you give it a go?
There are so many things that you can try, but here are the things that have worked for me:
- Using a SAD lamp — get a medically approved one, and use it for at least 20 minutes a day from September
- Take Vitamin D tablets
- Get a positivity diary and commit to writing this every day — trust me, it’s actually really enjoyable
- Get out for a walk or a run, especially in the daylight
- Practise journaling. Practise recognising when you feel a negative thought. Don’t let it manifest. Challenge why you feel this way. Challenge what would happen if the opposite of that thought was true. By understanding why you feel that way, you can then understand what steps you can take to change how you feel
- Focus on the present day, yourself and what you can control. Every time you experience thoughts about the future, or what might happen if, try and stop them, ground yourself and focus on what is happening right now.
To everyone that’s had an awful week, and is nervous for the marathon ahead — it won’t always be easy, but we’ve got this. Let’s keep talking, and let’s keep helping each other raise that baseline 👏🏼😄
