@amiablePeace77

What are you currently doing to maintain your psychological health and stability? I do daily meditation, yoga, exercise, eat healthy diet.

How do you take care of yourself when you're hurting emotionally? I try to sleep more because the two are often tied together. Even if I do not sleep it gives me time to sort things out. 

Ok I really have a lot to say; gonna stand at my lecture podium; I have much to say about psychology and medicine today.

In 2014 I went to doc apptmts tests it was all I did for half a year; I had so many symptoms. In the end the only conclusion was stress.

Psychology and medicine are artificially separated; they should not be.

Depression and anxiety, all psych problems are devalued below "real" illnesses. Here is a little secret from multiple hospitalizations including ICU stays: when the patient is seriously ill an anxiety med, usually a benzodiazepine, is a standard order. It comforts and calms the patient; this often leads to better outcomes!

Pain, emotional or physical, is all created within the brain according to modern pain theory. Pain is pain regardless of the cause! https://tinyurl.com/PainBrainConnection

All this stress unrelieved then caused many many "real" illnesses so yes that stress and anxiety lead straight to illnesses medical doctors treat.

@amiablePeace77

Good post for us to learn from.

I realised that most people, myself including, do not conscientiously know when to seek help.

There is often a very fine line between when we are able to keep up with the stress of a challenging situation/episode/time, versus when we need external help.

For me, I reflected and realised:

1. Many of us know the symptoms or ills from stress or when health is poor. Few of us actually learnt about or were taught how to seek help before a situation that we are dealing with, spirals out of control.

2. We often do not learn of appropriate coping techniques or behaviours until its too late. When struggling with pain, grief, loss or fear, the anguish from emotional torment can be unbearable. Any escape, regardless of method or lasting effective, no longer matter. The suffering seeks a quick escape, and any means that may facilitate one becomes a way out - or regrettably, becomes a new problem.

3. "No one knows. And no one will understand." This is another common thought that most of us would have. Our isolation already hurts, and our suffering compounds, thinking that no one will understand us or perhaps fearing even more, that someone we know in the physical world would come to know of our pain, weaknesses and imperfection.

As such, maybe emotional band aids addressing our individual and respective limitations or inadequacies in the above broad areas would help.

I am personally trying to improve myself in the above areas, and I realised it is important to have and maintain a healthy and diversified social support systems in my life; good colleagues at work, a couple of close friends from college, friends with young children whom I can learn from in my parenting journey, and now friends online in the 7 Cups community.

It may take a couple of minutes for some and a little longer for others, but perhaps writing out some ideas of what we should and can do during possible scenarios of stress may be helpful for us to identify the type and sort of band aid we need.

Between preserving our Pride and resolving our Pain, do always try to strive for the latter.

@amiablePeace77 this is something I don't handle very well. I try to hide from this, smile and ignore my feelings. Sometimes it works but sometimes. It ends up exploding into deep drspair. I haven't exactly worked out feelings/emotions properly yet. So yeah I'm not great with emotiona pains