Short messages on Mental health, stress and anxiety issues from Respect Yourself, the guidance site for young people to help make good decisions in life.
To distract yourself from a bad mood, immerse yourself in comedy and humour. Watch a funny movie or TV show. Listen to a favourite comedian’s routine. Read a funny book or magazine. Find something that will make you forget yourself and laugh out loud for a while.
When you are feeling badly, you are also often feeling out of control. Your internal state is often a reflection of your external state; when your environment is messy, you feel messy inside. Time spent organising your space is time spent building up your sense of control and accomplishment.
Put relationship situations into perspective: “I feel like I will have trouble trusting again. However, I know that one person out of the millions that surround me every day caused this. There will be others worthy of my trust.”
Did something good happen to you today? Write it in a journal. If you have a troublesome thought, write it in your journal along with a comment about how you’ll overcome this.
A good way to distract yourself productively is to do something to better organise your life. Tidy your living or working spaces, your computer, your wardrobe or schedule regular exercise into your life. Cleaning your house can feel incredibly empowering.
Find a personally appropriate balance between dealing directly with negative feelings and moods, and escaping from them, in order to have the best chance of healing.
We can get caught up in our secondary emotions around pain such as anger or anxiety, while blocking our most primary and important feelings, such as hurt or sadness. Sometimes you can experience relief when allowing your most primary and painful emotions to express themselves.
Focus on where you are now. What have you overcome? What resources have you used to get past the pain? Rather than venting, sink deeper into your most primary feelings about the situation and allow yourself to really experience them.
A certain amount of learning to accept negative emotions is healing. The less you struggle against negative emotions, the less you have to feel badly about. At the same time, sometimes negative emotions can be overwhelming, and you really need a break from them.
“Distraction” goes against normal wisdom – that you have to face your troubling emotions before you can escape them. Distraction is nothing more than a temporary respite from negative moods. It isn’t a permanent fix and shouldn’t be thought of as one.