Ego Checks And Balances

I found this article on Quora and thought it would be great info for people with a mild mental illness as we nicotine addicts tend to have in my opinion. Addiction is a mental illness, like it or not. We have to be responsible and check our motives.

You find yourself getting caught up in your own little world. Your world becomes more about you, what you can do, how YOU are effecting others, what YOU are UNIQUELY experiencing.

That is the hint. Don't get caught up in yourself and when you do, be aware.

Refocus away from yourself.

Take a break. Step away from your activity, project, circumstance, present company or people you are around or the location you are in.

If you have been stuck around others, go have alone time. If you have been alone, go visit a friend. If you have been working, take time off. If you have been inactive, go do a physical activity.

Make an appointment with your doctor, to see if you need to increase your med dose, add an anti-psych, or a stronger medication. We are not doctors in a 12 12-step program, and it is an outside issue. 

Play an instrument, read a book, listen to music.

Meditate in the dark. Visualize a place you would love to be if you could be anywhere and ANYTHING was possible.

This is my own little secret place to give you an example. I imagine myself being able to stop time. I get transported to a small seed-size container. It's dark, and I am inside. I am suspended in a black, sparkly liquid that I can float in, and this seed is transported to my husband's jeans pocket. I go wherever he goes. safe and protected, on hold until we have arrived at the new location. I just let him carry me and I am just free to experience infinite time, incapsulated.

This is when I usually fall asleep. But the idea is to create your own idea of contentment and create the place where you feel the happiest.

Other things:

Go to a room and just lay down on the floor and feel your breaths.

Talk to a therapist.

Eliminate some stressors, turn off your phone, go camping, change your environment. Go to a place you can eat and sleep well.

Go stay with a family member, hire a health aid to spend some time with you, ask a friend to come and stay and help.

Spend time with a pet, paint, draw, write in a journal, go to the gym, go for a run.

Unplug.

Get a massage, take a bath, smell some flowers, or just go outside and sit in the sun. Or go to a tanning bed.

But the real thing is this:

This is all just coping with your anxiety.

If you are starting to experience psychosis, you are experiencing too much emotion.

This could be fear, pain, sadness, shame, anger, joy, or passion.

When the brain is subject to the intensity of any emotion for too long, stable mental functioning gets lost.

So the focus can be on a short-term escape of the emotion with a coping mechanism, but the work has to be done on a much deeper level.

You have to truly process what you are going thru. You go somewhere safe, and just feel. You go thru the emotion for all it is. Try to understand it, how much is yours and how much is it someone else's?Where is it coming from? Is is tied to an experience in your past? Is it an emotion you have recently had, or one you hate or an emotion you never feel?

Quit all obligations and work on you. Release all the pulls others have on you and simply go thru the motions of the activity before you.

Don't think. Exist and when the emotion rises, do nothing but feel the pain, the sadness or the horror. This is about taking the time. Having nothing but time to allow your body the physical sensations of the feeling.

The ache of pain, the heaviness of shame, the overwhelming burden of sadness, the paralysis of fear and the utter sickness of despair.

Each time you go here, it gets easier to leave this emotional place. You torment yourself until you realize this place is not you. You can sense the difference between you and the emotion.

You LEARN to feel and then move on. To move to a different feeling or take a break from feelings.

That part of you, the you that is separate from how we feel and what thoughts we have is always truly safe, loved and protected. Because it was created and exists. It is real and able to learn and grow. Your faith in you, separate from your feelings grows everytime you leave your darkest pits.

No matter what happens or how many times you may experience any form of psychosis, your emotions are becoming more and more under your control.

They do not have to change your behavior. You can go to your own safe place and feel. You can take a break. You can dip in again, or better shield yourself against taking on the emotions of others.

You can take on what you can and protect your health.

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Karl Obolensky Martell, Psychiatry from Doctor of Medicine

Answered May 14

A few examples, after having suffered both “mild psychosis” and a full blown out psychotic eposide that ended up with me jumping down a 20 feet bridge with my head first, towards asphalt.

For example: I hear my mother screaming for help as she’s harassed by the people I’m in trouble with. They had “told me” that I had to admit to X and Y or they would rape her. When I hear her screaming for help I rush down and out … and my mother is reading the newspaper, completely fine.