@maninayton - Does Mental Illness Make It Hard To Get Out Of Bed?
Please note that this has been double posted - There were problems with Streemian - Apologies.
I have just read an article on themighty.com website written by Ellyse Rafferty (see the link in 'Sources', below) in which she describes a strategy she uses to prompt herself to get out of bed on days when she is suffering from mental illness.
If, like me, you suffer from depression and you wake up somedays just not wanting to face the world this simple method may be of some help.
Ellyse Rafferty calls it the 'One Hour Rule'. It is simple. Within one hour of waking up, you have to be out of bed. As she puts it:-
I tell myself: Just try. Get out of bed and get up. If it doesn’t work, and in an hour you feel worse, then you can go back to bed. And sometimes, I will. And that’s OK. But I make myself try. Try to taste the day. I don’t have to like it, I just have to do it.
By forcing yourself to get up and "Try to taste the day" you may find that once moving, things start to happen as a domino effect. You are up so you may as well have a shower. After doing that you might as well have some breakfast. Ok, I've done all that so I might as well go and do that little chore I had planned. And so on. One thing leads to another.
Of course, you will have days when it doesn't work and you find yourself back in bed within an hour or so. But it doesn't matter. At least you have the knowledge that you have given it your best shot. I'll leave the final word to Ellyse Rafferty:-
"There is so much power in baby steps. You can do a lot with sixty minutes."
"You are fighting. You still got out of bed."
I have collated a series of posts I did on Mindfulness into an ebook which can be downloaded here for the low, low price of 0.100 SBD
