When your heart is no longer in sync with your mind, when a relationship is grinding your heart so hard that your chest hurts physically, don’t be blind optimists, know that it is time to quit.
Don’t hold unto that which will destroy your heart and your mental health.
Listening to a well-versed presentation on mental wellbeing and how happiness is the key to a healthy mind at the annual Pride Women Conference yesterday, I was truly enriched and some issues I had tried very much to understand was put in some perspective for me.
In this COVID-19 time, I have been so stressed that I often imagine what lies ahead, sometimes my mind has gone so far in thought that I feel fear and anxiety being the commander-in-chief of my mental state. I try so hard to stand and wave it all off that it is nothing. I try to be dismissive of all these many and varied thought processes. However, I find myself still in that state of being scared, of feeling lonely, empty and most times angry with myself for feeling that way. I was so afraid I was losing my mind I had to reach out to friends and family. Narrating my ordeal, I found out that some of the people I spoke to have same issues. I took a deep breath and silently asked does this mean a lot of folks are also scared?
The human mind is very fragile and can slip at the slightest shift in given situations like in this COVID-19 times that things have gone south for most folks that I know. Some have lost jobs, sources of income, homes, even lost lives directly or directly.
Our mental state is as important as us, in fact it is because every thought and action generates from the mind and when it is bugged with so much – more than it can take, then a break down occurs.
Are we constantly thinking we are immune from mental break down? Oh well let me surprise you… No one is. I said no one, so quit playing super man/woman, we are all fragile and can breakdown at any given time if we do not recognise it on time and do something about it instead of being in denial or begin to “cast and bind”. Do not get me wrong; spirituality is the equilibrium to life. I think we need stay hopeful and positive all the time.
The mind is a powerful; we must learn how to control it. We must learn to be in a state that puts us at a constant level of balance and strength to enable us cope with the hard challenges of life.
Take charge of your thought patterns, there are no protocols to how the thoughts will flow but you can control how it’s processed and its output. These are some of the advice from the conference speakers.
Run from anger because when you bottle up so much it goes to disrupt the normal flow of the body workings and start to generate things like depression, cancers and other severe illnesses. Walk away from anger…
My Take…
Above all else, guard your heart, for everything you do flows from it. Proverb 4.23
We must take care not to overload the heart with toxicities of life. When love is not working take a walk, don’t hang in there because your heart can’t take much. When you think the burden is too heavy, drop it and give yourself some break, nothing in life is cast in stone. COVID-19 has taught us that there is no special timetables anymore, live now and worry less about tomorrow. Know the difference between want and need to avoid unnecessary pressure. Learn to take care of you because you are all you have got. Family is everything but you are not everything to family, life will surely go on with or without you.
Embrace who you are because truly and truly the world you are trying to please, are not watching.
Get enough sleep and eat healthy so you can nourish the mind, body and soul! As one of the Doctor’s at the just concluded Pride Women conference advised. Be in love in truth and not in deception, like my mentor with a glow in his eyes always calls his wife “IJELOVE M” Find your “Ijelove” and give your life a treat so in you others can be happy.
OK folks as always I love you for reading only this time I love you a little bit more than usual. Lol!
Till I write again, I love you for reading.
Ada.
Adaobi O. Alex-Oni is an Honorary Ambassador and a recipient of the Nelson Mandela Leadership Award by the African Youth Parliament. A broadcaster and writer, she is the convener of the ROWEAD conference. A social and women’s rights activist, she is a promoter of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. For more information, visit her website www.rowead.org