Signs Your Mental Health is Balancing Out: How to Recognize Positive Changes

Firstly, I want to express my gratitude to everyone for the supportive thoughts during the week I missed. It was a challenging time for me, as I had a family emergency and then tested positive for Strep. This situation is a fitting introduction to today's post because it highlights how my mental health can quickly decline in response to stressors, and how I struggle to bounce back.

As many of you may know, experiencing a family emergency often leads to grief, and for me, grief can be an all-encompassing experience. It can intensify my symptoms and make it difficult for me to find motivation to do anything. During these periods, I often find myself spending most of the day in bed, feeling lethargic and unmotivated.

It took me around two weeks to start feeling like myself again, and even then, I wasn't back to my full capacity. When my mental health takes a nosedive, I also tend to lose my appetite and struggle to eat regularly. So, for me, one of the signs that my mental health is improving is when I start to feel hungry and eat several times a day, even if it's not always the healthiest food.

I want to quickly touch on the stages of grief, as they are often the reason why people who do not have chronic depression experience their own depressive episodes. As we all know, the five stages are denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. What many people don't realize is that there is technically a sixth stage: shock. Sometimes, when a situation that triggers grief occurs, there can be shock before denial. This stage can also arise due to the suddenness of the event, or because it happens at a particularly bad time when there are many other stressors in one's life.

However, not all medical professionals agree that shock is a true stage of grief especially since it would actually come before denial. Personally, I believe that this just shows that grief is different for everyone; this is the reason I do not call anyone in the field of mental health an "expert" as I do not believe that anyone can truly be an expert when everyone reacts to things differently.

It is also a common misconception that you must go through all of the stages, or that each stage must be a lengthy process. For some people, the stages can be microblips or may not seem to happen at all. To provide an example, I asked my mother if she was okay with me using a recent experience.

On April 14, 2023, my dad called me to let me know that my aunt who is my mother's sister-in-law had gotten ahold of him and let him know that my uncle (her brother) had passed that morning. The grief hit me very hard in that two-minute phone call, and I had a moment of shock before I hit the anger stage. In this case, I was in shock because my uncle was several years younger than my mother and I was not prepared to hear that he had passed; especially since it's only just been over a year since we lost my cousin. My anger was not due to the fact that he passed, but due to the fact that it was placed on my shoulders to tell my mother. We have since gotten a hold of my aunt, but in that first moment I couldn't believe that I was not only receiving this bombshell but also because I had to deliver the blow.

As I walked to tell her, my anger fizzled out into sadness and the beginning stages of denial because he just couldn't be gone yet. We weren't even sure at that moment how or why. My denial passed quite quickly, as I watched hers set in. Thankfully, my children were near by and I explained to them what had happened; they went in and laid with her as my denial came back to me because it just couldn't be true. This is a perfect example of how grief is different. Sometimes you can jump stages, and other times you don't have any stages at all. I have not gone through bargaining because due to current circumstances, I can't find a reason as to why I would other than for my mother.

My depression stage over this was more of a combination of seeing how much it affected my mother, and getting sick at the same time, just as Marcevolution was coming back to life. I took my small leave because I needed to be there for my mother during that time, and because I still couldn't believe it. I hadn't seen my uncle much in my life, but we spent Christmas a few years ago with him; it was actually a surprise! He had no idea we were coming, as I had made the plan with my aunt. There is still so much love for him in my heart though, but the type of relationship we had made my grief very quick.

Now I digress, people are different and your signs or symptoms could be different from mine; so the general overview when you know your mental health is balancing out is that you feel like you're you again. As I balanced back out, I got back into fully being focused on the blog and started eating again; I also started to get back up and out.

All in all, everyone's recovery signs are different; but when you start noticing that you are doing the things you enjoy then you know you're headed back in the right direction. No matter what anyone says: if you start to recognize that YOU feel that it might be too long of a decline, force yourself to do things and eventually it will become habit and you will see and feel better. Take breaks during that time if you need it, but you can and will get there.