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Each year the month of May is dedicated as Mental Health Awareness Month.
This year is no different, but it maybe needed highlighting more than almost any year in recent history. It's been a year of isolation, disconnection, working from home, and loss of routine. Since March of 2020 the world has been in a state of displacement, people haven't been able to see one another, go to work, or carry out their normal daily lives. This has had a huge effect on mental wellbeing across the globe.
Alongside this displaced year, we live in a digital age, where phones are always in hands, and information is always on tap. It's a great move forward in human knowledge and development, but it is not without it's costs.
One of these costs is the impact on mental health, particularly linked to social media, along with disrupted sleeping, and reduced attention span. This is something I personally have found to be a big challenge. Most noticeably it is tough to put the phone down and get to sleep, it's difficult to get out of bed in the morning, and it's nearly impossible to focus on a task for longer than 10 minutes without picking up the phone.
I've found something that has hugely improved the first two of these problems for me, and helped impact on the third; an alarm clock.
The humble alarm clock has been around for quite some time now, originally we had people with a pocket watches who would go around and knock on your windows in the morning to let you know what time it is, then we had clocks in our homes putting these poor people out of jobs, and now, well we all use our phones.
And there's the root problem, we use our phones. This means that we just have to have them in the bedroom, they have to be accessible from the bed. We can't get by without having our precious device within 3 feet of us almost constantly. The knock on effect of this "need" is that we aren't disconnecting from devices, it's all too easy to scroll through social media until you feel sleepy, it's entirely possible in a year where we don't have our normal daily routines to easily lose the first hour of our day scrolling when we wake up. And we justify this to ourselves by saying that we have to have our phones in the bedroom for the alarm clock.
Well we don't and we should take some responsibility in acknowledging this, the humble alarm clock still works just fine, and it means that our phones can be left in another room overnight. This prevents a lot of the issues from being possible; no blue light keeping you awake, no late night scrolling, no checking notifications as soon as your eyes open.
Now what to do with the hour you've just gained before you go to sleep? How do you now start your day? How will my twitter followers cope without me through the night?
It's simple, set yourself a routine. Read that book you've always been meaning to get through, write a diary to reflect on the day you've had and think about the days you've got ahead, talk to your partner instead of sitting next to each other scrolling through two separate feeds. These things are all good for you, your mental well being, and your relationship. Utilise the time.
In the morning, give yourself the first hour of your day, take it back! It's yours! learn how to make yourself a proper coffee from the beans to the cup, read an article about something you're interested in, cook yourself a good breakfast, you could even go for a walk. It's how you start that sets the tone for the rest of your day.
Starting and ending the day without the constant distraction will undoubtedly help improve your ability to focus, your brain will become more accustomed to spending time focusing on a task, or at the very least will know what it's like not to be glued to a phone. This will help with concentration, productivity, happiness and wellbeing, things that ultimately make life enjoyable.
Don't worry about your twitter followers, they'll still be there in the morning.
