Tag: grief

Grief and Bereavement.

Life isn’t as easy and smooth as we assume and expect it to be. With life comes hardships and sufferings. For some, it’s the loss of a loved one, and for others, it’s a financial crisis or maybe some sort of physical, emotional or mental abuse. Grief is linked to anything that overstresses your mind that causes extreme pain leading to heart break.

Grief is something that everyone will experience at some point in life. In simple words, grief can be defined as a reaction that an individual revert in response to any type of loss while bereavement is a type of grief that is linked to the death of the loved one.

A person under grief usually undergo five stages of it that is subject to one’ environment. However, we can culminate it in below five stages and these are:

1.Denial: It is the first stage of grief where an individual is reluctant to accept the reality that the loved one is gone to never return. It’s the most difficult phase where it’s hard to feel anything and that empty feeling is hard to explain.

2.Anger: Denial is followed by anger where you’re partly aware of what has happened and the bereaved will never come in person, and the discomfort this thought provokes, leads to resentment.

3.Negotiation: Now, here comes that negotiation part where individual attempts to postpone sadness by visualizing a “what if” scenario. Like what if it wouldn’t have turned out this way and life wouldn’t have lead despair and anguish.

4.Depression: After bargaining our feelings, our attention moves to the present reality that gives rise to the empty feeling. The stage where it is difficult to carry out day to day activities. Losing someone is very depressing and it is a normal and appropriate response in the given situation. Grief is no doubt a process of healing, so is the depression a necessary step along the way.

5.Acceptance: After going through the above stages, now comes the time to accept your reality that the loved one is gone and it is impossible to meet him/her in person. It’s the time to accept that ‘It is what is it” and that’s how I’ve to live my burying it in heart and move forward in life with a smile on your face.

Grief is indeed necessary because this is how life works. The pain of grief can often cause you to retreat into your shell and withdraw from others. But having face-to-face support is necessary. Even if you’re not comfortable talking about your feelings under normal circumstances, it’s important to express them when you’re grieving. It’s not necessary to talk about your loss all the time, but be with someone, who’s presence is just enough to lessen your burdened soul. The key is just not to isolate yourself while healing.

Mental Health amidst Covid

Mental health is health too.

The pandemic has taken a toll on mental health across the globe. Cases of depression and suicide have increased manifold ever since this coronavirus abruptly interfered with our daily life, and left us on house arrest with never-ending thoughts and endless fear. This speck of RNA has changed the entire outlook of the dynamic world we live in. Be it trade, finance, education or tourism everything seems to stand still for a while, as a consequence of which unemployment skyrocketed, which leads to utter despair and curtailed hope even further. History has never witnessed such a destructive catastrophe till date.

It was just the first wave summarised so far because the damage done by the second wave in India is nothing less than a nightmare in which hundreds and thousands of people lost their lives and scarcity of oxygen came into the picture. With deaths comes grief, anxiety, pain etc that is detrimental to mental health beyond the scope of one’s imagination.

Here are some ways to look after your mental health in these trying times:

Priorities Yourself:

Give yourself priority and listen to your instincts. Do not let others set a line for you because you’re the one who knows yourself the best. But it doesn’t mean to turn a blind eye towards others. It okay to be in your little bubble for a while. Take your time and relax.

Express your Feelings:

It’s not necessary to be expressive all the time, but try to communicate if there is something inside your head that is eating you alive. Communication is the key. Express your feelings in whatever way you want to. Be a loner but don’t be lonely.

Rebuild your routine:

Since we are still stuck with the online education situation, it’s necessary to have a profound morning routine. It will help you to align for the rest of the day and less likely to have a chance to sit ideally and overthink.

Control Overthinking:

Thinking before making any decision is appreciable but continuously thinking about something in endless circles is exhausting.
While everyone thinks over a certain point of time, but “What if and should” dominates the thinking of chronic overthinkers which is mentally draining and can put your health and total well-being at risk.
Rather than getting lost in the thoughts of what you could have, would have and should have done differently, try to become self-aware and connect to your immediate world.

Ask for help:

Be strong enough to ask for help. There are lots of counsellors and therapists available online. They will hear you out and validate your emotions. All you need to do is to summon your courage and accept yourself.

The Link Between Anxiety and Perfectionism

Everyone knows at least one perfectionist. They’re hyper-critical of their own work, almost to a fault. And according to a growing body of research, there’s a good chance they also suffer from an anxiety disorder. The very nature of a perfectionist makes them particularly susceptible to the illness.

Here’s what can be done about it: –

🔺on the surface, perfectionism doesn’t seem like such a bad thing. It keeps you focused and motivated. It also helps you consistently produce work of the highest quality.

🔺on the other hand, it also has the potential to wear significantly on one’s psyche. The impossibly-high standards perfectionists set for themselves can lead to a distorted sense of self-worth, in addition to high levels of stress. And that, in turn, can easily spiral into an anxiety disorder.

🔺It’s not just anxiety, either. Perfectionism has been linked to numerous other mental illnesses in medical research, including bipolar disorder, severe depression, and even suicidal ideation. In other words, if you’re a perfectionist and let your tendencies control you, they can literally kill you.



Worse still, there’s evidence that being a perfectionist doesn’t even afford you a significant advantage over non-perfectionists in the workplace. Per the Harvard Business Review:

“Our results showed that performance and perfectionism were not related to each other – perfectionists are not better or worse performers than non-perfectionists. Even employees high in excellence-seeking perfectionism were not better performers…taken as a whole, our results indicate that perfectionism is likely, not constructive at work.”

Scaling back on toxic perfectionism and setting healthy boundaries for yourself starts with understanding the source of your behaviour. As noted in health publication medical news today – which itself cited a landmark psychological work published several decades ago – there are three primary sources of perfectionism. These are:

 1◾Self-oriented.
You hold unrealistic expectations for yourself and are extremely critical of your own work. This could be caused by a negative experience at some point in your life, or simply a series of habits developed over time and linked to mental illness.
2◾ Socially-prescribed.
You believe that your peers are extremely critical and that you must be perfect in order to gain their approval.
3◾Other-oriented.
You set impossibly high standards for the people around you. This form of perfectionism isn’t exactly relevant to our discussion here, though it can occasionally overlap with one of the other two.
🔹Positive self-talk is the second step in overcoming toxic perfectionism. Understanding how your own tendencies manifest will help you structure it in the right way. Whenever a toxic belief or thought manifests in your mind, counter it with a positive one.
In other words, be compassionate towards yourself. Understand that your self-worth is not tied to your performance in the workplace or your ability to turn out flawless work. You have value as a person beyond your output.
And if self-talk alone isn’t enough to help you, know that there’s no shame in seeking help from a trained professional. Everyone could use therapy now and then.