By Gill Seaton-Jardine, Counsellor/Psychotherapist, and Louisa Magnussen

One of the difficulties I often hear about in my practice room is trying to manage changing frames of mind, mood, perception and reaction. If your mood is stable, responses and reactions will also be stable, but if it is constantly unstable decisions will be hard to make. If you wake in the morning feeling calm and in control, then plans will be manageable but if you wake anxious and unsure, plans may seem overwhelming and perhaps impossible to pursue. It can be so hard to understand why something that made perfect sense yesterday, now seems a struggle, and decisions about whether to cancel everything or nothing become an enormous challenge.

Talking to another about this can prove unhelpful as it is hard for the other to understand why you are feeling this way when perhaps yesterday you had been comfortable with it all. They might be cross or impatient because, of course, your change of mind about what you want or plan to do, may well affect what they were planning to do. This effect can then lead to a decision not to make any plans but rather to stay home which can then lead to feelings of isolation and loneliness.

Now we start to see some of the effects of living with the changing landscape of mental health issues.

So, what kind of conditions could create such landscapes? The first is perhaps anxiety. An anxious state of mind can be paralysing. There are so many aspects of every day life causing anxiety, for example health, finances, family, employment and home. Each one of these is complex and challenging in itself and there could be a whole article, or indeed a book, focussing on each of them but let’s just take one of them to consider, that of finances. This subject invariably causes anxiety and worry to every age group post childhood.

Young people often have the pressure of trying to move out of their parents’ homes and find somewhere affordable to rent, while perhaps wanting and trying to start saving to buy their own home. The aspects that can cause extra anxiety are lack of space, trying to live by parents’ rules, shortage of money to go out and of course frustration at the whole situation. If you are also dealing with a mental health condition this situation can become overwhelming.

An older group eg 30s/40s could be trying to provide for a family. Space again can be an issue, ever increasing mortgage/rent payments plus costs of maintaining the flat/house all lead to anxiety. Once again, add other mental health conditions and the situation can feel, or become unmanageable – a frightening prospect including the fear of losing your home.

Then of course we have the older folk. They may be living comfortably with family members knowing that they won’t have to move again and knowing that they are secure where they are. Then there are the others, the ones who don’t have family support and are trying to get by on a pension which needs to pay for everything – levels of anxiety for them can also be through the roof.

It may seem that I have gone right off the subject here, but I wanted to give you just one example of how we all, no matter what age group we are in, experience worry and anxiety, born of the ups and downs of life itself and its challenges. I have used finances as an example but there are many more themes to explore. The ups and downs of life do not start with having mental health conditions. They start with ordinary challenges of life, that we all experience. These ups and downs can become much more extreme and be exacerbated if we are dealing with a mental health condition/s as well.

Just today’s thoughts,

Take care all.