Triggers and Self Harm

hello@mikebell.io (Mike Bell) — Wed, 30 Mar 2016 08:46:52 +0000

Recently my anxiety is triggering more and more frequently. Last night two men were arguing outside Sainsburys at Oxford Road, it triggered my anxiety, my heart began racing, eyes twitching and I became the monster I hate.

Generally I tend to cope well with anxiety but when I get triggered I find it very difficult to function. I know the reasons for this, I know that it’s my situation and stress that makes things worse. I’m trying to cope with anxiety attacks but it’s difficult. My brain just regresses into being an soup of anger and sadness that spirals out of control till I want to punch a wall or generally do myself harm, pain seems to control it somehow.

I’ve not really spoken about self harm before, it’s not something I ever considered myself suffering from. Until last year when I was lucky enough to be at Manchester Geek Mental Help Week where Chad @kitation was speaking. She was quite frank and opened my eyes to the world of self harm. It comes in so many different forms. Mine isn’t drastic, it’s not life threatening but it’s painful and the pain helps. I bite my thumb to the point where I’ve teared the nail off, not just a small bit, it’s all gone. It’s painful, there’s a reason why you see people use it as torture, the pain lingers for days until it heals, it’s a kind of burning pulsating pain. The worst thing is I can’t help it, the damage is done before I realise it. I wish I could stop, with the wedding coming up it’s not going to be a pretty sight when people ask to see my wedding ring.

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Traveling with Anxiety

hello@mikebell.io (Mike Bell) — Thu, 28 Jan 2016 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve been fortunate in my life to be able to travel around a lot, both in the UK and the World. While growing up our family used to go camping a lot, later on we started to go abroad more. I love traveling, meeting new people and experiencing their cultures is just amazing.

As I grew older things started to change. I think this started around 7 or 8 years ago. I started to become anxious about traveling. I realise now that this was the beginning of a battle with anxiety and depression that would lie under the surface for many years.

I don’t really understand why this happened, traveling is something that is part of my life.

One year I was supposed to be taking a family holiday with my brother and parents. We were going skiing, those who have known me for at least 5 minutes know how much I love it. I couldn’t sleep the night before, I was sweaty and shaking, at the time I didn’t realise that I was having a full blown panic attack. I couldn’t go, the feeling of sickness overwhelmed me to the point of no return. To this day my Dad recalls how upset he felt going skiing without me. This has been something that then started to occur more and more.

I hate my anxiety, it has such a tight hold on me when I travel. It was such a big pain when I was applying to Wunder. I knew I’d have to travel way more than I normally do. On the one hand this is great but on the other it’s tough to deal with the physical and mental side effects (oh yeah they’re fun!).

The physical side effects of anxiety for me are terrible, it can range from not sleeping, panic attacks to nasty bowel movements. It’s pretty horrible but I love traveling so I manage as best as I can.

As part of my thought process for joining Wunder I figured that this was going to be an opportunity that I couldn’t resist, traveling and meeting people is very important to me so I decided to not let that be a factor in my application.

While I’ve come to terms with my depression and overcome it for the most part, anxiety just doesn’t seem to want to go away. I’m slowly learning how to cope with it. I’ve found the following things help quite a lot:

Planning times for all connections.
Keeping registration documents handy.
Using TripIt for regular reminders about traveling.
Making sure my bag is always packed with useful tools e.g. Power bank for charging usb devices, laptop charger.
Finding out if someone I know will be around.

All these things help streamline my anxiety, they don’t get rid of it but they help.

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Anxiety on Mike Bell - Blog & Stuff

Triggers and Self Harm

Traveling with Anxiety