19 Jul How to find inspiration when you’re completely lacking in inspiration
As regular readers would know, despite being known as “Dr Happy”, I am, quite often, quite unhappy!
For most of my adult life I’ve experienced significant mental ill-health, mostly depression and anxiety. Thankfully I don’t feel like that every day, but it does mean that at times, I really struggle just to do anything much at all.
But even if you don’t have the sort of mental ill-health I do, we all have bad days, and so today I thought I’d share a few tips for finding inspiration when inspiration seems ever so hard to find.
- use social media for good! There’s lots of talk about how social media is bad for our mental health and there’s no doubt that at times, it can be highly problematic. But like pretty much everything in life, there are pros and cons, and social media is a platform where you can find many people do many great things. So search through your feed or search for new profiles / pages where the content is, for you, motivating and inspiring
- search the internet more generally for the good stuff! Along the same lines as the that just stated, there’s a plethora of content out there, easily available with a quick search, not all of which is great but much of which can be inspiring and conducive to boosting happiness. Search for stories of resilience, or stories of hope. Type in something like “show me examples of people who’ve overcome hardships [or who’ve overcome depression, anxiety etc]” and see what you can learn from others who’ve been through something similar to you
- pick up an old book you’ve enjoyed or head to your local bookstore and wander through the self-help section. If you’re a reader, then you’ll probably already know that there are thousands of wonderful books written in different ways for different people on different topics and so there’s no doubt there’ll be at least one out there that might spark some inspiration in you
- reach out to a friend. Too many of us think we have to do it all on our own. But we don’t; and we can’t. So call that friend or family member or better still, meet up with them in real life and use the principle that “a problem shared is a problem halved”
- and finally, if you really think you need it, seek professional help. We all need professional help at times, whether it’s a mechanic to fix our car or a dentist to treat a toothache; well, seeing a clinical psychologist (or someone similar) is, or should be, no different
So there you go. I hope, as always, you find something useful and helpful in here and if you do, please feel free to share it with anyone else you know who might find something of benefit in these few words.