It’s good to find our way back to our child-like, kinder selves

THIS WEEK is Mental Health Awareness Week but, in my mind, mental health is one of those phrases that maybe doesn’t have the meaning that it should.

I know when I was stressed, anxious and burning out, I wouldn’t have said I had a mental health issue. I thought I had to be a lot worse than that. Now, thankfully, I feel I have more awareness of the issue, and in fact mental health, to me, is as important as physical health

– it’s something that needs to be on our radar all of the time; it’s something that we need to cherish and nurture.

When I became aware that it was Mental Health Awareness Week, I was heartened to hear that this year’s theme was kindness. Kindness has been underpinning a lot of my writing this year, particularly since the untimely and sad death of Caroline Flack, but what occurred to me now, was how much kindness to ourselves is connected to our own mental health, and how I see so often that when we become kinder to ourselves, we then automatically seem to become kinder and more understanding to those around us.

It’s often easy to fall into the trap of thinking that being kind is something that we have to learn, that it is a skill that we can acquire or become good at. However, I don’t see it like that at all, what I see is that we are all born with kindness within us, but that somewhere along the way it gets buried under life. Of course one way to see this is to look at children, examples of our former selves before life happens. On a quick search I found the internet littered with examples of children being kind to those around them. We were all once children, we all have kindness at our core.

So what takes us away from our kinder selves? In my mind there can only ever be one thing, and that is what we are thinking in any given moment. I remember, when I was burning out, I did so much insecure thinking about myself. I was harsh, overly critical, I didn’t feel good enough and thought I was failing. I thought everyone was criticising me, I compared myself to others and I was fearful of doing the wrong thing. This in turn made me critical and judgmental of those around me. All of this thought seemed so real to me, it was such a strong feeling that I took notice of it, I made decisions based upon it, it was like a lens that I looked at life through. I felt like I had no capacity to be kind to anyone else, but then I wasn’t being kind to myself either.

We can’t control the thinking that pops into our head, no more than we can control the weather. But what I have become aware of, is that when we notice the unhelpful thinking that is taking us away from that kinder feeling, it loses its grip, and when we see that type of thinking can’t tell us anything, the easier it becomes to simply stop paying attention to it and let it go.

Interestingly, when this happens, we naturally return to a kinder feeling. Our feelings in many ways are like an internal barometer that we have, letting us know what thinking we are in and gently guiding us back to our kinder nature.

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