Mental Health First Aid Kit: In Summary
For the last post in this short series, I thought it might be helpful to offer some alternative resources that could support you in moments of feeling overwhelmed. Though we’ve explored a few often‑mentioned techniques to help you ground yourself, calm your nervous system, and create some space between you and difficult thoughts and feelings, perhaps they just didn’t click for you.
If this is the case, I’ve included some links at the end of this post that you might have better luck with.
And if my suggestions haven’t helped, try not to be too disheartened. It can be easy to grab at the first couple of options you come across and feel like you’re failing if they don’t seem to work instantly. Finding the right approach (or combination of approaches) can take time – if you haven’t hit upon the perfect method straight away, that’s okay. In fact, I’d argue that being unsuccessful can be valuable, because a little experimentation can go a long way.
I encourage you to be patiently curious about yourself and about what works and what doesn’t.
When things are hard, we often wish for quick fixes – I know I do. We don’t want to feel uncomfortable or overwhelmed; we just want the feeling to stop. This is a deeply human and understandable position to take. Yet, if we can change our relationship with our experience, and adopt a stance of compassionate curiosity towards ourselves, we open up space to truly learn, grow, and change.
If you’re someone who has always had a noisy internal critic, being kind to yourself in these moments can be particularly difficult. Even looking for different ways of supporting yourself can cause that critic to kick into high gear – “You’re pathetic, you shouldn’t be feeling like this, it’s weakness to look or ask for help – just get on with it.”
I’d argue that recognising when you’re struggling and looking for help is not weakness but strength. Self‑compassion can feel alien when we’ve had little experience of receiving compassion from others or offering it to ourselves. Like many of the methods suggested in this series, it can take patience and practice to find something that helps. Curious self‑compassion doesn’t mean ignoring what’s going on for you or pushing through because the feeling will eventually go away. Nor does it mean you can’t look for things that might help. Rather, it means paying attention, drawing on sources of support that can help you through the difficult moments, and then, when you’re feeling stronger, reflecting on what happened.
In the next few posts, we’ll explore some of these ideas more fully. For now, I hope you can explore ways to be kind to yourself and be open to the possibility that different things may help at different times. Here are a few resources that might help:
Calm Blog | Calm your mind. Change your life.
Anxiety - Every Mind Matters - NHS
