There are a million different ways to get trapped in your brain. To get purely engulfed in thought. You do it when your watching the football, you do it when you are engaged in conversation and you even do it when you are hungry. When you are 100% focused on one thing you can often not be able to think of anything else. When you need a drink (a soft one, obvs!) you can get completely distracted by anything you are doing because you are only focused on one thing, despite doing the essay you need to be writing or the book you are trying to read.
The problem with our brains being susceptible to this way of pure and intense focus on one thing can be brilliant. It can make you be productive and efficient and brilliantly focussed. However, when the thought you are deeply submerged in is one of self-destruction, it can become dangerous and even life threating. Self-preservation becomes a quiet voice in the background until you cant hear it at all over the thoughts about risking your safety due to the overwhelming loudness of these damaging thoughts.
When one is suicidal or wanting to self-harm they can become only able to hear the thoughts that would help in the destruction of their well-being and there is no doubt about how difficult that can be to shift.
However, we can use the same intense focus to shift the thoughts onto something else. If we mindfully concentrate on different topics we can reverse the intense need to do harm to ourselves. These new topics have to be focussed on in a certain way, and that is what I am here to explain.
If we say we are trying to distract ourselves from these thoughts then we are using the participate skill of the mindfulness rules outlined by Marsha Linehan who founded the therapy known as Dialectical Behaviour Therapy which teaches people with impulsive and self-damaging behaviours to not to be led by these thought but to be focused on being led by mindfulness in everyday life.
Mindfulness often feels too much, to complex and too challenging to people, but using the what and how skills Linehan lays out, it could not be simpler.
What- Observe, describe, participate
How– Non-judgementally, one-mindfully and effectively
Today we are just going to focus on the participate skill and how we can make it work to the best of our ability.
When Linehan says participate, she means to throw yourself, whole-heartedly, into whatever activity you might be doing and by using the how skills you are going to do this activity with no judgement (in this case it means you are going to be openminded to trying the activity you are doing), you are going to do it one-mindfully (which means that you are only going to do one thing at a time and totally focus on it) and you are going to be as effective as possible (you are going to do something you think will actually work, not just pick at random as there’s very little point in doing something you hate to try and distract yourself).
With all that in mind, here is a list of my top 25 things, in no particular order) that I enjoy doing to distract myself from dangerous thoughts so if you get stuck, you can have a look here and see what you might like to try as something new and something that might work to change your thought process…
- Cook or bake something (even if you give it to a friend)
- Listen to music and dance or sing to your hearts content.
- Call or facetime a friend or relative that you are close to and ask for support
- Call or facetime someone you don’t know so well and talk about easy topics to distract
- Do your hair or make up (even if you aren’t going anywhere!)
- Play a game on your phone
- Write a poem or story
- Scroll one social media
- Tidy your living space
- Go shopping with £20 and see what bargains you can find for ONLY the £20
- Clean out your handbag/rucksack/suitcase/etc
- Re-arrange your living space
- Re-arrange your kitchen cupboards and drawers
- Get creative
- Make lists for your next supermarket shop
- Look though pictures from years ago and maybe even put them upon a wall
- Go for a walk, even just to the corner shop to get a drink
- Do a random act of kindness
- Have a bath or a shower and pamper yourself
- Make your favourite snack and eat it
- Imagine what you would spend money on if you won the lottery (my mum does this to fall asleep!)
- Window shop online
- Have a nap
- Read something (a book, blog or article) that will make you smile
- Watch videos online that you think will make you laugh
Those are just a quick list of things you could do to distract yourself while you are in an emotionally volatile space but please remember to do these things whole heartedly so they have much more of a chance of working. If something isn’t working after half an hour, try a different thing on the list. Just don’t give up because the one you have tried isn’t working for you after five minutes.
What other things would you add to this list? Comment below for to give people more ideas!
Tal x
Tali Mentality 