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Episode 7: Tips for Feeling Better on Low Energy and Bad Mental Health Days
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Good morning y buenos dias. To my lovely friends all over the world welcome to the Noggin Podcast, a cozy mental health advocacy podcast with me, Kyarra Keele. It genuinely means so much to me that you’re here.
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On this podcast we provide a safe, loving space advocating for diverse mental health dialogue in the community for people of color, educating about marginalized mental illnesses, and providing resources for mental health recovery. If that's what you’re looking for, welcome home.
If you’ve already listened to me introduce myself briefly in a different episode, you can skip ahead about 40 seconds because I value your time. But, if you’ve never stumbled across me before, again I’m Kyarra Keele. I’m a 4-time published author, healthy lifestyle blogger of 6 years, and an aspiring polyglot currently learning 4 languages, which are Spanish, and American Sign Language and I’m also gradually learning French and Arabic. I’m a mental health ambassador working as a liaison between the community and my local health center to educate, support and progress the mental health dialogue. I’ve been navigating the mental health system for about a decade now and I’m extremely passionate about mental health service and advocacy because I believe that no one deserves to be hurting or feeling alone in this universe. I hope this compassionate podcast will cheer you along on your good days and offer a cozy and supportive haven for you on your more difficult days. Which chances are, if you’re listening to this particular episode, you may be having one of those days. In that case, I’m extra glad that you’re here with me and with all of us.
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Bueno, last week’s episode was all about what ASMR really is and how you can use ASMR for better sleep and soothing anxiety and depression. Today’s episode will be offering some of my very best tips for low energy and bad mental health days and this episode comes to you straight from my heart and I mean that genuinely and not in a corny way. I’m rather well acquainted with low energy days or bad mental health days which are what I call “Sadboy” days. Anyone can have a “Sadboy” day, whether you’re young, older, male, female, anywhere on the spectrum, or nonbinary. I was inspired to create this video not only because of my personal experiences and what I’ve observed in the struggles of those around me, but also because I know that it is finals week for many of my listeners and many of you are under extensive stress, and probably near your wits end. I was also inspired to create this post because I noticed that most advice you can find online for self care on bad mental health days or low energy days recommends actions that can potentially require a ton of energy for some people like me either mentally or physically. For example, most people will recommend going to the gym, taking a walk, or going outside in general, drinking tons of water, or just deep breathing. All of these recommendations are valid and can be useful to some individuals but for me personally, on a rough day these things can feel exhausting or downright discouraging to think about. Even taking a shower, brushing your teeth or putting on lotion can feel like too much for some people in the depths of paralyzing mental illness. And thus, I bring you a set of lovely tips that I hope will help you navigate through a bad mental health day without using up all of your precious finite energy.
But first I’d like to take a moment to speak especially to the men who are listening to this. I’m glad you’re here, first of all. I know there aren’t enough platforms that recognize that mental illness isn’t just a women’s issue, or even a men’s issue, it’s a people’s issue. Sad boy days are a people’s struggle. So if anyone ever told you that “manning up” means that you can’t recognize your emotions or have a mental illness, I just want to encourage you to question that. You can choose for yourself what being a man means. And I’m here to tell you that having mental health struggles, asking for help and treatment for those struggles or just feeling what you feel does not make you less of a man.
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Alright, I know that was a bit of a tangent, but a necessary tangent, no?
Before we continue today, let’s do our Noggin Nurturing Segment together where we take a quick break from the episode to do one thing to nurture and invest in ourselves...but, let’s make it extra special today because I know many of you listening may be having a rough moment. As I always say, a plant collector, I’ve learned that much like plants, our minds need gentle encouragement. So, let’s use this noggin nurturing segment to motivate ourselves to get out of bed and work our way up to whatever you feel you can do to gradually get yourself going. You can make yourself a cozy cup of tea, do some gentle stretching...I really enjoy sitting in the child’s pose when I don’t have the energy to do any other stretching. If you’re not familiar with the child’s pose, I recommend you try googling “Yoga Child’s Pose” It’s a very gentle stretch and requires very little strength or flexibility so even if you’re the most inflexible person on earth, this could be worth a try. You basically just curl up in a cozy ball. Aside from that you could make a phone call to someone you love, or make that brave call to make your first or next counseling appointment, journal, make your to-do list for the day, or plan out a healthy breakfast. You could take a short 5 or 10 minute walk or if you’re on medication, you can use this time to take your meds. If you’re in the car or on public transit commuting to work or school you could try listening to a song that makes you feel uplifted, or planning out your ideal day mentally. If you can’t try any of those examples for the segment, you can still participate, so don’t worry! I’d like you to make a pledge to yourself of what you’ll do to nurture yourself as soon as you finish your commute. As I always say, I truly understand that sometimes even the most simple tasks can feel like they take all of your energy especially on say boy days, so please pick a task that’s gentle and kind to your body and mind. Honestly, if all you can do for the pause is simply get out of bed and use the bathroom or get out of bed and brush your teeth, make that your plan of action and follow through. That’s okay. That’s enough. For myself, today I used a combination of a bunch of the low energy tips coming up in this episode that for now I’ll keep a secret until after our quick break. Entonces, comment below to share with me and everyone in our home how you’ll spend the break for the Noggin Nurturing segment…The Noggin Podcast is brought to you today by Anchor. A service I actually use. The anchor app is the easiest way to make a podcast, ever. It's the only app that lets you record a high-quality podcast, and distribute it everywhere (including Google Podcasts and Apple Podcasts) – all in one place. No fancy equipment or podcasting experience necessary, and even better than all of that, it’s 100% free! I’ve tried plenty of other podcast editing apps that make it a headache to import and export your audio files but Anchor’s intuitive platform makes it nice and easy.
Welcome back and bienvenidos! Okay, so let’s jump right in. Since we established before the break that tasks like working out, going outside or socializing in person can be exhausting or feel near impossible on bad mental health days, what would I recommend instead for someone who cannot do those things at the moment? Well, let’s see. The following recommendations will be in the approximate order of what I would do throughout the day to try to help myself feel better on a bad mental health day or a sadboy day. You don’t have to use all of these at once, but it’s wonderful if you can implement several of them at a time and find what works for you. And finally, please make sure you don’t skip the first two tips in this episode, they’re absolutely foundational for the rest of the tips that follow. They may seem like they’re not a big deal but they can make all the difference in the long term on having better mental health days or at least better navigating the rough days. So hear me out:
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Tip number one, which is something that I had to teach myself (along with all of the tips I’m sharing today) is to change the way you view bad mental health days entirely. When you learn to compartmentalize difficult moments into just small segments of the day instead of letting the hardship make you upset about the entire day, you can make the best of the balance of the time left. For example, if you wake up feeling awful, it might take you a few hours to shake off that feeling but then you have to make the conscious decision not to let the entire day remain in that state. Easier said than done, absolutely. Absolutely. But the compartmentalization is crucial so that you will have fewer bad mental health days and only sprinkles of difficult sadboy moments here and there.
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Tip number two, which is also essential, is to come into acceptance with the fact that you must learn to become your own greatest ally and best friend, in general but especially when it comes to surviving and feeling better on difficult mental health days. It’s the acceptance of knowing that you can save yourself. Some of you may have people you can rely on to help you feel better on these days and others of you may feel that you have no one. In either case, for everyone there will come a time where you may have to navigate your mental health struggles on your own for that day or whatever time period. And when that happens, we have to become our source of comfort because it cannot always come externally in that moment, it may have to come from within. I think it’s both enlightening and frightening to think about that fact that you are the one person in the entire world who absolutely has to have your back. We are the only people who can save ourselves. You can get help for feeling better, but ultimately you have to want to feel better more than anyone else. And that is something that I would tell my younger self. You have to be your own friend. You have to make yourself proud. For those of you who like the lift weights and exercise, an analogy that I like to use is that, other people can spot you and help keep you safe in the squat rack but ultimately you have to be the one to push and do the squat. If you’ve never sat down and contemplated the fact that you have to be the one to save yourself, I would encourage you to just think about this. It’s uncomfortable and it’s hard but I genuinely think it changed my perspective of my mental health journey for the better. If you would like to hear more about this perspective and mindset from someone who words it much more eloquently than me, I recommend the video “The Day I Changed, Mental health talk” which is a 10 minute video by ItsSabrinaVlogs on Youtube who discusses being so depressed she layed in the dark in bed for a week and the mindset changed that helped her finally decide to help herself.
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Great, now that we have our mindset foundation in place, let’s explore together some of the tips that I would follow next.
For tips number three, I would create a to do list. If you can’t get out of bed right away because you’re feeling too low or you got back in bed after the Noggin Nurturing Segment, you can create a list on your phone. For this list, choose a realistic number of goals you must accomplish for the day in order to feel proud of yourself. If you’re having an absolutely awful day, maybe there will be only two or three goals on that list. If you’re feeling a little better, maybe four to five list items. The list should be in order of priority, starting with the item that would make you feel most proud as the list will serve as an outline for your day. It provides structure and reinforcement so that we don’t stay in bed all day moping and sad and scrolling endlessly through social media and falling deeper into a depressive episode. Excellent ideas for your list would be items similar to the ideas I recommended for the Noggin Nurturing segment earlier in this episode. For example a three-item goal list could be to get out of bed, take a shower, and schedule one thing to look forward to.
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Alright, let’s move onto number four.
If you can, I recommend keeping some kind of record of how you’re feeling. If you don’t have the energy to physically write with pen and paper, which I totally understand, you can journal on your phone. If you’re not into that, I recommend a free app called Daylio which requires even less energy because you don’t have to type out how you’re feeling (you have that option if you want to though) you can just choose the emotion icon along with what activity you’re doing at that moment. I’m not sponsored at all by Daylio in this episode (but hopefully one day I will be because I really do like this app) I do use the app every single day and I’ve recommended it to several of my friends and shared it with my counselor. The app allows you to track your mood with custom emotions you can change, you can compare your emotional changes over the days, weeks and months, in circle or line graphs. The app is available in dozens of languages which is wonderful if you’re someone who enjoys practicing languages like me. I currently have the overall app set in French and the emotion settings in Spanish. I like to start my day off with checking in with how I’m feeling so that as the day continues I can see the progress (hopefully). Tracking your mood can help ensure that you’re aware of what activities and behaviors make your mental health worse and what improves your state. And moreover it allows you to release all of the emotions you’re feeling and to see them out in front of you, on paper or on screen. Write exactly why you’re feeling whatever you’re feeling; everything you can think of. And if you can’t think of why you’re feeling low today, that’s okay. Some days the sadboy feelings come for no reason. It’s still helpful to track that you’re having these feelings for no particular reason. My mental health journey leveled up once I started journaling by paper and pen and it leveled up even more when I started using the Daylio mood tracker app.
Okay, so let’s say you’ve accepted that you have to be your own greatest ally today, you’ve accepted that this only a rough moment and not a completely bad day, you’ve made a to-do list of two or three things, you’ve gotten out of bed, you’ve showered or at least washed the essentials if a full shower was too much energy, you’ve journaled in some form written or electronically about how you’re feeling. If you’re still not feeling well now what do we do?
Don’t worry. I have more tips.
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Once your wearing clean clothes and all, I find that it helps to put on my favorite perfume, cologne or essential oils that I would wear on a usual day. So, that’s tip number five. This reminder if normalcy can help pull you out of a slump and make you feel more put together. Even better, if you have a fancier scent to wear, a sadboy day is a great day to wear it. It may feel silly especially if you're not planning to leave the house but that's okay. Enjoy it anyway.
Number six, I highly recommend some spring cleaning to combat sad boy feelings. Particularly spring cleaning while listening to an upbeat music/a dance playlist. Now you might be thinking “How is spring cleaning a low energy tip?” Well, it simply depends on how you strategize. Instead of trying to deep clean your entire house today, pick one small, specific area of the house that matters to you the most. Maybe it's washing half of the dishes in the sink so the pile isn't so big, maybe it's picking two socks up off of the floor, maybe it's cleaning old papers out of your backpack or receipts out of your wallet or purse to recycle. Maybe it’s looking through just one drawer of your clothes to start a donation clothing pile of clothes you don't wear anymore. What I don’t want you to do is create yourself a massive cleaning project, over-commit and then if it takes too much energy and you can’t complete it all, you may feel even worse. So, let’s create a small, realistic goal for cleaning up our space. A decluttered space declutters the mind. Open the windows to let some let and fresh air in even just for a few minutes, maybe light a candle if you have one to make your space smell nice, and just choose one decluttering task.
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But… for those of you who may feel that any sort of traditional physical cleaning may require too much energy for you on a rough day, tip number seven is a plot twist for my aforementioned tip. The plot twist is to try an electronic deep clean. You can get rid of old emails, texts, photos, or memos you don't need or that bog you down and take up all of your phone memory.
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Speaking of electronic plot twists, tip number eight is to try writing or typing a letter to your future self. Write about everything that is an obstacle in your life right now, everything upsetting you, every mountain that seems too tall to climb, every frustration and reason to be sad, and then write down where you hope to by the date you open that letter. I’m creating myself one of these “to my future self letters” today to be opened when I graduate with my Bachelors in 3 months. I’ve done them before when I was going through a difficult patch and when I read the letter later on I was so proud of my past self for being tenacious. Even if you can only write a small paragraph, and then you hide the letter away for 2, 3 or 6 months, I promise if you follow my instructions it will be special when “future you” opens the letter again.
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Tip number nine, if you're a visual person and you like to watch things that will make you smile or make your heart melt, I highly recommend the channel called Puuung on Youtube. It’s a channel with stunning hand drawn animation stories of these two precious characters. It's goofy, witty, colorful and peaceful all done with no talking and barely any sound. My favorite one is called “A short animation about what love is” again by Puuung. It’s a beautiful video and I can attest to the fact that love does exist like what is in the video because I’ve experienced it myself after a long time of waiting. So don’t lose hope, my fellow hopeless romantics.
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If none of that works, I recommend a good old fashioned nap for tip number ten, if you can. Naps even for 35-45 minutes always help reset my system and I nearly always wake up feeling a least a good amount better than before, with more energy and a lighter spirit.
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If you've made towards the end of this fairly lengthy episode and you’ve tried a good portion of these things and you're just really having an awful time, especially if you've been having a lot of these sad boy days lately over an extended period of time, I highly recommend that you try seeking professional help. Don't worry, I have your back, I created an entire episode with tips for affordable mental healthcare treatment for those with low income or no insurance so be sure to check out episode two, episodio dos, in order to learn more about affordable professional help. If you're interested in online therapy you can also check out my money and time saving tips for online therapy in episode 3. If you're feeling deeply upset or having life ending thoughts, first of all thank you for choosing to be here, I recognize your pain. It’s very, very real. For you, I would recommend my episode four, where I rate and share useful text crisis hotlines and warmline online mental health chat tools where you can talk to someone about how you're feeling within 5 minutes or less.
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For my much-loved hard of hearing and deaf community, transcripts in english are now available on the new Noggin Podcast website and for my Latinx community transcripts in español will be coming very soon on the website for you all as well. Also, if you enjoy this podcast and value the cozy space it provides, you can support the podcast by donating. Simply visit https://anchor.fm/thenogginpodcast/support. Even one dollar donated means a lot to me and is greatly appreciated.
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If you made it here to the conclusion of this episode, I’d like to say thank you so much. Muchisimas gracias. If you’re interested in learning more information about The Noggin Podcast you can visit our website and subscribe to be a part of our cozy home with new episode releases every other Monday morning. See you in the next episode! Nos vemos en el próximo episodio.