What’s your sign?

For me, putting stuff off is a sure sign that something’s not right with my head. If, for instance, I go four days without shaving, it’s a proper red flag that stress and/or anxiety have crept up.

At the end of last week, I looked in the mirror and realised this was exactly what had happened. And as that realisation dawned, it hit me like a cartoon frying pan that I’d also been neglecting a whole pile of other tasks.

There was cash in my pocket that needed to go into the bank, but instead of just doing it, I’d been transferring it from one pair of jeans to the next. There were email requests that I’d been meaning to answer, but which the senders kept having to nudge me about. There was the length of time since I’d updated this website. Our parking permits needed renewed. I was yonks behind on putting in an invoice for a job I’d done.

Sometimes, I spot these signs almost as soon as they appear. Other times, generally when I’m trying to do too much, they take a little longer to seep through.

What matters, though, is that we DO learn to recognise the onset of blips in our mental health and try to head them off at the pass before they become full-on issues.

Once we do that, once we better understand our mind – and body, because mental stress so often shows itself through physical pain – we find ourselves in a far better place to take charge of our feelings and emotions, to prevent rather than to cure.

This is how change works, from the inside out. It starts with us realising that we can’t control the world, but we can control how we operate with in it.

It requires us to be aware of areas where we’re more vulnerable than we’d like to be, identifying the times when those vulnerabilities are bubbling to the surface and working out ways of minimising the effect they have on us.

Yes, even if that means something as mundane as having a shave.

Hence, this confessional on why it’s been so long since my last blog. If sharing this helps you recognise and change patterns of behaviour that hold you back, magic. But if it helps me do it, even better, because then I’ll become better at helping you.

Of course, going four months without updating a website is a minor mea culpa in the big scheme of things. But the reasons for it, the excuses I’ve made not to do it, are pretty much the same as those which can set us down a negative path that might lead to anything from feeling a bit flabby to being bankrupt or homeless or worse.

In short, whatever the issue we’re supposed to be dealing with, it can often feel easier to hide from it than to rip the plaster off and get it out of the way.

•The difficult phone call we’re scared to make.

•The red bill we need to open and deal with.

•The job that’s draining our will to live.

•The friend or partner whose toxicity is slowly poisoning us.

Every day, we might wake up full of good intentions to sort them out. Yet every night, we might go to bed deflated by our failure to turn those intentions into actions.

That’s been me far too often for decades, someone who knows his responsibilities to himself, but who finds excuses not to fulfil them. Each time it happens, I fill up with regret, an emotion that takes me deeper into a spiral of regret about all the other things I failed to do in the past.

How much better off would be if I’d put £20 away every week since starting work? How much fitter would I be for even 30 minutes exercise a day all my adult life? How much less would my back hurt had I stuck to those Hot Yoga sessions that were an obsession for six months before something else took up my time?

Etc, etc, etc.

Maintaining momentum, that’s my problem. An unwillingness to ingrain the mantra that once we start down a good road, we can’t allow ourselves to turn back. 

Note that I use the word unwillingness rather than failure; this is because, as with any issue, we all have the ability to change.

If our mind can create a problem, then it can also create a solution. What we tend to lack is the will to allow this to happen, as – let’s be honest here – it can feel far easier to do the wrong thing than the right, to be unhealthy rather than healthy, to spend rather than save.

Bottom line, though?

We can put off dealing with bills or relationships or our job or whatever else as long as we like, but they won’t go away – and, as we’ll discuss in my next blog, the thought of what might happen if we do the deed is generally far worse than what actually happens once we’ve done it.

In my case, the relief of writing this blog on how difficult I’ve found it to write blogs feels lovely.  The words have come easily. I’m reading back over it wondering what the hell the problem was with doing it in January rather than April.

Yet here’s the thing: There’s nothing to be gained from regret, from beating ourselves up about the stuff we haven’t done or the reasons why we haven’t done them. There’s also no value in lying to ourselves that our mental health patterns are just the way I am.

Truth is, most of the time it’s just how we’ve chosen to be – so, as simplistic as it might sound, we can choose instead to strengthen our thought processes just as easily as we can choose to get physically fitter.

I can testify to the fact that this change doesn’t always come overnight. But since I’ve come to understand my own mental ups and downs a whole lot better, the gaps between the downs have grown a whole lot wider. It’s a good couple of years now since I went through one of these spells of putting stuff off, whereas they used to queue up like taxis.

So I’ve written all this down for two reasons. The first is in the hope that you might see yourself in some of it and have a think about your own signs of something not being quite right. The other is that I want it to there to remind me not to let it happen again any time soon.

I want these words to become a digital tattoo, a permanent reminder of how I need to think and act going forward.

Because once we take this step, once we choose to do rather than thinking about doing, we become so much more accountable to ourselves.

Which is one of the most powerful feelings imaginable.