Delete Instagram

Welcome to my very first blog post on Maujha! In this first post I am going to be completely utterly honest with you concerning my mental health and physical health and the reason why I was offline the past three months.

How it all went down

Last year around December I started to feel very tired, which you may think is normal for a 22 year old student who was working a side job, had her own content company, took a language course, had a busy social life, a mother who was sick, and was doing the mindfulness teacher course next to her full time bachelors at the university!

Yeah, I thought it was normal too!

I didn’t think much of my tiredness and thought it was just something I had to go through. However, as weeks passed and some of the things on my to do list disappeared my tiredness didn’t seem to become any less. Even more frightening, it actually went from tiredness to exhaustion. Getting out of bed had become so difficult that my body was actually refusing to wake up or get up.

So why am I so exhausted?

As the mindful person that I am trying to be, I tried to reflect on everything I did in my life and tried incredibly hard to find the cause of my tiredness. I thought I might be doing too much activities in one day, so I tried to do less.  I thought I might be sleeping too much, so I tried sleeping less. I thought I was sleeping too little, I tried sleeping more. I thought it was because I was eating too much, tried eating less. I thought I was eating too little, tried eating more. I tried working out more, working out less. I totally gave up anything processed, I tried eating more processed. After a few months of trying all kinds of different attempt to improve my health and wellbeing I realised that none of it decreased my exhaustion.

Nothing worked!

The next step was to find out if something was medically off in my body. For that I went to the doctor to investigate my exhaustion further. After months of all kinds of tests that you can imagine and several visits to different health specialists in the hospital, I got the good but also bad news. 

I was completely utterly healthy. 

By now the final semester at the university was ending and I used the last tiny bit of energy I had in finishing it.  The rest of the time all I could do was sleep or at least be in a horizontal position with my body. During this time I had much time to contemplate on my situation and how I could improve this. However, the first few weeks of my exhausted state were actually filled with resentment of others that were able to do the things that I wanted to do. And more importantly self hatred for feeling so tired and weak. 

Grateful
During this horizontal period,  I realised that the first thing I need to do is change the way I talk to my body and be grateful that she was carrying me through every day. Also, appreciating the exhaustion as a message that  something was off in the way I was living my life. So, the first thing I did was delete all my social media and go offline to give myself some piece of mind. The second thing I did was go on a family holiday to this beautiful island where I did not have any Wi-Fi and all I could do was swim, meditate, yoga, and enjoy quality time with my family. Through disconnecting myself from the online platforms I was able to fully connect to the nature and people around me. This gave my mind and body the necessary space to rest and contemplate how I wanted to design my life in a more balanced and healthy way to avoid feeling burned out.

During these three months my exhaustion went from 200% to merely a 40%. I would be lying if I said I feel completely energised right now. Currently I am going to a psychologist  to work on reducing my exhaustion to 0%. But these two months of reflecting, meditating, being with only my thoughts, reading many self-help books (which I will discuss in another blog) , and simply listening to my body gave me back my energy and with that my life.

Importance Of Play

We were all kids once who were giving pens and paint and we expressed ourselves completely freely. But as we grow older we try to conform and fit in. So I took this whole play part a chance by just letting go sometimes of the idea of being good or great at something. We sometimes just need to do something creative and just do it. Creativity goes well beyond play, it helps us think differently, problem solve differently and helps us build confidence. It can come in so many different forms, singing, dancing, cooking, playing sports. Anything that feels like a unique form of self-expression. Anything that helps us reconnect with our inner child! 

That is why I have decided to open myself up to you and to start writing this blog. Every week I will share my words on my experiences, mindfulness, psychology, and simply put life. 

Thank you for taking the time out today to read my words!

 With love,