Plodding upwards

I had a positive counselling session today, but it was still exhausting! Trying to marshall your brain into thinking clearly about yourself can be difficult. The last couple of sessions I had were heavily emotional and I had to admit that I wasn't coping well and think about what that meant.

But in the last month I have been steadily plodding upwards from the very deep pit that I found myself in several weeks ago, and it was great to be able to go over that with my counsellor.

It was also helpful to reinforce that just because my plodding is going quite well, I'm not up to flying stage yet. This is the problem with recovery from anything. Once I start to feel better, I think "okay I can do all those things I wasn't able to before!", invariably I overdo it and topple back over into the hole again.

This is why charting my progress by tracking my mood and playing SuperBetter has been so good. I can see the progress I am making when I get sick of the plodding - I can see that although it feels like I'm standing still, I am actually moving forwards.

I explained the whole SuperBetter thing to my counsellor and she was fascinated and asked me to send her the links. She was intrigued by the concept and thought it could appeal to some of her other clients, especially younger ones.

Here's a graphic from the site showing how it works:

It's a little small, but click to embiggen it and explore.

My counsellor and I agreed that one of the things about 'conventional' mental health tools/exercises is that they often seem overly dry and homework-like. But the thing about SuperBetter is because it's conceived as a game, it's creative, it breaks everything down into bite-sized, achievable chunks, and it puts a big emphasis on the journey you're taking to get to your Epic Win. You can customise your power-ups, quests and bad guys to be things that are more meaningful to you, but the 'power packs' the team has devised based on various goals (eg, 'the power to quit anything', 'stress buster', 'emotional resilience') are fun and really well thought out.

Playing doesn't take much time (I check in most days). I'm also finding when I start to feel my mood dipping, instead of dwelling on the dip, I log onto SuperBetter and do a power up or a quest, and it's usually enough to put me back on track.

Of course it might not appeal to everyone, but I'm pretty excited to have found something that works for me.

So yay for forward/upward momentum, no matter the pace! Yay for games! Yay for five or six days of consistent mood (no spikes either up or down)!