How going out travelling makes me feel good about myself

Good evening everyone, and I hope you've all had a great week! Without sugar-coating things here, I'm just going to be honest and say that I have been reluctant to type on here lately. Mainly due to being too occupied with my life. Going into more detail on that, I have recently been working at Challengers on Wednesday's, doing Maths every Monday & Tuesday, and I am please to announce that I will be working every Thursday & Friday at my new job soon...!

However, I have been trying to fit in my love for travelling in between. Meaning on the days I have nothing planned. 

For as long as I can remember, I have always been a keen lover of travel, which is why I feel like talking about how travelling makes me feel good about myself.

*The above picture was taken from my most recent trip up into Oxford, I had taken so many that it was hard to pick just 1😂*

Whenever I get the chance to go out & explore somewhere where I haven't been to before, my mind gets a boost of motivation by wanting to know what will be awaiting me. In other words, it gets this sense of excitement.

Even when I typically spend all day walking around a place, my mind experiences a feeling of pleasurable lost by taking in every bit of scenery. It's like I'm actually living in a daydream where I am conscious of what I am doing.

Furthermore, going out travelling to different places makes me feel good about myself, as it provides me with a sense of adventure. Not to mention that I feel more powerfully independent. Best of all, I feel positive & free knowing I am doing what I love!

*I began this post on the 26/1/24, but didn't finish it until the 29/1/24*

Why facing your fears makes your mind feel more powerful

Hello everyone! This was something that I did with my work colleagues at Challengers this past Saturday. (9/9/23) If you want to find out more, click on this link to view: Basingstoke Team Abseil Spinnaker Tower for Disability Challengers

And because there is psychology involved with facing your fears, I thought about mixing in my facing my fears experience along with talking about the benefits & outcomes in the same post.

*An action shot of me abseiling down Spinnaker Tower in Portsmouth, UK*

My personal experience with facing my fears:

Let me tell you, it's not very often that I get to abseil from something that is stood tall at 100m! 

Prior to my abseiling experience with my work colleagues, I have always been jittery about dangling over a height. Hence, I rarely got to do any abseiling at all. What I mean when I say being jittery about heights, is me being up a height where I can look down it. 

However, as soon as I saw the opportunity to sign up to the Spinnaker Tower abseil, in aid of raising money for work, I immediately jumped at the chance. This was mainly because I wanted to challenge myself by abseiling from a height of 100m. Besides, if I didn't do this, I knew I was only going to regret it.

Fast forward to when I was abseiling down the tower, the waiting by the abseiling platform (where I waited to be clipped up to my abseiling rope) was a bit nerve-racking, as I had to wait for 2 of my colleagues to go down first. Once I got the rope clip on process out of the way, I proceeded to position myself onto the tower wall. (Where I was abseiling down) I thought to myself: "The quicker I get going with my abseil, the less time I will have feeling nervous." Although, as a matter of fact, I was actually feeling excited/nervous combined.

The second I hit the floor, I felt so accomplished & mentally powerful that I feel like I can do anything involving heights!

Benefits & outcomes:

As well as debriefing about my personal experience with facing my fears, I will say hands down that being able to face your own fears (whatever they may be) head on, will make you feel more powerful in physical appearance & in mind. With that said, being scared is good for the mindset, as the feeling helps it to grow stronger.

I suppose the overall benefit of facing your fears, would be to do them more often, as if they suddenly became second nature to you. An example of this would be climbing up a 40ft height everyday.

If you've reached this far in reading this lengthy post, all I can say is well done, as well as thank you. And I hope this post has taught you all something new by feeling inspired to go out & face your fears.

From my pictured perspective: #3

Haven't done one of these in a long while...

As it has now quickly become the 1st of December, I think it's safe to say that the weather in England has definitely plummeted to its average temperature. That being said, the wintery effects are significantly showing as well.

In the picture below, wintery fog spreads around the background like a blanket, which was the foremost reason of why I decided to take the picture and thought about showcasing it on here.

Backstory: Whilst on my way home from college, I was walking back through the grey surrounded fog in the typically freezing weather for December. As I happen to look around, I saw a perfectly good scene for me to snapshot a picture, which captures all the wintery scenery in one!

I know people reading this will just think that picture looks depressing, but I can assure you, there's more of an effective explanation than just labelling the picture depressing of how it presents itself upfront.

The way I choose to vision this wintery snapshot is to think how the English weather can have better days ahead. Yes, I'm talking even the English weather has to have its grey & gloomy days for it to be able to shine cheerfully bright & sunny again. I suppose you could say I'm highlighting weather behaviour here.

Conclusion: Wintery weather is really not as depressing as you can make it out to be. If you have a good think about it, this is the English weather's way of preparing itself for the spring season.

How spending time in nature can help with Mental Health

I was originally going to make a post to raise awareness for #WorldMentalHealthDay. But since it's now past the date, I'll use this post to talk about something (in this post) that I've come across recently to help raise not only late awareness for Mental Health, but to give you a personal insight about one of my favourite ways to manage it.

As I was out on a local walk this Sunday gone, I was just taking in my surroundings when the idea hit me to capture a picture of what I was seeing. I thought I could use this picture I took to discuss all the beneficial things about spending time in nature in my blog. Even if it's only for as short as 10mins.

It has been proven in the Mental Health & Psychology industry that spending time in nature can have a positive impact on your Mental Health.

Why? When you're out walking in a natural environment, your mind will become fascinated to take in all its naturistic things. Examples given: Leaves, rivers or even squirrels. Especially now we're currently in autumn, it has so much trend to give to just a natural environment itself that it lights up the scenery with different colours. This makes you appreciate how lucky you are that you will always have a nature spot not far from you, so you can take a long or short time out from whatever is stressing you to a calming nature spot to detoxicate.

Although the same could be said for the other seasons as well, but I just think in my opinion that autumn deliveries the best nature content.

The picture I took above shows how just spending momentarily time in nature can have a positive impact on my Mental Health. Purposely taken in wide view, so it captures all my surroundings facing frontwards.

Animals have a life too

Sort of a quickie for tonight, as I'll have more bigger content coming soon...

Whilst out on my walk last Saturday, I saw something which had strongly caught my attention. It happened to be a set up dog play area.

As soon as I saw it, I immediately thought to myself: "It's so heartwarming to see our furry friends having the same kind of fun as us human beings". 

Why the sympathy? I'll tell you this... Dogs are proven to be the most loyal pet any human being could have. They have the 24/7 dedication to look out for us, obedience and trust. With those things said, dogs do all that hard work just to become a loving member of someone's family/household. Which is why I think it's only fair that dogs should be allowed to let themselves free as a reward for everything that they do for human beings.

After all, a healthy dog is a happy dog.🐶

*Excuse the poor quality of this picture*

This was the dog area I had captured whilst out walking last Saturday.

Even celebrities are just human beings (Anxiety Awareness post)

In a bid for anyone trying to gain a further recognition on how anxiety works on people, I am going to start making posts relating to anxiety. For this one, I have attached pictures of celebrities giving out their own perspectives on how anxiety makes them vision the world.

What's their purpose? This is because they want to shed some light on everybody around them going through similarly to what they're going through, in terms of anxiety. Anxiety doesn't necessarily have to effect us ordinary human beings, it can happily choose to have an effect on a celebrity lifestyle as well. In fact, anxiety doesn't give a damn weather you're the nicest person in the world or even the smartest person in the world. It likes to bring a difference to people's everyday lives, (including celebrities) so it makes them vision the world of mental health through their eyes. Also the world in general, goes by without saying.

As a friendly reminder for you all, my outcome of these posts is to spread awareness by making everyone reading not feel alone when they try to open up about their anxiety.  

From my pictured perspective: #2

I was originally going to make this publish yesterday, but I had other stuff to do which then lead me to being too tired after, therefore I've pushed it back to today. Plus, I'm going away on a short holiday for the weekend, so I might as well get this post out of the way whilst I still can.

Backstory: I went on a 2hr walk around my local area yesterday afternoon. By the time I had finished my walk, I couldn't figure out what to take a picture of and give it an inspirational piece of talk. Fortunately, I thought about taking a picture of some rather long steps, as I know you can give out a psychological message when looking at some steps.

I shall name this picture: "Every big goal has its own steps to take". 

Conclusion: Whilst it is always good to have at least one big goal in mind, it is always important to bare in mind that there will always be little steps to take on that road to achieving that big goal, as no big goal can ever be achieved within just one shot; It has to be broken down into smaller steps to make it more do-able. Gradually going up each step helps you to focus on tackling on one obstacle at a time, as it gives you preparation to go higher which will eventually give you all the advantages to readily tackle the biggest step.

Sharing my perspective

Just a quickie, yet very insightful publish...

"Whenever nightfall comes... I use it as a way of reflecting on how my day has been that day. Regardless if it's been good, bad or even in-between, I still intend on saying something about it.

Then I use it to think about the following day ahead of me, in terms of what should I plan on doing or achieving something that following day.

However, if I may not end up doing what I intend to do the following day, there's always yet another nightfall to reflect on everything - Nothing has to be rushed, as you're within your own time frame."

Have a good night all.