As the days shortened in August, we had a few cooler days in the last few weeks of the month. We can still get warm days in September, which I remember from high school. It was often a lousy end to the summer holidays, and then when we were back in a classroom, it was roasting!

To work through trauma, you have to revisit the trauma. That brings up old memories and body sensations from when you were in that traumatic moment. As a result, I have been looking at ways to look after myself in all aspects of my life.

I’m making many changes this year in many different areas, at least for this first part of it, and I will see if anything else changes later in the year post-therapy.

I'm getting better at noticing when I’m hiding myself away and I have a few friends that check on me if they’ve not heard from me for a little bit. I think that it’s because my anxiety is rising and I’m feeling so overwhelmed by it that I can't deal with normal day-to-day things. So instead of dealing with and facing it, I avoid it. Which isn’t healthy and it certainly isn’t helpful.

I’ve struggled with the change in seasons from summer to autumn for many years and as a consequence, I’ve spent a long time trying to find ways to help myself with the autumn or winter blues.

We all know how crazy 2020 was and for someone like me who was already in a mental health dip, it was a very gruelling year. I know many people were in the same boat as me over the last twelve months, and now we have an enormous amount of boats surrounding us. There's almost too many to count.

So, I thought it might be useful if I shared some of the things that have helped me over the last twelve months as I've worked on my anxiety, depression and PTSD.

I was inspired to write this post after something one of my church pastor's text me this week; "We can all start to feel alone, but we are all still together even when apart, zoom really helps with this ;)" It resonated so much with me and shook me out of my feelings of woe is me that I was getting stuck in that day.

I posted about my sleep routine here back in August 2019. That post was published the month before I asked my doctor to put me back on antidepressants because I wasn't coping well on my own while I was waiting for some more therapy. A lot has obviously happened between then and now.

I'm not the biggest fan of Autumn, although over the last few years I've tried to embrace it more and to find things I do like about it.

I struggle with it is the shorter days and generally where I live, dull and wet days as I live in one of the wettest places in the UK.

I've mentioned in a few of my last posts about some of the things that I've done and am doing to help me while the UK is in lockdown. I don't think I've mentioned them all in one place however so I'm doing that now in case some of them may help you or give you some ideas of things to help yourself until we are able to start to emerge back out into the world again, however that world may look.