Beat Stress
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In the UK, one man in five dies before he reaches 65. Together we can change that. Donate, sign up for news or order some of our man manuals from the online shop.
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'Learn To Love Yourself'
On the face of it, growing up I really didn’t have it hard at all. People often seem surprised to hear I’ve really struggled with low mood and anxiety. The causes of my decade and a half of depression were quite subtle, mainly to do with beliefs I built up about myself growing up.
The underlying force periodically taking me out of action for months, years even at a time, was self-criticism. And as Yoda would say, self-criticism leads to anger, anger to self-hatred and self-hatred is the path to the dark side.
I’ve tried drugs and had more types of therapy than Woody Allen. Some helped at the time, some didn’t. It was only when I came across mindfulness and compassion-focused therapy that things really started to click. Bulbs have continued to light up ever since.
Practising mindfulness has massively helped, by teaching me to step back from the intensity of difficult thoughts and feelings, to stop myself from overthinking. The compassion part of it, which has been just as important, has been about coming to see myself as like anyone else: great just the way we are.
- Fabio Zuchelli is a freelance writer specialising in mental health who has both lived experience of depression and experience working in mental health services. He is one of the authors of the Men's Health Forum's Beat Stress, Feel Better
| This article reflects the experience of the individual. It is not health information from the Men's Health Forum under the terms of the NHS England Information Standard. |
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The Men’s Health Forum need your support It’s tough for men to ask for help but if you don’t ask when you need it, things generally only get worse. So we’re asking. In the UK, one man in five dies before the age of 65. If we had health policies and services that better reflected the needs of the whole population, it might not be like that. But it is. Policies and services and indeed men have been like this for a long time and they don’t change overnight just because we want them to. It’s true that the UK’s men don’t have it bad compared to some other groups. We’re not asking you to ‘feel sorry’ for men or put them first. We’re talking here about something more complicated, something that falls outside the traditional charity fund-raising model of ‘doing something for those less fortunate than ourselves’. That model raises money but it seldom changes much. We’re talking about changing the way we look at the world. There is nothing inevitable about premature male death. Services accessible to all, a population better informed. These would benefit everyone - rich and poor, young and old, male and female - and that’s what we’re campaigning for. We’re not asking you to look at images of pity, we’re just asking you to look around at the society you live in, at the men you know and at the families with sons, fathers and grandads missing. Here’s our fund-raising page - please chip in if you can.
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