Men's Mental Health - Matt Richardson
Over the past 18 months in particular, my wellbeing has gone through waves of positivity and unfortunately negativity, as I’m sure is the same for many of us. A big positive of working remotely has given me the opportunity to spend more time with my son who was born in May last year and I feel extremely lucky to have spent so much time with him.
An increased amount of time working from home has meant I’ve needed to be more disciplined with my breaks and I now book time in my calendar to go for a walk either alone and listen to podcasts, or if diaries allow me and my wife will walk and use the time to catch up. On the subject of podcasts, I often listen to Rob Beckett and Josh Widdicombe's Parenting Hell which makes light-hearted fun out of the general situations of lockdown we find ourselves in and particularly for me, in being a new parent.
I do generally try to keep active but have noticed that my activity levels have reduced. I often play football on a Friday evening with my brother and some friends, and to be honest, the bit I’ve missed the most about that has been the socialising and catch ups before and after rather than the actual game itself. I’ve certainly taken for granted seeing people on a regular basis in the past but that doesn’t always necessarily mean you are connecting or being present while you are with them if that makes sense? At times I’ve found myself not wanting to socialise, whether that’s video calling or messaging people. Perhaps there is some MS Teams fatigue in there and by the time I’ve had all of my meetings, I don’t want to talk to anyone. It’s a shame as I really don’t like to feel like this and generally see myself as a positive and sociable person, but I definitely think this period of time has affected my efforts to socialise.
Unfortunately the lack of activity has also meant my sleep was affected for a time, so I subscribed to Headspace which has loads of great resources including sleepcasts, meditation sessions and video exercise routines. I predominantly use the sleepcasts as it’s basically someone reading the most boring story you’ve ever heard in a soothing voice, and that helps me go to sleep!
There unfortunately was a period of time, maybe a few weeks or so towards the end of last year, where I just felt sad… I can’t put my finger on why it was as it could have been a combination of lots of things. I’m still trying to get better at speaking with my wife about how I feel but sometimes still have that barrier of not wanting to burden her with things. I’m not sure why, as she is the most supportive and caring person I’ve met in my life, but just have the odd occasion where I think “it can wait”, but understanding that just getting things off my chest makes a huge difference in the way we communicate.
Someone once told me “it’s difficult to feel happy and sad at the same time”, and that’s not that I don’t acknowledge my down days but I try to relax and perhaps to get some context on the bigger picture by doing an activity such as sport or watching something that will make me laugh as a way of being free of all the worries and concerns I have throughout the week. I’ve always found with sport that I always forgot about anything and everything within that hour/90 minutes and it does do wonders for my mental health. I’ve realised that when it comes to activity, doing something is better than nothing, even if that something is a minute of star jumps or running up and down the stairs or rolling around playing with my son. It all helps.
I’ve actually found the exercise of writing the above a difficult one and particularly thinking how much I should and shouldn’t say but if it helps someone reading this to think “I feel a bit like that” or “I might try that or listen/watch that” it may help.
I’ll leave you with my favourite saying that came from the great philosopher Denzel Washington 😊
“Don’t look for perfection, look for progress”.
I’m trying to not be too critical of my own work or the way in which I do (or don’t do) things in my life but I’ll never get it 100% right and understanding that has helped me enormously.
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