During creating this project I knew that my mental health may be a struggle. Having experienced victimisation personally this project was definitely something that would bring back thoughts and feelings based around my personal life. I spoke to my MMP supervisor about this and was advised that if my mental health did become a struggle then to be in contact and get involved with student wellbeing.
As someone that has struggled with their mental health for some time, I have experienced quite the amount of counselling and support, one being from student wellbeing. I have been taught many tips and tricks in dealing with my personal mental health and have found multiple ways that have helped. Therefore, when I started struggling with my mental health during this project I knew some ways to try and combat this and start getting back on track.
In this blog post, I want to share some ways that are beneficial in helping your mental health during creating such a project. As this radio documentary is on victimisation within the care system I thought this post was fitting because mental health problems may affect a person who is going through victimisation.
The first thing that I find helpful in dealing with my mental health is taking regular breaks for myself; this usually is by doing something that I love, that will properly take my mind off of what is stressing me and making my mental health suffer.
Next, I love to-do lists, I write the smallest tasks (the big task but split up into lots of different smaller tasks) to make myself feel like I have achieved something and motivate myself more to carry on and do more tasks. This helps my stress a lot and calms me because instead of just sitting around doing nothing and then stressing more I haven't done the tasks that I was stressing about, I aim gradually getting the task done but in a way that is manageable to how I am feeling in that time period.
Finally, I love watching programmes, films, YouTube videos- in particular YouTube videos that will motivate me to carry on, sounds silly to me now but it majorly helps, watching videos of people doing work or cleaning or something that I need to do motivates me to do that task. In particular with this MMP project I have changed up my work by watching a few Christmas films to cheer me up and then watching a documentary on victimisation or a clip on YouTube that will help with my research for this piece.
This is a little list of things I do to help with my mental health, and what I have done to help with my mental health during this project, which is very important with managing a project and completing it to the best of your ability. I think if your mental health is down and you are not in the mood to do your work because of this, it will definitely affect your ultimate goal.