Bob and Steve

A couple of years ago, my cousin, my sister and I started making an animation called Bob and Steve. We made two little plasticine guys, then made a bunch of claymation videos using a snazzy little feature on the Nintendo 3DS camera. Then we edited them on MovieMaker and uploaded them to our YouTube channel. It was going pretty well until the beginning of this year, when my mental health took a dip (nothing too serious, but it made making new episodes unrewarding and incredibly stressful) and since I was responsible for the animating, editing, uploading and blogging the whole thing ground to a half pretty quickly. But for the past two weeks, we've been working on bringing it back and making it better. I revamped our website, social networking pages and YouTube channel, then we started brainstorming and today we uploaded our first proper video since last Christmas! I'm also waiting to hear back from my cousin about a new idea for Halloween, and then we will be working on the second Christmas special. In the meantime, you can watch out new video below, follow us on Twitter, add us on Google+ and like our page on Facebook!

Janet Devlin

I went to see Janet Devlin's tour gig in Camden on Wednesday and it was amazing!! The support acts were awesome, Janet herself was even more awesome and I got to meet her afterwards!!! It was an amazing end to a not so great day, and I also took loads of photos (although a lot of them didn't turn out so well because of the lighting):

Tom Dibb.

Wayward Daughter.

Janet Devlin!

Janet and Newton Faulkner.

A bald guy's head got in the way of my shot.

Highlight of the day!!!

Anxiety, Stimulants and the Sleep Cycle

As with any mental health disorder, anxiety creates its own set of problems, many of which I find involve the things I eat and drink combined with the amount of sleep I get, and that the two can often negatively affect each other.

How much anxiety I experience in a day depends a lot on what I do and where I am. I'm much more likely to come across things that trigger my OCD when I'm at school than when I'm hiding in my bedroom at home, for example. This in turn affects the things that I am able to do, which often has an impact on how I feel. You can see how I can quickly end up in a negative cycle. However, I have found that altering a few things in my life has helped me to manage my feelings more effectively, even if not entirely:

#1 ~ Sugar. This one might sound obvious, but it only recently hit me that the amount of sugar I consume and the amount of anxiety I feel might have some kind of relationship. The event that made me realise this took place near the end of the summer holidays this year, when I purchased an enormous box of gummy bears in the Duty Free shop at the airport when we were coming home from Menorca and ate the whole lot in the space of about 12 hours. This, needless to say, left me not only hyper but panicked and jumpy, and was followed by a pretty nasty sugar crash! Since then, I've limited the amount of sugar that I eat or drink in one sitting (I generally won't have anything with more than 15g of sugar per serving unless I'm exhausted or feeling low - or prepared to take a risk!), and I've found that it helped more than I thought it would. If anything, it gives me the feeling that I'm in control of something, even if the whole anxiety relief thing is only a placebo.

I still have the box. I'm not really sure why.

#2 ~ Caffeine. I've never really drunk much caffeine to be honest (unlike my younger sister, who's addicted to the stuff), so it wasn't until I started cutting down on sugar that I figured it would probably be a good idea to go decaf as well. As a result, I now drink even less caffeine than I did before (i.e. none) unless I'm absolutely exhausted or feeling very low, in which case I'll have a cup of tea. Right now I've got an embarrassingly weak cup of cold English Breakfast, which I've drunk only half of in over an hour. I'm drinking it deliberately slowly - not only to gauge my body's reaction to it but to avoid spilling it on my computer! It tastes vile, but it's doing the trick.

#3 ~ Sleep. Because my anxiety drains so much of my energy, I find that I often want to sleep at odd times (generally during school, which as you can imagine isn't favourable). I always avoid taking naps even if I'm able, as if I give in I'll mess up my body clock and end up wide awake and twice as anxious at three in the morning. Having said that, though, there is scientific evidence that taking a 20 minute nap every now and again can be beneficial (they even tested it on Mythbusters!), so at the end of the day it's really down to personal choice.

As always, feel free to post anything you think I may have missed in the comments section below, or suggest other things I could post about in the future.

Mental Health and the Daily Routine

If, like me, you're among the one in four people living with a mental health problem, chances are it can seriously affect the structure of your days. I know from my own experiences of exhausting anxiety, ridiculous amounts of time spent on compulsive rituals and an increasingly demanding schedule that it can be pretty hard to motivate yourself to get things done, which is why I've decided to share some of my tips for keeping to a daily routine here:

Tip #1 ~ Write things on a calendar. A calendar is a really useful and easy way of reminding yourself of what you have to do whilst also reassuring yourself that you haven't forgotten anything. It can also be free; you can use calendars on your phone or email inbox, or just do what I did and draw one in a notebook. I find it useful to colour code my calendar so that I can look at it and immediately have a good idea of what kind of day I'm likely to have. I write everything I absolutely have to remember (or, as the case may be, absolutely can't avoid), such as appointments and coursework deadlines, in red; significant days or annual events (like birthdays) in blue; and everything else in black. I also highlight certain days in different colours depending on how much anxiety the events on that day are likely to cause me. Yellow is some anxiety, orange is significant anxiety and pink is severe anxiety. To show you what I mean, this is what the next two months currently look like:

On the back of each month is my notes page, which is where I write the things that happen that might be useful to me in the future, such as good coping strategies I've discovered or warnings not to do things a certain way. I also colour code these notes to show how much anxiety I felt on the given day.

Tip #2 ~ Allocate your time. Make the commitment to finish the things that really need doing before moving on to other things. For example, if you know you've got a project due tomorrow and you still have half of it to do, you will feel a lot better later if you sit down and finish it rather than going off to play video games, as tempting as the second option may be. It's perfectly alright to allow yourself a break now and then, particularly if you're working at a computer or doing something that requires straining your eyes, but make sure you set yourself a sensible time limit (the recommended time for a break is about twenty minutes) and that you go back to your task once it's over. If someone asks you to help them with something or a friend calls asking if you're free, be sure to check that you actually have time before you say yes. Whoever it is will understand if you're too busy, just like you (hopefully) would for them.

Tip #3 ~ Know when enough's enough. Everyone has limits, and it's really important to remember that, particularly if you're already struggling with your mental health. Take care not to over commit yourself, and let people know if it's all getting too much. It would probably be a good idea to let your school or workplace know about your disorder if you haven't already, as they'll be able to work with you to make sure you're not taking on more than you can handle. 

So, that's my advice on keeping a structured routine. Feel free to comment with any additional suggestions, and I'll let you know how well I do with sticking to my plan!

Testing...Testing.

Hello!

This certainly isn't my first attempt at writing a blog (it's actually more like my fourth), but I've never used Blogger before. This is also the first time that I've actually had some kind of theme other than "random".

So yeah. My name is Beth, I'm fourteen years old and I live in England (it's raining, surprise surprise). My aim for this blog is basically to keep it going for more than about a fortnight, and maybe to get some of the people I know to write posts about their lives. I'll probably write mainly about my family, my pets, music and my daily life with a mental illness (obsessive-compulsive disorder). Other than that, I guess we're back to "random" again.

Oh, and you can click here to check out Bob and Steve, which is a little series of animations I made with my cousin and my sister.