My biggest rebuild of PROJECT ME was to repair my Mental Health. I had to understand why I did what I did in order to be able to accept it and not be ashamed or feel guilt over it.
I created a theoretical model to analyse my own mental health at various stages of my diabetic journey.
The Brain Box Model
I want you to imagine that we are all born carrying a box. In this box we carry around all of our mental stuff. This box is a particular size and all of our boxes are different. For each of us, the box is usually a fixed size for life, but there are circumstances when you box might grow or shrink throughout your life. The amount of stuff in your box is completely fluid and can change from day to day.
- The box size represents my “Mental Capacity”.
- The stuff inside represents my “Stressors”.
The more stressors I carry, the more difficult it is to fit them all into my mental capacity. It can even reach a point where the stressors are too much to fit in the box and it becomes impossible to carry. In this model, this represents depression.
As a Type 1 Diabetic, there are physical and psycological reasons why:
- Our Boxes are, on average, smaller thn our non diabetic counterparts.
- Our value of stressors is higher than our non diabetic counterparts.
This Blog series will outline these and also discuss strategies that have worked for me in both:
- Increasing the size of my box
- Decreasing the number of stressors