I’ve been stressed lately. We’ve had a queue of bad events coursing through my family lately, everything from ill health to work problems. December and January  were busy, but we’re starting to see the light (maybe, hopefully?).

I knew that the stress was bothering me, like it would anyone, but I thought it ended there. I was keeping up with everything, handling what needed to be handled. It was going as well as it could.

Then that little voice in the back of my head started nagging me again, and I mean that in the rudest of ways. When I’m over-stressed, run down, anxious, or depressed my mind doesn’t stop with the negativity and it starts directing it at me.

You most the time my inner voice doesn’t degrade me. If I make a mistake, it curses really quick then moves on to how I can recover from it. When I’m not in great mental health my mind does something different. It starts to insult me for every mistake I make, even really silly ones that don’t matter in the grand scheme of things.

It’s such a small change that you don’t think about it the first few times your mind throws daggers at itself. You just take it, yes I’m stupid, yes I looked it too. Everyone might have been annoyed by me, sure.

You absorb it, but then driving home one day I caught myself mid-thought and realized that I was being downright cruel to myself over nothing, and worse, it happened without me being completely aware of it.

That little voice was giving me warning signs, big flashing red ones that said I needed to take care of what was going on with my mental health before things went downhill fast. And I, had been ignoring it.

Maybe it’s because I’ve taken a beating from my brain before, after all, I’ve gone through depression multiple times, and when your in that state, all your brain does is beat up on you, but that doesn’t mean that it should all the time. It doesn’t even mean that it should be while your depressed, but when you think you have a grip on your mental health the little voice in your head shouldn’t be a terror.

But I’m glad it was, or is, I’m glad it let me know that I need to throw some kindness and self-care my way. I’m glad I realized that I need to be arguing with that little voice instead of absorbing it. I’m thankful that I saw the warning signs before I started a spiral downwards

So please, for the love of all that’s good in the world, listen to that little voice in your head and listen to it closely. It has a lot to say and can let you know things are going astray before you even realize it yourself.