I was having a bad mental health day… so I cleared out my wardrobe

Its 2am, and for the last week or so I have been struggling with my mental wellbeing. I’ve been sleeping poorly and my productivity levels have been reduced to near zero. You can tell it is bad when I tell you that my entire freezer is full of cake; I’ve been stress baking to the extreme. But its not been working and I have been sitting on the edge of honestly not being okay.

Social distancing isn’t even the main reason I’ve been feeling like this. Whilst it has definitely contributed, I think the underlying issues have stemmed from having no busy schedule. It was being busy that pushed me into doing revision and extra learning for medical school and kept my brain engaged to a point where I was sleeping… because I was tired.

So it’s 2am and I am just sat in bed, this desire to sleep because I want a normal sleep schedule but I am not tired and my brain just won’t shut off. So I get out of bed and open my wardrobe, pull everything out of it and turn on my apple music playlist. I spent over an hour trying on every piece of clothing I own and deciding what fits and what I never wear. If it doesn’t fit its gone. No matter how much I want to keep it incase I loose a bit of weight… because I said that 3 months ago and though I’ve lost 4kg they still don’t fit, so I won’t be wearing it for the foreseeable future (even if we were going out).

I probably culled about 25% of my wardrobe. Rediscovered clothes with now fit me and fallen out of love with clothes I have kept for a while but just never gotten along with. It’s surprising what this forty minutes of cleaning did for my mind. I am able to just sit down in bed and let all my worries go. They definitely haven’t gone away completely once I woke up it came back in full force and left me feeling panicked and vulnerable again. But having a cleaned and organised space just allowed me to feel like I had some control back in my life. It was a strange feeling and when I woke up I made the decision that I just needed to get proactive and utilise the opportunity to organise, clear out and reduce the clutter in my life. Hopefully doing this will tire me out enough and I will sleep a little better.

Either way the last week or so has really made realise I am in desperate need of a proper night routine. I need to develop that ability to calm down and tell my body that it is time to sleep. Hopefully some better nights sleep will help me be more productive in revision and improve my mental health. Going to keep organising all my drawers though.