 Hello and welcome back. Today's video is about self-harm and it's specifically looking at ideas for how to get started on stopping self-harming. Now the first idea that I always share with people who are struggling with self-harm is that you need to start talking about it and you might start that by writing about it. You might start it by phoning an anonymous helpline like Childline or the Samaritans. You might use one of their online services. Ideally, you want to get to the point where you can talk to a trusted adult, a parent, someone at school, something like that, but we really need ideally to begin sort of articulating our kind of thoughts and feelings around our self-harm and ideally have a kind of trusted adult in our life who can help to keep us safe, who we can turn to at difficult moments. So getting someone on board who's going to kind of walk that journey with you is a really important step. Now, I don't underestimate the enormity of that task. It can be really, really difficult to open up about it, which is why I do suggest things like Childline or the Samaritans as a first port of call because talking about it anonymously and confidentially can be a great starting point. But if you can get someone that you know kind of face-to-face in real life, that's a great next step. You might find it first that when you try and open up to, for example, parents, they might not understand, they might have expectations that you should stop, but you might find that it's very distressing and upsetting for them and it can take a little while to get through those feelings. Please just know that generally those feelings come from a place of love and that as we work through this that you will often find that opening up to parents, to teachers, to youth workers, whoever it might be that you feel that you can trust is a really, really good tool in your kind of ongoing recovery. The next thing is that just whilst the self-harm continues, and we need to accept that it's unlikely to stop overnight because in order to break that cycle of self-harm we need to really begin to understand it, think about healthy alternatives and think about different outlets for our emotions and maybe change the underlying circumstances. So while the self-harm continues, even if it's in a lesson form, we need to think about keeping ourselves safe. So have a think about things like your access to means of self-harm. So make sure that the means of self-harm that you access, whatever that might be, that they are as safe as possible. So things like ensuring that whatever you use is clean, that you're not repeatedly using the same things, making sure that you don't have access to means that are too dangerous or potentially lethal. And it's good to have a think about those things when you are in a relatively kind of calm frame of mind because for most of us, when we're self-harming, we're not doing it with any intent to cause ourselves huge damage or to take our own life, we're trying to manage a moment. And so we need to think in the moments when we're a bit more lucid and calm and a little bit more positive about how we can help our more distressed self to manage in a safe way as possible. The other bit with keeping safe is about looking after your injuries. So if you are someone who is currently self-harming, making sure that you know what signs to look out for that might indicate shock, if you're harming yourself badly, and if you were to see those signs that you would go and seek help for that. And also that you can recognize signs of infection. So here we're thinking about keeping your wounds clean. Learning to look after your injuries when you're self-harmed can be quite an important part of the sort of healing process and that can be sounds kind of corny, but it's quite symbolic sometimes watching yourself heal can be quite an important thing. And learning to have that kind of self-care look after those wounds can be really important. So thinking about yeah, keeping, keeping clean, keeping safe. The next thing I would suggest is to try and keep something of a journal of what's going on for you. So it can be very, very detailed if you're someone who likes to write and record, but it might simply be that you're keeping a record of what's happening each day and then maybe keeping a scale like a record of a number of one to ten on how you're feeling each hour or something like that. And what we're looking to do here is to build up a bit of a picture. What we want to know is when do you tend to end up self-harming? What immediately precipitates that? Are there any particular times in the week or the day when you're more likely to do that? Are there any places or people who seem to trigger these feelings in you? And you're looking for patterns and then when you can see those patterns we're thinking okay what can we do to change this? Is there anything we can do to avoid that situation or to make it less likely that we end up self-harming then? The other thing we want to look for when we're kind of keeping this journal, keeping this trigger diary, is to think are there any times when you managed more well? Are there days when your mood was a bit better? Are there days when you didn't think of self-harm? And what about those days was good? What were the kind of protective factors if you like? Then we want to start thinking about what alternatives could we turn to instead of self-harm? Now I'll share a link to another video that I made which is all about looking for alternatives to self-harm that you might find helpful. But the very kind of crux of this is thinking what do I get out of self-harm? Why is it something I keep returning to? What's the positive in it for me? What does it make me feel? What feeling am I trying to achieve by it? And how might I be able to achieve that feeling by doing something else? Basically there's lots and lots of different alternatives that we might look for and it really depends on what you're getting out of self-harm. It's about beginning to understand what's in it for you and how you might find alternatives. So once you kind of thought through what those alternatives might be and you don't want to just find one you want to have like a whole toolbox of different alternatives of things you might turn to because also it might not always be that you're looking to seek the same kind of feeling when you're self-harming and so you want to have this toolbox of different ideas and then you want to give yourself a choice. So when you get to the moment when you cannot manage anymore you want to give yourself a choice of choosing on alternatives to self-harm. Now by far the most effective way I found of doing this is to create a self-soothe box for yourself which is full of different things that you might do instead of self-harming and in that box would be where I would keep whatever means it is that I would normally self-harm with. So at that point when you feel like you can no longer overcome the urge to self-harm you actually need to make a choice. Another thing you can do is to either have like you know a locked box or to wrap it in ribbon so I quite often have done that in the past is encourage people to wrap the box in ribbon so that you have a bit of a kind of tactile moment and just a bit of time whilst you're accessing your means of self-harm. So trying to make it less immediately available and the other thing with that is that the very intense feelings that we get when we self-harm often will begin to dissipate over time and if we can just find a way to stretch that time out a little bit then often we get to a place where our head is much more able to manage where we're much more able to think our way out of this problem and to begin to problem-solve instead of and think you know instead of hurting myself I will try X you know I will call this person I'll talk to that person I'll go for a walk I'll go jump on the trampoline whatever it might be for you. So giving yourself an alternative and the other thing that that you can do there is literally just give yourself a minute so set a timer on your phone and just say right I am going to set a timer for one minute and I'm going to see if I can just get through the next minute without hurting myself just you just need to make it through one minute if you make it through the one minute then maybe try for the next one and again you know this anxiety curve will just gradually be dissipating and each minute you get through is another minute that you have you know really succeeded that's a big big battle and granted you may still end up turning to the self-harm but you are likely to harm yourself less severely than if you've done it when you were right at that heightened emotion so give yourself a minute the other thing that can work really well is a song so if you have a particular track or a playlist that you like try and give yourself the length of a particular song before you then turn to your means you're just trying to buy yourself time trying to buy yourself your brain and your body time to calm down to begin to calm so you can begin to kick in with the reasoning and you know write yourself prompts so in your box or wherever it is that you might go while you keep your means for self-harm actually leave prompts for yourself because most people at the point at which they feel that they urge to self-harm we're not thinking straight at all we're a massive ball of emotions and they could be lots of different kinds of emotions but usually the one thing they have in common is they're utterly overwhelming and it's so hard to think straight if you've got a list or a letter that you've written to yourself saying hey before you self-harm try this try this try this then it gives you something to try really clear instructions can be really helpful the final thing i would say is just please be hopeful this can feel like something that you're not going to ever overcome and when you are struggling with self-harm it can feel like there's never going to be anything that's going to make things feel better and it can feel quite hopeless but actually this is a relatively common means of coping and lots and lots of people do overcome it you're much more likely to overcome it if you're making you know a real kind of effort to do so you recognize that this is something that you'd like to change that's a key thing is wanting to change even if you feel unable to do that right now and also about inviting and help so reaching out to those trusted adults and not being afraid if we don't get the right answer the first time to go and approach someone else so if for example you go visit your your doctor or someone you speak to someone at school or you speak to a parent or another trusted adult and you don't have the kind of conversation you hope to then think about if there's someone else that you might talk to it takes a huge amount of resilience and bravery to have this kind of conversation it takes even more so to do it more than once but the thing is that things can get better they really can so yeah good luck please try some of these things and if you have other ideas that have worked for you then please leave them in the comments and the one thing I would say is please don't leave any specifics about means of self-harm because that's the kind of thing that can be triggering for people so please share your ideas about what might help but don't share specific details about methods of self-harm I hope this was helpful good luck it can get better I promise it can and please don't feel too alone if you're feeling alone then just head to the other video which I'll link to here and have a look down in the comments and you're going to see lots and lots of people who are in the same boat as you but also you know if you're at school or college have a look around you I guarantee you there are other people in the same room as you who are in the same boat you just haven't found each other yet okay good luck I hope you found it helpful please do leave a comment down below give it a thumbs up if you liked it and if you want to hear from me then please subscribe to see my future videos okay bye