 Today, I have a very special guest here to talk to everybody about borderline personality disorder as well as self-harm. What is up, everybody? This is Chris from the Rewired Soul, where we talk about the problem, but focus on the solution. And if you're new to my channel, my channel is all about mental health. Not only do I like to help all of you with your mental health and improving it, but I also like to spread a message of hope and increase awareness and decrease the stigma. So if you're into that kind of stuff, make sure you subscribe and ring that notification bell. But something that I try to do is build this kind of community or become more of a part of the community here on YouTube with other YouTubers who are talking about mental health. Like, there's so many people out there that you need to check out who are helping out with mental health and also educating people on stuff. And today, my very special guest is Sharina. She is from across the pond over in the UK and she has a channel over here called Recovery Mom. Okay, so Sharina has an awesome channel. I found it a few months ago and not only did she struggle with borderline personality disorder and self-harm, but also addiction, anxiety and all sorts of stuff. And I have her here to talk a little bit about that stuff and educate all of you, but I'll quit yapping and here is Sharina. Hi, Chris. Thank you for having me on your channel. Hi, guys. My name is Sharina. My YouTube channel is Recovery Mom. A little bit about me. I've been diagnosed with borderline personality disorder, depression, anxiety, bulimia, I was a self-harm. I used to attempt suicide multiple times, drug addiction, alcoholism, prenatal and postnatal depression. I have four children. So I have literally got so much personal experience in this. But all those problems are no longer problems for me today. And today I'm going to talk to you about self-harm. Now, drug addiction, overspending, eating disorders, they are all forms of self-harm. But for the sake of this video, I'm talking about NSSIs, which stands for non-suicidal self-injury. There are so many reasons why people self-harm and they can vary greatly. Some people might have experienced trauma as a child and grow up feeling they deserve to be punished and self-harm for that reason. There are those of us that suffer such intense emotions. We just don't know how to cope with them and we self-harm. We have people that don't experience intense emotions. In fact, they're the opposite. They experience no emotions. They're emotionally numb. And so they self-harm to feel. We can self-harm if we're angry at other people. We can self-harm if we're angry at ourselves. We can self-harm because we just don't know how to communicate, how we feel to other people. And it's like, help me. So they're all like, just some of the reasons why we self-harm. When it comes to self-harming, there is a kind of scale, I suppose. And at one end, when someone self-harm, they might need urgent medical attention immediately. At the other end, you might have someone that just pulls out individual hairs. Either way, wherever you are on the scale, self-harm is self-harm and it's not a coping, not a healthy coping mechanism. But for us, it is a way of coping. So what is happening in our brain when we do this? Why is the cycle so hard to break? If, for example, you're feeling really, really sad and you go and eat a load of junk food, maybe chocolate, chocolates. And you feel better. In your brain, a little neural pathway will grow. So next time you feel sad, you're more likely to just go and eat chocolate and it'll make you feel better and that neural pathway will grow stronger. And every time you're using chocolate as a coping mechanism for the sadness, your neural pathway gets stronger and stronger and stronger until eventually, you don't even have to think about, oh, I do, you just do it. You feel sad, you eat chocolate, that's it. And this is what happens in our brain when we self-harm. We feel or don't feel a certain way and we self-harm and that neural pathway grows. So next time, we're more likely to do it. The other problem is that self-harming releases endorphins. Endorphins are our body's own natural pain relief. It's like morphine, it's addictive. So not only are we growing a strong neural pathway, so in the end, we don't even think about it, we just do, it's addictive in the nature that it's giving off an addictive chemical meaning we're more likely to do it again and again and it's harder to break that cycle, but it is possible to break that cycle. Now, there are a number of things you can do. I have a book coming out in October, the big book on borderline personality disorder and I've got individual chapters on the traits and one of the traits is self-harm. So there's a whole chapter on that and I've got a lot of advice in there, but I'll try and cut it down, scale it down for this video. One of the things is distracting. Now, you can distract in various ways. One is self-soothing and that's do something nice, have a nice warm bath, listen to relaxing music, phone a friend, stroke a pet, cuddle a teddy, go to sleep, just soothe yourself. Another way of distracting is by releasing a burst of energy and doing something really like physical exercise, punch a punch bag, scream into a pillow, go for a run, because this, doing this exercise, releases endorphins. So we still get that endorphin here, but in a far healthier way than if we were self-harming. Other things you can do is make your house safe if you are someone that cuts or just clear everything away. So next time you have that urge, you haven't easily got anything around you because this buys you time. What also buys your time is the five minute rule. When you have that urge, just say to yourself, I'm not self-harming for five minutes and because that's doable, five minutes is doable. If you say, I'm not self-harming, it just seems unrealistic and you're not likely to take your advice. If you say, I'm not gonna self-harm for five minutes and you hold up for five minutes, hopefully that buys you enough time for that urge to pass. So one of the best things that I have done is create something called a crisis box. And it's for when we're in a crisis because when we're in a crisis, we're far more likely to act impulsively or self-harm. So a crisis box is of your own making. You can put as much effort into it as you want. Just get like a shoe box or a bigger box if you need a bigger and put anything in there that you could use and get hold of quickly. That might help you when you have the urge to self-harm. It might be a mindfulness coloring book and some pencils. It might be a stress ball. It might be a CD of your favorite music. It might be a DVD or a funny film. Literally, it can be absolutely anything. There are so many things you can put into that box and the great thing is once you've got it there, next time you have that urge and the box is easily accessible, you can just grab it down and use something and it will buy you some time. Please don't feel ashamed of yourself harming. You can speak to a medical profession, you can professional, you can ask for help. You do not have to suffer in silence and please know that there is a way out. The last time I self-harmed was in 2014 and I actually have never even had the urge since. So it's possible, if I can do it, any of you can do it. So thank you so much for watching. Don't forget to subscribe to my channel. Thank you. All right, I hope you all love that video as much as I did. Like, I love, one of the things that I loved and those of you who've been around for a while, you know that I'm a big neuroscience nerd. I loved how Sharina talked about how you train your neural pathway for certain habits, right, and she uses the example with chocolate, but it can also be for self-harm. This also is what happens with addiction. When we have specific triggers and we go to certain habits, it gets wired into our brain. That's one of the reasons why this channel is named the rewired soul, because you can start to rewire these various habit loops. So I love how she explained that and talked about it and also talked about endorphins as well as other ways that you can get them. So that's really, really fascinating stuff and I hope you all enjoyed that video. But please, please, please, like something that I'm looking forward to is her book that's coming out in October. I need to hit her up and see if I can like check it out so I can do a review of it on my channel. Maybe I'll even do an interview with her and talk about some stuff in the book. But in the description down below will be a link to her book, so you can pre-order it and get it in October. I know I'm looking forward to it. So make sure that you check it out. But also like Sharina talked about towards the end of the video, like there's a lot of different things that you can do to help yourself and recover, but if you have more deep seated stuff and you need to talk to somebody about it, like make sure you check out the description below because I have a link to better help online affordable therapy and you will work with a licensed therapist and start working through some of this stuff. All right, so there'll be a bunch of resources down below. Make sure you head over to Sharina's channel, Recovery Mom. Like she covers a wide range of stuff, not just self-home and not just BPD, like a ton of stuff over on her channel. And she's also a mother too, so any of you parents out there, like there's a lot of stuff about being a parent who struggles with mental illness. So make sure that you go over there, subscribe to her, show her some love and also subscribe because pretty soon here I will be posting a guest video over on her channel. All right, but anyways, I wanna hear from all of you down in the comments below. What was your biggest takeaway from this video? Like do you struggle with BPD or self-harm? Or if you don't, like what are some of the things that you learned and now you're enlightened about? Let's have a conversation down in the comments below. All right, but that's all I got for you today. So if you liked this video, please give it a thumbs up. And if you're new here, I'm always making videos to help you out with your mental and emotional wellbeing. Make sure you subscribe, ring that notification bell and a huge thank you to everybody supporting the channel over on Patreon. And in case you missed it, we just launched a mental health merch shop that will be down in the description below. Grab yourself a t-shirt or a mug, support mental health awareness all over the world wherever you're from. All right, but that's all I got for you. Thanks so much for watching and I'll see you next time.