Mind Matters
Living with Epilepsy means living with a sense of the unknown. But even if you did not have epilepsy, it would be impossible to know what will happen in the future. Whilst understandable, making plans based on a fear of how your condition may affect you is not productive and can lead to negative thoughts.
Most people get anxiety when they get epilepsy, that nervousness takes over your life..
It’s helpful to say between seizures…remind people, employers, that even if someone’s having one seizure a month, which is not great, it wipes out half an hour. That adds up to 6 hours a year. For the other however many thousand hours in the year, that person’s brain is functioning normally and they’re the same person they always were. Get them in some sort of context
For most people the majority of the time is not spent having seizures so it is best to focus on that time and perhaps think, ‘the seizure is the time I am not in control. All the other hours, actually I can control.”
One of the things you can do is understand a bit more about your thoughts.
We all have thoughts that drive what we do and how we feel but we are often not aware of it.
Thoughts should not be confused with feelings – there is a difference. Feelings can be described in one word and come from inside you. eg I feel happy or I feel sad. Thoughts are the words or pictures that go through your mind. The problem is, not all thoughts are helpful.
If you are having unhelpful thoughts, there’s nothing unusual about you, or about the way you’re thinking. Unhelpful thoughts are common. It’s just sometimes quite useful to know what they are, and then to see if we want to challenge them and think differently.
Understanding your unhelpful thoughts may improve the way you feel, both emotionally and physically.
While it is not always possible to change a difficult situation, you can change how you think about it.
So what is an unhelpful thought? Here are some traits to look out for…