Another week or month has passed, you’ve made zero progress on your health goals and now the negativity has led you towards self harm.
Deep down you know your health is important, but you aren’t taking consistent action.
Most of the time you’re having deep thoughts and feelings…How strong are they? Do these thoughts intrude into your thinking and activities? What’s really going on here?
The truth is, you don’t feel inspired or motivated.
You can’t help it, but your emotions always get the better of you, causing you to make terrible decisions.
Defining Self Harm
Self-harm is defined as an act of intentional self-injury, self-poisoning or suicide. Self-harm is known when a person injures their own body on purpose. These self-harm injuries can be serious or minor. However, sometimes it can be associated with the risk of suicide. Overall, self-harm really depends on the way you are dealing with difficult situations, painful thoughts, or feelings.
Researchers across different countries studied and reported that most adolescents have a 13% to 18% lifetime risk of self-harm.
Some common ways young people harm themselves include:
- Cutting, scratching, biting or burning your skin
- Constant hair pulling
- Overdosing or poisoning, but not to lethal levels
- Hitting your head or body against hard surfaces.
Self-harm is thinking about hurting yourself. Most of the time it is a sign of emotional distress or feelings of shame. Many people who experience uncomfortable emotions may grow if a person continues to use self harm. Usually, this is caused by frequent cutting or burning that can be permanent. Another factor of self-harm is drinking alcohol or drug use can increase the risk of a more severe injury. Self-harm takes a lot of time and energy away. Some people do not realize the importance of other things you value. This leads them to focus a lot more on their emotional behavior and feelings.
For example, self-harm causes people to skip classes and avoiding social occasions to prevent people from seeing their scars. This is a sign that self-harm can affect negatively your work and relationships.
You may probably already know what self harm is, but did you know self-harm is a major public health problem?
Causes of Self Harm
The truth is, there is no simple cause that leads someone to self-harm. Self-harm can be caused by poor coping skills and the difficulty of managing emotions.
Emotional awareness is important to understand to help us talk about feelings, resolve conflicts better, and move past difficult feelings more easily. Some people have a hard time understanding their own emotions. This leads to a mix-up of emotions that can trigger self-harm events. For instance, feeling worthless, anger, panic, guilt, rejection, and self-hatred are all signs of urging to self-harm.
Mainly self-harm is targeted on the arms, legs, and front torso. There are only a few people who experience self-harm and then stop. Mostly for those who become upset and trigger an urge to self harm right away. However, self-harm can become a long-term and repetitive behavior. In the end, it is always important to be aware of your emotions and to take control of your own actions.
Moreover, stressful situations can have some people self-harm as a way of releasing emotional pressure. More like a stress reliever. Here are examples of how self-harm can bring relief in different ways:
- Hurting the body “outside” can shift the attention from painful emotions “inside.”
- Feeling emotionally numb or disconnected from feelings can push a person to want to feel “something,” even physical pain.
- If a person is feeling unworthy or guilty (with or without a reason), self harm can sometimes be a form of self-punishment.
- It can provide a sense of control.
- It can be a way of letting others know that something is wrong.
Risk Factors of Self Harm
Most people who experience self-harm are teenagers and young adults. Self-harm often starts in the preteen or early teen years when emotions are more unstable. Also, when teens face a serious amount of peer pressure, loneliness, and conflicts with parents. At the early stages of self-harming, it can definitely be difficult to control your feelings and feel hopeless about finding a solution.
Some risk factors are social or situational:
- Difficult relationships with family or friends;
- Problems at school or work (including bullying);
- Problems at home or family breakup; or
- Dealing with homophobia or racism
Some risk factors are more emotional and personal:
- Feeling empty, disconnected, isolated;
- Experiencing anxiety, anger, or depression;
- A history of trauma or abuse;
- A family/friend history of self-harm;
- Alcohol drug use; or
- External uncontrollable stress
Signs of Self Harm
Several people who self-harm tend to keep it a secret from others, so it can be difficult to detect. Some of the signs of self-harm are:
- Changes in usual behaviour, like withdrawing from friends and social life;
- Stressed or depressed;
- Overdressing, for example, wearing long sleeves and pants in hot weather;
- Signs of scarring, cuts, bruises or burns that can’t be explained and may happen more than once;
- Noticing razors or other items that could be used to self-harm.
Why is it Important to Get Help?
Any form of self-harm is a sign of bigger issues that need to be addressed. Even if you are injuring yourself in a minor way or not controlling your thoughts of harming yourself.
Reach out for help.
Talk to someone you can trust. A friend, a doctor, loved one, nurse, teacher, spiritual leader, or school counsellor. Most importantly, find someone who you feel comfortable with the most, to help you find the right treatment. Sometimes you can feel ashamed or embarrassed about your behavior and this why it is important to find someone who is supportive, caring, and non-judgmental to help you out in tough times.
Furthermore, if you are worried that a family member or friend could be hurting themselves. Make sure you reach out to them on asking how they’re doing and prepare to listen to the answer. Although it can be uncomfortable at times making sure that your there for them and listening can greatly help them out. Also, it is important to not turn it into a joke or make promises because it takes a great amount of effort to quit. Gently, encourage them on offering to find treatment even if it is hard to fully understand. This will show there is someone out there to take care of you and help you get back to your feet.
Why use a Self Harm Tracker?
It is important to take care of your health and finding ways to manage your health. There are a lot of tools out there to help you get what you need, but the result depends on how well you can continue to manage your health.
Especially, with the global crisis of the COVID-19 pandemic, it can affect some people’s mind-body to lose control with all the news, emotions, health protocols, arrangements, closures, and much more.
A self-harm tracker can calm your urges, track your progress, and help you get better over time. For people who are going through a mental breakdown or having emotional problems, the self harm tracker enables them to have self-control. You can help yourself to feel calm than feeling harm. Tracking your feelings on the self harm tracker, helps you to become more aware of yourself and to remove toxic feelings from your life.
The self-harm tracker can be used for several reasons, it can help to manage and track people who experience with:
- Inactive self-injuring
- Struggling with a mental health condition
- Isolation
- Stressful situations
- Abusing drugs and alcohol
- Addictions
The self-harm tracker app is used for easy access on recording self-harm situations or other health problems to track your health emotionally, physically and mentally.
How to Control Self Harm Urges with a Self Harm Tracker
Self harm can be associated with a range of mental health problems such as depression, anxiety, substance abuse, eating disorders and much more. This can also lead to harming yourself both physically and emotionally.
Although to control self-harm, you are truly in charge of understanding your own well-being. The best way to manage your health with the self-harm tracker is with CareClinic. You will have full control of your health by tracking all of your health problems.
To calm self-harming emotions, the self harm tracker allows you to keep daily records of your emotions and worries. This helps you to identify the most frequent mental breakdown or health concern that is affecting you the most. The self-harm tracker offers different utilities for helping to manage your emotions or creating a plan to control self-harm. Overall, being consistent in tracking your self harm urges can not only help you understand yourself but lowering self-harm occurrences gradually.
Managing Self Harm Urges with the CareClinic Platform
Now that you know how a self-harm tracker can be useful in many situations. Let’s open the CareClinic app that I asked you to download at the beginning of the blog.
As you register as a new user with all your personal information, the CareClinic app will be your all-time personal health tracker. This allows you to keep all your health and fitness information under your control. Also, with simple access to your smartphone, you can reach CareClinic at anytime and anywhere. From head to toe, the CareClinic app can help track and manage your health with daily reports.
The CareClinic app offers a variety of care plans to help control all self-harm urges. As you select a care plan, daily recordings of personal health experiences can help build good habits. Although it could take some time, surely you will notice a significant improvement in your well-being.
The more you know, the better you feel.
How to do Better?
Simple. Get started by downloading the CareClinic app on your smartphone from the App Store or Google Play. Follow along to learn how the self harm tracker can benefit you and explore other ways to manage your overall health with the CareClinic app!
Tracking on the CareClinic Platform
Symptom Tracker
As you explore the CareClinic app, you may come across the symptom tracker. An excellent feature to calm self-harm and to tracks urges of self-harm.
Many people do not realize, tracking their health symptoms can seriously make a difference, especially when it comes to mood tracking. The mood is an important symptom to track in your day-to-day life. It allows you to have your emotions untwine and beware of your behaviours.
Using the symptom tracker, you have the ability to search for any symptom. Simply adding additional notes, reminders and start dates can help manage and track your symptoms. In addition, with more control of your mood or symptom, you can achieve great health results by staying consistent. By using the severity bar, you can decide the level of your experience with a symptom at any time in the day. From having the option to use the severity bar, you can add additional notes under each symptom to self-reflect on your behaviour or emotion.
Overall, the symptom tracker is a remarkable feature that the CareClinic offers to calm self-harms by learning to track, record and analyze your well-being.
Diaries Entries Feature
As you explore the CareClinic app, diary entries are designed to provide encouragement, recognition, and love.
For those who struggle with self-harm, diary entries help to collect your thoughts, experiences, and make observations. The diary entries allow you to better remember what you did, what you thought and what was happening. From troubling events, you can now record and reflect on improving your mental state and controlling your emotions.
CareClinic is recommended for anyone who feels the need to write without worrying about anyone else and to improve their thinking process. Many people think writing a diary is useless or not effective, but it’s a simple technique that can be enjoyable. A free mind can overcome distractions and get things out of your way that matters the most to you personally and professionally.
So, what are you waiting for? Go ahead, start using the diary to track all your daily thoughts to enhance the quality of your life! With this great feature, the CareClinic app allows you to be a free-minded individual.
Personalize Your Own Therapy Sessions
The CareClinic app offers tremendous ways for you to prevent self-harm occurrences and other health issues.
By tracking and creating your own therapy sessions, you can start to think about what you’d like:
- To achieve;
- Identify thoughts and urges;
- Understand feelings and behaviour; and
- Controlling health concerns
Self-therapy is an underestimated technique that many people do not understand. The CareClinic app will help you to manage and track all types of therapy techniques for you to better understand your feelings, experiences, and personality.
Lifestyle Factors
Using a self-harm tracker, it is important to track your lifestyle factors. This helps you to modify your habits and could greatly influence your health and well-being factors.
The CareClinic app provides a wide range of lifestyle factors, such as:
- Social;
- General;
- Virus Risk Factors;
- Digestion; or
- Weather
You would have the opportunity to reflect on the experiences and the factors you choose. Also, having the ability to add and edit factors that could possibly not be valid throughout the day. Tracking your lifestyle factors through the CareClinic app is a simple way to manage the urge to self-harm or to influence an individual’s health.
Why Choose CareClinic?
By now you should know why the CareClinic app is right for you. This gives you the opportunity to be motivated or inspired to track and achieve all your health goals.
You name it, anywhere from nutrition, medications, fitness, and much more. CareClinic has your back to review, manage, track, and record right onto your smartphone.
Don’t worry about missing appointments or forgetting to take your medications. The CareClinic is your own medical alert system to ensure you follow all your health goals. Especially with the global crisis of COVID-19, start using the CareClinic app to mentally prepare and maintain a healthy lifestyle.
CareClinic is more than an intelligent health tracker. Take control of your health and well-being. From a simple interface, anyone can use the app to track everything together and to better understand your behaviour. Are you still not too sure why choose CareClinic? Well, let me tell you that CareClinic has been recommended by several doctors. Now you know CareClinic is approved to be safe and efficient on being the best all-in-one health app.
Care Team Feature Support
If you haven’t heard, we have an amazing Care Team feature offered by CareClinic.
Our CareTeam is used for several reasons to keep everyone informed and up to date.
You’re not alone.
Simply adding your family members to your CareTeam gives the opportunity to monitor each other’s well-being. This feature is free for all users to connect and help each other with their health. Being able to share your health reports with members of your CareTeam, allows you to discuss potential improvements and goals to accomplish.
Want to connect with your health providers? Easy. You can have health professionals connected to your CareTeam to alerted or remotely view user reports on receiving professional feedback.
Stay together, stay healthy, stay on track!