Sections
1. What do people do to help themselves when they’re feeling suicidal?
4. Take it one day at a time
Suggestions from people with lived experience
Things that can help in the moment:
- Grounding or breathing techniques.
- Putting your face or hands in cold water.
- Writing down your feelings.
- Avoiding drugs or alcohol.
- Delay your actions and break time into manageable chunks so you’re less overwhelmed. The smaller the better. Complete one minute and assess how you feel, and then try the next one. If you can get through 2 minutes at a time, that’s great, but keep it small and focus just on that one period of time, getting to the end of it. You just have to get through the next minute, hour, day, whatever feels manageable and then start again.
- If you’ve been prescribed medication to take at times like this, take it and try to keep distracted until it starts to work.
More suggestions from members of our lived experience panel
- “Saying just one more day helps, as I don’t always have the strength to imagine being able to manage much longer than this, it breaks life up into small manageable steps.”
- “Thinking moment to moment instead of bigger picture… it’s so important to think about survival on a minute to minute basis and not allow ourselves to be swamped by the bigger problems we face.”
Things you can do to help yourself in the future:
- Create a list on your phone of anything that helps you when you feel suicidal so that it’s with you wherever you go. Keep adding to the list whenever you think of something else that might help.
- Make it harder to access things you want to harm yourself with. Adding in layers of prevention so there is distance between you and your methods of harm gives you more time to seek help without having to get rid of access altogether, which may make you feel worse and less in control. For example, placing items in a locked box, with the keys in a different location, which means you can’t immediately reach for something and might help you stay safer for longer.
Remember, these ideas and suggestions came from people with experience of suicidal thoughts. Everybody is different and what works for one person might not be right for someone else, but they’ve shared lots of different ideas and examples of things they find helpful when they’re having suicidal thoughts.