We encourage you to always listen to yourself. Here are some quick tips for when you feel overwhelmed by powerful emotions or something just feels too much when doing an exercise:

• Remember you can always take a break and come back to it later. You decide your pace.
• It's completely natural for powerful feelings to make us feel anxious, scared or uncomfortable. It's equally natural for us to impulsively want to flee them. But our emotions can't harm us. And even the most intense emotions come and go in waves.
• Try one of the meditations in the Safety Toolkit.

Remember that you decide your pace at all times. So if it gets too intense, feel free to temporarily distract yourself or think of something else for a while as a way to self-regulate.
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Suicidal thoughts are common, even though we seldom talk about it. The most important advice is to talk to someone about it, outside of this app. Tell someone you can trust, call a helpline or seek professional help. You can find a list of crisis helplines here.

• Seek help from primary healthcare if you have recurring suicidal thoughts or experience difficulties managing day-to-day life. Your primary healthcare provider will be able to advise you on the available treatment and further support.
• Most countries have crisis helplines, follow this link for phone numbers to helplines in some of our most-used countries.
• Seek help immediately at a psychiatric emergency unit or call an emergency number (e.g. 112 in Europe, 911 in US) if you feel your situation is unbearable or you have serious thoughts or plans about ending your life.
• There might be people around you who want to be of help. Tell a friend how you feel and be specific that you need help. For instance, you can ask someone to be with you, when seeking professional help or meeting a mental health professional.

Feeling low and depressed is common and happens to everyone sometimes. Doing inner work can evoke a lot of emotions and feeling low might be one of them. When you slow down your pace in life or actively work on overcoming past hurts, unfulfilled dreams and expectations are likely to resurface. This is a normal part of the healing process. However if you feel low over a longer period of time, it could be a sign of depression and you could benefit from getting professional help. The majority of people having a depression get better after a few weeks of treatment.

Feeling low, worrying or experiencing anxiety are natural reactions to difficult circumstances in life. For example if you’ve lost your job, experienced financial hardship, lost someone you love or struggled in one or more of your key relationships, it is natural to be affected for a period of time. Grief, anger and feeling low are a part of life and are neither dangerous nor an illness. While these emotions can feel challenging, they usually pass over time, maybe with support from those who are close to you.

The definition of depression includes feeling persistently low, not enjoying usual activities and lacking in energy for  most of the time for more than 2 weeks. This may be difficult to spot at first as the line between feeling low and depressed is not always clear cut.

Symptoms of depression include:

• Feeling unhappy and hopeless
• Loss of interest in things you normally enjoy
• Trouble concentrating and making decisions
• Insomnia or oversleeping
• Fatigue
• Overeating or loss of appetite
• Irritability

Depression is an illness and we cannot simply talk ourselves out of it. In general, a single episode of depression passes over time, usually in around six months. These months can be very hard, and it might help to know that most people fully recover from such an episode. Support and treatment can make a depression easier to tackle and shorten the recovery period.

If you have experienced the symptoms above for most of the time for more than two weeks, you might consider seeking professional help. Getting in touch with your primary healthcare provider is a good first step, even if you have been depressed before.

Always seek help from your health provider if you have suicidal thoughts that keep recurring over time, or experience difficulties managing day to day life.

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