The Mick Morris Musing

R U OK day is on the doorstep. There will be conversations and social media posts galore about reaching out and asking the people in your life if they are OK. A vital service checking in on the welfare and safety of those around you.

The creators of R U OK day, ask people to consider a couple of quick questions about being in the right headspace, having time the team needed and being ready to genuinely listen?

What does it mean to be in the right headspace? Pause for a moment, ask yourself this question: “Am I OK to be asking RUOK?”.

The world has been a very different place for many of us in the past 18 months, with the impact of the COVID pandemic, lockdowns, debates of all sorts about the right or effective approach to dealing with the public health problem, adapting our ways of working and dealing with many associated issues. Have you done an honest assessment of yourself, and how you are?

How do you ask yourself if you are OK?

Here are a few questions to help yourself do this assessment:

Has my behaviour changed?
Have my feelings / overall baseline mood changed?
How is my sleep pattern?
Apart from the impostion of lockdowns/social distancing – I am avoiding people? (or am I avoiding people more than usual if you are a strong introvert)
Am I cynical and disengaged?
Am I still finding joy and fulfillment in the things that once brought me joy?
How are my eating/alcohol consumption patterns?
How is my “self talk”?

If your honest responses to yourself suggest that you might not be OK to ask someone else R U OK, then it is important that you take the time to initiate some self-care!

It’s OK to not be OK! But it is not OK to languish in it and not take action to move towards being OK.

There are many great resources to do more structured assessments of your own mental health, and great resources that can be of assistance to yourself and others if you find yourself or them not being OK. You can find these through organisations like Beyond Blue , The Black Dog Insititute , Sane Australia and of course R U OK. Don’t forget many workplaces also have links to services and mental health programs.

For those who want a deeper dive, I also recommend a couple of books – Learned Optimism by Martin Seligman (and his related books), and Change Your Thinking by Sarah Edelman.

If the response to your own self assessment is “I’m OK”, great! Then I encourage you to take the time on R U OK day to check in and make sure someone else is OK too. Here are another 50 ways to reach out to someone without directly asking “How are you”.

According to the urban dictionary, “Mood Typing” refers to how someone types messages that give a clear message to their current mood or feeling.

For many of us, our fingers seem to be constantly attached to a keyboard. Whether it is wading through the endless supply of email, working on academic writing, or engaging with social media.

I am typing thousands of words every week across multiple contexts. To improve my writing ( and catch myself on those annoying little mistakes!) I have been using a couple of tools to monitor my output.

One of the interesting reports that one of these tools emails me each week is a report on the “tones” detected in my writing and the change from week to week.

This weeks report looks like this;

The urban dictionary entry includes this example about mood typing;

“Oh shit, Catleen is angry-typing again. You can tell if she’s pissed at you since she’s always mood-typing.”

It is an interesting exercise each week when this report hits my email to reflect on the week of writing. To consider what has been happening in my various contexts and what might be contributing to the ratio of various tones in my writing.

What tone is happening in your writing? Are you typing up a mood, and what is the reaction of those receiving your writing?

If you want some help, I can recommend using Grammarly (not a sales pitch, no affiliated commissions etc.) It might be interesting to learn about your own writing.

As the program constantly reminds me; To err is human, to edit, divine.

The Mick Morris Musing

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Am I OK to ask R U OK?

Typing up a mood