Brain in Hand Helps People Manage Anxiety

With digital and human support from Brain in Hand, Amanda can manage all elements of her life.

For Amanda, even studying part-time felt like it might be too much.

‘I honestly thought at some stages that I would give up because it just felt so overwhelming,’ she says, reflecting on the challenges of studying at a university level. ‘I do have mental health problems as well as physical disabilities, which impact on my studying. Even part-time, getting your head in the right place to be able to study can be a huge challenge.’

When a member of staff at her university suggested that Brain in Hand might help her to balance her life with her studies, Amanda embraced the possibility. With personal, human support from a Brain in Hand Specialist, Amanda set up reminders and strategies; stressing and trying to remember how to cope with situations could cause her physical pain due to her fibromyalgia, but Brain in Hand allowed her to simply look at her phone for guidance no how to deal with the problem.

‘It took away some of the thinking,’ Amanda says, ‘took some of the stress out of doing daily things.’ Although she felt the pressure of expectations to deliver high-quality work, Brain in Hand meant that she could manage all elements of her life, from medication to essay deadlines, without becoming anxious about staying on top of things.

The remote support offered by Brain in Hand has been a big help, too.

If you get to the stage where you really do need help, but you’re too wound up to physically ask for it, you can press the red button and someone calls you. It takes that stress out of it, because they’ve phoned you.

Not only that, but Amanda says that just having the ability to record her anxiety levels with Brain in Hand’s simple traffic light system has helped her to practice mindfulness and calm herself down. ‘It’s nice that sometimes you think things are really bad, but then you go to press that red button and you think… are they really?’

Looking back, too, Amanda credits Brain in Hand with helping to remind her what she has achieved and how she’s coped well with difficult situations. She can look at her strategies and her progress on her timeline with pride, reminding herself that she’s made it further than she ever thought she would.

Amanda describes Brain in Hand as like having a friend who’s always on hand 24/7 to remind her that things aren’t as bad as they might seem. Her other friends have noticed she’s much more chirpy since using the system, and – even though there are still challenges – she feels a lot more able to give her best in her studies.

‘You can adapt Brain in Hand to any situation, every aspect of your life,’ she says. ‘You can use it for anything and everything: set up things when you’re in a good place that remind you when things are bad that this is what you need to do.

I wouldn’t be without it. It’s part of my life now.