Looking After Yourself

Support for...

Looking After Yourself

How can you take care of physical and mental health?

Look After Yourself

Try to take care of your physical and mental health as best you can. Obviously options for a healthy diet and exercise are limited on board but if you can, get ashore for a walk and buy yourself some decent food. Even a short walk ashore can raise the heart rate, help you to feel a little better, and remind you that there is more to life than what you are experiencing on board.

This Self Help Guide from the Survivors Network helps to explain responses to sexual assault and helps survivors to process what happened and their reactions to the trauma. It has lots of helpful information and is a great resource for those that are unable to access help ashore. It can also be downloaded in Urdu, Polish, Chinese, Ukrainian, Arabic and Somali.

Please also find a guide to 'Managing Traumatic Stress' here.

Don't forget your value.

If you are being bullied or abused and you are a long way from the people that love you, it can easily eat away at your confidence and self-esteem. Make a list of your strengths.

If you are being bullied and starting to doubt yourself, think about what you might say to a good friend who was experiencing the same thing. If your friend made a mistake on board, would you say to them “Well of course you messed that up, you shouldn’t even be at sea! You’re useless at everything!”. Or would you say something kinder and more realistic?

The people who say you should not be on board because of your gender, sexuality, race, physical strength or any other reason, are wrong. There is a place for everyone on board. The physically weakest person may be the best at ship-handling, welding or splicing. The quietest might turn out to be the most methodical and calm in an emergency. There should be a place for all sorts of people on board, there should be no place for people who bully, harass, abuse and commit crimes against their fellow crew members.

YouTube & PDF Exercises

Here are a couple of YouTube exercise channels with free content. If you don’t have internet access on board or have restricted internet access, you can try them on leave. Exercise is a great way to lift your mood, and if you have experienced sexual harassment or assault it can be a way of rebuilding positive feelings about yourself and your body.

Ekhart Yoga

There are some free yoga classes or short 10 minute sessions on YouTube and if you have space in your cabin and want to download some to take away, you can buy classes on their website.

View Channel

EMKFIT

Dance Workouts – Free 20 – 30 minute HIIT dance moves to a variety of soundtracks. It doesn’t matter if you can’t dance, just have fun and jump around. Guaranteed mood improver!

View Channel