By Malou Stitz

When D&AD takes over your life

It’s now very late in the evening/very early in the morning and we are running on D&AD juices. It’s been a mad couple of weeks and this weekend had one thing written all over it: work, work, work and work. Even though we were advised to go out and collect some dots. The thing is that at this stage it wasn’t really possible. We had SOOOOO much to do and I guess it will be more or less like this from now.

Even though these processes are very hard, they build us up to become stronger ad-men/women, and we take so many learnings with us. Future Lion is also coming up. It’s a shorter process than D&AD but we should already be finding mess in the world and prepare our little tired brains to make our lives easier.

Speaking of: make your life easier by having a journal that you always keep with you to plan ahead your day and write down the things you need to do. It really helps. And take on board the advice the self-efficiency and mental-health mentors give you and keep a gratitude journal. They all suggest it. You simply write down 3 things you’re grateful for in the morning and the evening. Sometimes it’s so much easier to think of all the bad things you want to write, but you can’t. It’s not the point of gratitude.

The three things I wrote down this morning were:

• kittens
• D&AD will soon be over (a massive thank you to the ever so helpful mentors <3)
• having good conversations with the people you love. 

So, my reflection on those things were that despite being super stressed out, have a lot of things going on, I still managed to find FOUR things in the morning that I was grateful for.  

D&AD has taken a lot of our time and energy, and even though we probably are going to look like ghosts in the morning, finding gratitude in what you do can really help your mind and soul.