By: Jessica Taylor, LPC
May is Mental Health Awareness month. And in honor of this, the therapists at Thrive Counseling are sharing the top mental health tips that they not only talk about with clients, but also use in their ‘real’ lives.
Meal Planning
Catherine Sangi, LPC is often seen working long hours at the office, so it makes sense that she is passionate about being organized when it comes to mealtimes. Here are her thoughts on this:
- Meal prep! Whether that means making big batches of food or coming prepared with snacks and frozen meals.
- Having food that we want to eat on hand means we have one of our basic needs taken care of and checked off for the day.
- It’s harder to focus on our bigger picture mental health needs if our basic needs (food, water, sleep, movement) are not met.
Somatic Mindfulness Work
One of Courtney Cox, LPCC’s specialties is treating trauma, so she spends a lot of time teaching grounding mindfulness strategies, that are relevant to everyone who has ever felt anxious or dysregulated (having had an experience of trauma or not.) Here are some that she practices with her clients and in her daily life:
- When you are feeling overwhelmed, anxious, or dysregulated, tune into your body and do mindfulness practices.
- We are often anxious because we are worrying about the past or the future.
- Instead, ground yourself in the present moment by first taking some deep breaths.
- Then notice what is around you. What do you see? What do you smell? What can you feel?
- Do this until your nervous system is calm again, so that you can then begin to use cognitive mental health coping skills.
Scheduling Time to Stress
Here are Jessica Taylor, LPC’s tips for leaning away from avoidance and instead into acceptance, when you find yourself in an anxious spiral.
- Our instinct is to try to push anxious thoughts out of our head as soon as they start to make us feel uncomfortable. But this often only works for a brief moment, then actually causes your fear brain to send these thoughts to you even more intensely.
- Instead, try saying something like this to yourself: “I’m noticing that my brain is wanting me to worry about this thing. That makes sense, since I just got that stressful phone call.”
- Just notice. Don’t judge.
- Then, just as Courtney recommended, you need to calm your nervous system by doing something physical.
- I will often take a walk and allow myself to ruminate about the stressful thing for as long as I need to while on my walk. This also works with a warm shower or just deep breathing.
- When the walk, shower, or breathing is over, I calmly tell myself it’s time to move on with my day.
- Sometimes I don’t even need to the whole walk or shower to stress out, because by activating my senses and grounding myself in that moment, my regulated body then begins to allow my brain to leave a reactive state.
- If your body keeps wanting to jump back into a state of dysregulation, just keep practicing acceptance while taking slow, deep breaths.
Want more solution-focused strategies that can help you have more good days? Reach out today to schedule an intake with one of our therapists.