As therapists, an important part of what we provide to our clients is coaching and education on coping skills. This term is used a lot to describe a growing set of cognitive, behavioral, and/or emotional tools that allow for mood management and overall increasing quality of life by building new habits and responses to one’s environment. When people hear the term coping skills they may envision someone taking slow deep breaths or going for a walk outside. These are examples of fantastic skills to use and regularly help many people. However, some people, including some of those who seek therapeutic services, can perceive the idea of coping skills as a waste of time or “not real therapy”. These are sometimes folks who struggle with buying into their own influence over their daily lives or simply struggle profoundly with motivation. No matter what the reason, if one sees new and effective ways of coping with daily life stressors as valuable, then this can make treatment very difficult.
Shift Your Thoughts: How To Replace Negative Thought Patterns
Supporting Others Emotional-Wellbeing: Ways To Support Someone Struggling With Depression
Treat Yourself! Take a Break
Taking on a challenging work project, school paper, workday, or studying can feel overwhelming, so much so that it sometimes causes you to push through without stopping until the task is complete. While in this process, taking the time to pause can bring feelings of guilt. Often, having this mindset can make the thought of taking a break as being “lazy” or “unproductive.” However, taking a break is the opposite of this, as there are many benefits that you will experience from doing so. Adapting the mindset of viewing breaks as a productive way to better help complete your tasks is essential.
Tough Talk: Communicating Difficult Emotions
Communication is vital in any relationship (romantic, workplace, family, friendships). Communication helps in sharing expectations, feelings, disappointments, and opinions. Being open in these relationships helps to strengthen the bond between them. This communication is essential when you feel disappointed or after your feelings are hurt; however, these situations are the most intimidating to approach due to fear of rejection or an argument. When approaching these difficult conversations, it is important to enter with a soft startup to lay the foundation for a productive, calm conversation.
Filling Up Your Positivity Gas Tank
Filling up your positivity gas tank is a term that can be used to help convey a similar idea as when one fills up their actual gas tank in their car. When you know you will need to drive your vehicle, and it needs to get you places reliably, and the gas tank is running low, you ensure that you stop and fill up the tank so that your car may perform as you need it to when you need it to. This metaphor is fitting for how our tolerance works in our daily life. Many people who suffer from common mental health challenges struggle with a thought distortion referred to as “filtering out the positive .”
Using an Imagined Force Field to Reduce Conflict in Your Relationship
There are many ways that people strive to conceptualize their relationships and that of others around them. It is hard to apply a framework to something so complex, so what is being offered in this blog post is not a full framework but rather a device to use to help side-step being defensive, reduce co-dependency, and increase your commitment to your personal values while in the context of a relationship.
Eating Disorder Statistics- What Are some Of The Risks?
Coping Strategies: What To Do About “Overthinking”
Part of some people’s mental health challenges, especially if they struggle with anxiety and/or depression, is an experience referred to sometimes as “overthinking”. Many people struggle with long strings of thoughts about one or many topics that end up effecting their daily lives. Overthinking can make you late for appointments, generate unreasonable anxieties against your own goals, or put a halt in your basic motivation which is sometimes casually referred to as “analysis paralysis”. These habits can chronically effect someone’s quality of life, but they are still just habits. As habits, they can be broken, and new habits built up in their place.
The Anger Iceberg
Anger is one of the emotions most people would put in their list of fundamental feelings that they, and most others, would experience regularly. There are entire treatment modalities and services specifically dedicated to anger management that help educate and coach individuals in recognizing anger triggers and reducing the spikes in distress in the moment. This does lead to the idea that anger is one of the most common emotions that people do struggle with in ways that directly effects their lives. Though anger is a very strong feeling and one of the ways we may choose to express how we feel in many situations in our lives, it was during my start as a therapist that I was taught, and then reaffirmed through my experiences, that anger almost always comes second. This is means that it is rarely a primary emotion and is often then referred to as a secondary emotion. A secondary emotion refers to a feeling one has about another already existing feeling. It is here that the iceberg idea begins.
Mornings & Mental Health: Starting Your Mornings Off with Routine
The way you begin your morning can have a huge impact on the rest of your day, whether this be a positive or negative impact. The first moments of the day have a correlation to your productivity and your mood. Starting the day off on a positive note helps to set you up for success to conquer the day. This all begins with a morning routine that sets a positive tone.
Taking Care of You: Coping with Divorce
If you are trying to cope with a divorce, you may experience a grieving process. Know this is normal and that there are several things you can do in order to cope with difficult feelings. Divorces can be exhausting, overwhelming, and full of negative emotions. You may experience feelings of depression, anxiety, and/or stress. Know that these feelings are valid. While you navigate through this grieving process, you may go through cycles of feelings. It is important amidst this to enjoy all the things you previously loved doing and make space for you and what brings you joy.
Walk It Out! The Benefits of Walking
Walking can be a great way to boost your physical and emotional well-being. It is a great exercise that can easily be done anywhere. Walking increases your blood flow and circulation between your brain and your body, this positively impacts your hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis which is responsible for the response of your central nervous system and stress responses (Brennan, 2021). Basically, what this means is that the body functioning while walking helps to alleviate stress, increase your overall mood, and even help you to sleep better. Walking obviously has its benefits in more ways than one, so how do you go about incorporating this into your routine? The following are tips and tricks on how to begin your walking journey.
Feeling Good About You: Strategies to Improve Self-Esteem
Everyone has an understanding that having a strong self-esteem is important, but actually establishing positive self-esteem can be difficult. When we have higher self-esteem, not only do we feel better about ourselves, we become more resilient too. Another benefit of positive self-esteem is being less vulnerable to anxiety, due to reduction in the release of cortisol (the stress hormone).
Solutions-Focused: Problem-Solving Steps Made Easy
We may have all heard the term “problem-solving” but I wonder how many people actually know the steps in the process. If you ask someone how to solve a problem, they may say something like “just find what works” or “figure out the problem before trying to solve it” and just like how the average person could change the brakes on their car, an experienced mechanic will know all the basics just as well as they would know all the subtleties and best practices that would take the process from just working to working optimally. I am sure that many people reading this could say that they have solved countless problems in their lives, but to have a step-by-step guide on an effective method of doing so may yet be useful.
Summer Blues: Tips and Tricks for Coping with Summer Depression
Summer has its expectations to be fun and relaxing, but if you are struggling with summer depression, it isn’t. For some people, there is a biological cause. For others, the stressors of summer can pile up and affect their mood. What makes it more difficult is that you feel like you’re supposed to have a great time. This blog can help you to make your summer easier and more enjoyable.
Emotional Wellbeing & Work: Is your Job Good For You?
Forty or more hours a week, 9 am to 5 pm or later, short breaks then back at it again. Sound familiar? Many jobs have this format but a growing number (particularly after the pandemic) are adopting a different format and requiring workers to figure out solutions to new challenges. Whether you are a restaurant server, warehouse supervisor, or a CEO, the idea that a job or a career is a regular and necessary part of life is built into our culture. Just think of the perceptions around the idea of being “unemployed” or “jobless” or how many times you may have heard growing up things like “you need a job” or “no one likes to work, but you have to do it.” From the time you begin to work until retirement, it is assumed that everyone needs to work a job in order to achieve. It is here where many people struggle with the idea of sacrificing so much of their time to a job when their values would suggest a different use of their time and energy. There are also many people who place themselves in their job or career doing what they love and where their values agree with how they use their time. Now here is the $50,000-a-year question (before taxes); How in the heck do you figure out what is right for you?
Get Good Sleep: Tips for Improving Sleep Hygiene
The Many Benefits of Furry Friends: Pets & Mental Health
Feeling Good About You: How To Boost Your Self-Esteem
Many of us can acknowledge the value and importance of self-worth. Higher our self-esteem, we feel better about ourselves and are more resilient. When your self-esteem is higher, you are also less vulnerable to anxiety and stress. Even though it is great to have higher self-esteem, improving our self-esteem is no easy task.