| | | | | | | | May is Mental Health Awareness Month. This has been held every May since 1949 to help spread the word that mental health is something everyone should care about.
It is even more important this year. Just weeks ago, we had no idea the world would be turned upside down by COVID-19. Worry, isolation, loneliness, and anxiety is something everyone is experiencing.
Mental health is essential to everyone's overall health and wellbeing, and mental illnesses are common and treatable. There are tools that everyone can use to improve their mental health and increase resiliency regardless of the situations they are dealing with.
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| | Tips for Success
Allow Yourself to Feel - Sometimes there are pressures that encourage people to shut down their emotions. Everyone has emotions - they are part of the human experience. You have the right to feel them regardless of gender, sexual orientation, ethnicity, socio-economic status, race, political affiliation, or religion.
Don't Ignore Those Feelings - When we "bottle up" emotions, without addressing them, they make us more likely to "explode". It may not always be appropriate to process your emotions at the very moment, but try to do so as soon as you can.
Talk It Out - Find someone you trust to talk about your feelings. You may find that people are eager to share similar experiences and how they've dealt with them.
Try Journaling - Each night write down at least 3 feelings you had over the course of the day. Just a few sentences or bullet points to help you practice being comfortable identifying and expressing your emotions.
Consider the Strength of Your Feelings - By thinking about how intense your emotions are, you may realize that what you thought you were feeling at first could better be described by another word. For example, when a person says they are stressed, they are really feeling annoyance, anger, or a stronger, deeper feeling like betrayal. |
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| | 1 in 5 people experience a mental illness during their lifetime.
When it comes to your feelings, it can be easy to get caught up in your emotions as you're feeling them. Most people don't think about what emotions they are dealing with but taking the time to really identify what you're feeling can help you to better cope with challenging situations. It's ok to give yourself permission to feel.
Connections and the people that surround us can help our overall mental health - or hurt it. It's important to make connections with other people that help enrich our lives but also equally important to recognize when certain situations or people in life can trigger us to feel bad or engage in destructive behaviors. Identifying the toxic influences in our lives and taking steps to create a new life without them can improve mental and physical health over time. And we know that work, paying bills, cleaning, getting enough sleep, and taking care of children are just some of the things we do each day - and it is easy to be overwhelmed. By creating routines, we can organize our days in such a way that taking care of tasks and ourselves becomes a pattern that makes it easier to get things done without having to think hard about them.
Living a healthy lifestyle and incorporating mental health tools to thrive may not be easy, but can be achieved by gradually making small changes and building on those successes.
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| | | Your health and wellbeing is my utmost priority, if you have any questions or concerns,
please do not hesitate to contact me today.
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| | | | | The Road to Healing
Begins Here! |
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