With all the stressors coming at us each day, it can feel overwhelming. With heightened stress we should consider taking short breaks to breathe, relax, unplug & meditate. Such practices have been show to reduce stress, improve mood, and improve cardiac health. Below are some links for 10-minute and 5-minute guided meditation practices. Consider trying a guided meditation practice each day. I would love to hear about your experience meditating in your reply. Peace.
Category: Lessons learned
Wisdom gained from 25-years experience as a mental health professional. The people I serve teach me many lessons about how to live well, relate healthier, and enjoy life more.
Common theme for the week
As I mentioned in a previous post, I often notice a common theme emerging across my appointments each day. So, despite talking with many people with different problems, I always learn something that we all share. For example, themes include gratitude, remembering ones value, worthiness, redemption, autonomy, self-compassion, etc. I muse how easy it has become to recognize common themes when I reflect daily. The common themes reveal the wisdom I receive through my work as a professional counselor. This week I learned that we should consider being more gentle and kinder to ourselves, take the pressure off ourselves. Life in 2020 is stressful enough: COVID-19 Pandemic, economic uncertainty, growing awareness of institutional racism against our black, LGBTQ brothers & sisters and the upcoming elections. We do not need to add to self-imposed stress by holding ourselves to high performance expectations, or overloading our schedules. When we do this, we are saying “No” to self-care, and saying “Yes” to every demand we face.
This is the first time I noticed a common theme for the week instead of a new daily theme. We all feel overloaded and overwhelmed just living in our current environment today. Recognizing that we cannot care for or love others better than we care for ourselves, let’s strive to practice being kinder to ourselves. Practice better self-care: eat more nutritious, portioned meals, take breaks throughout the day, get outside daily, and exercise a little each day. We all get 168-hours every 7-days. This is enough time to sleep 8-hours per day, eat 3 meals, commute, work 8-hours, rest, exercise, enjoy our relationships, take weekends off, if we are organized. Let’s all strive to say, “No” to business, demands and expectations so we can say “Yes” to our self-care first. Peace
Reframing negative thinking
Albert Ellis developed rational emotive behavior therapy to treat our negative self talk. Self talk is how behaviorists describe thinking. We all tell ourselves stories about our experiences. Our thinking can range from positive and accurate to self-defeating and negative. Our emotions are a product of our thinking. Therefore, learning to replace negative self-talk has been shown to improve mood, sleep, reduce anxiety and promote our physical health. Counseling can teach us how to improve our self talk to be more positive and accurate.