A little while back I wrote about how a therapist can help you improve your mental health. It certainly proved helpful for me as I was able to talk things through with someone, as I tried to find away through the aftermath of divorce, the progression of my mother’s terminal illness and her death. We worked together to find strategies to help me find ways to manage my stress and anxiety levels. It’s important though to take responsibility for your own mental health and make sure you are well educated about mental health problems and ways of dealing with them. I think it’s worth seeking a good mental health information source with comprehensive information on a range of issues.
The first thing to do is understand what’s happening to you. If you are grieving read about the stages of grief so you can understand where you are in the process of coming to terms with the loss of a loved one. Armed with that knowledge you’ll be better placed to find ways of coping and healing. If you had a physical illness, you’d probably want to know all about it so you could help yourself deal with it. There’s no reason why mental health issues should be any different. Having knowledge and information about your mental health problem may make it seem easier to deal with and make you feel more confident about it. It also makes you realise that you aren’t the only one.
One of the things I did to help me get through the difficult situations I was having to cope with (and the very real symptoms caused by them) was reading widely about strategies to manage my stress and anxiety. I read a wide range of books which broadly speaking fall into the self help field. Each book I read helped me target a different aspect of my life, or my mindset or even my physical health. I was struggling to get enough sleep because I kept waking at 4 or 5am and couldn’t get back to sleep. So I read a book about sleep and made quite a few changes to my sleeping space to help me sleep better at night. I now have a new mattress, black out blinds, heavier curtains and I’ve found a clock that I can turn the brightness up and down on. Improving my sleep environment made a big difference as did making changes to my bedtime routine. The result has been better and longer sleeps which helped relieve some of my symptoms and made me feel more in control.
Other books I read targeted my focus and planning, helping me to achieve my goals and feel I had more direction in my life. I was able to get away from long to-do lists that never seemed to get finished and felt that I was more in charge of my time and how it was used. It wasn’t just books that I read, I visited online resources, watched videos and read articles, some of which handled bigger issues, but others concentrated on small techniques. It’s amazing how powerful something small like thinking of two or three things to be grateful for each day can be.
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