4 Tips to Optimize Mental & emotional well-being
As a teacher, yoga therapist, and life mentor I see the struggles my clients face every day with mental health and the way this impacts every area of their life. I also consider myself a Mental Health influencer, educator and advocate and I want to smash the stigma that hovers over mental health today.
I want to show everyone, no matter what they have struggled, suffered, or survived through, that they can achieve the mental health they desire and deserve and that we will celebrate their actions to do so.
As we look at the mental health dilemma facing us today it is important to understand that mental health is not just about mental health. In yoga, we talk about the koshas, sheaths, or layers that make up our state of being. These are the physical body, breath/energy body, mental body, mind/wise body, and spirit/soul/bliss body. This philosophy is important to this discussion because so often people focus heavily on physical health to support mental health and vice versa, but what about energetic health or spiritual health?
Today, I want to go over four tips that might inspire you to optimize your mental and emotinoal well-being by working with all five layers of your being.
Schedule Time for Silence
Normally I include silence as part of a self-care protocol, which I’ll talk about later, but I feel it is time to give silence a little more attention. Take a moment and stop what you are doing, how many noises and interruptions are coming into your life right now. How many are you choosing and how many are really outside of your control.
For me, I feel blessed to have a small home in the country surrounded by forest and privacy. My devices are on do not disturb as part of my work schedule time blocking routine. The only sounds I hear are the crickets, the windchime outside my window, my typing fingers, and the soft sigh of my Australian Shepherd as he lies down for slumber. I am one of the lucky ones.
Most people have 3-5 interruptions including noises around them at all times. This includes the ding of your phone or computer every time you get a phone or text. How about the sound notification for apps on your phone that could go off any moments. Are you listening to music in the background? Do you have a podcast playing in the background. How about your favorite spotify playlist. Maybe the television is on while you cook or eat a meal. It seems that as a society our biggest fear is silence and yet it has the most to say. When we can’t remove the distractions from our lives, we have to really pay attention to ourselves.
I recommend that people commit to at least 10 minutes of silence a day. My clients tend to be high-performance entrepreneurial moms who are running a business while also getting their toddlers to preschool and still managing to run a home. So when can they find silence - anytime they are in the car. .
2. Diversify Your Therapy
I have been in and out of therapy most of my life. As a society, it has been indoctrinated into us that when you have stress, anxiety or challenges talk there is the place to go. In recent years, there has been a shift to Life Coaches (mostly because of the stigma associated with therapy but that is a post for another day). Talk therapy really never moved the needle for me. For me and for so many people I talk to, it felt like we were repeating the same stories again and again. While I understand how that is a necessary part of the therapy process it does lead to a bit of burnout. It wasn’t until I started engaging in energy therapy and somatic therapy that I really started to feel a shift.
Talk therapy and psychotherapy have it’s obvious merits, but no one can deny that there is a lot of talking and thinking in either scenario and as a society, I think we can all agree that it is time to get out of our heads and into our bodies. For this reason, I recommend that clients diversify their therapy. The therapeutic approach can include Talk Therapy or Psychotherapy, combined with a Yoga Therapy/Somatic Therapy, along with Energy Therapy, and Spiritual Therapy and it might look like this.
Talk Therapy / Psychotherapy offers clients the opportunity to explore thoughts, emotions, feelings through a more cognitive process, expertly getting to the root cause and using strategies like memory reconsolidation to literally change those at the root level, to support positive change in their life.
Somatic Therapy, Yoga Therapy, Mind-Body Medicine helps clients explore thoughts, emotions, feelings through a more embodied/somatic process using strategies related to movement, meditation, neuroscience, psychology, and mindfulness to create positive change in their life.
Energy Therapy like Sound Healing and Reiki help clients remove stale and negative energy from those thoughts, emotions, feelings, past events, and relationships that are weighing them down
Spiritual Formation and Mentoring can help clients explore spirituality, identify their core values, beliefs, and vision that supports their best life
So you see with a customized therapy protocol clients are able to access the mind, body and spirit for a more comprehensive therapy approach and in my opinion more impact so they can make changes quicker and easier.
We offer these services as a complementary and alternative holistic therapist, coach and mentor.
3. Make Self-Care a Priority
The number thing I do for all my clients is a self-care intake. I am at a point in my life where I can easily schedule self-care for myself. While my business keeps me going, my partner and I share household responsibilities well and my children are grown up and moved out. But when I was raising my sons I was at a point in my life when everything and everyone else came first. I literally had to start training for marathons and triathlons to give myself a reason to practice self-care. Fast forward about eight years and I now know that self-care is about more than just how I treat my body or the food I eat.
4. Choose your “Nutriments”
“Nutriments” is a term I first heard from the Buddhist teacher Thich Nhat Hahn and preeminent thought leader on mindfulness and meditation. I always thought of nutriments as nutrition and the food and drink I chose for my body. But there are many types of nutriments that come into and impact our life. This includes:
The people we choose to have in our life
The job we have
We news we watch or don’t watch
Social media
Technology
Extracurricular activities
The movies and TV shows we choose
The books we read
Have you ever had that friend that you knew was bad for you but you just couldn’t shake them? Or that relative that constantly brings you down but you figure “its your relative”. But there are healthy ways to create physical, energetic, and mental boundaries and settings expectations even with friends and family so you are in control instead of letting them be in control of you.
What is challenging about this is that many of our nutriments come at us from our devices. We make the (somewhat) conscious choice to pick up our phone, log into social media, or open a web browser but we can’t choose what is going to be waiting for us on the other end. We could be having a great day, then we see our best friend getting married, or our brother building his dream house or our ex co-worker at their new dream job. Without resilience and self-awareness this could send us into a tailspin because what we see is not always something that moves the needle in the right direction. More often it sends us into a state of being that does not support our best mental and emotional well-being.
Here are some choices I made in my life to manage the nutriments in my life:
I am very specific and who and how much time I spend with people
I quit drinking even when my friends and family still drink
I have Do Not Disturb on my phone for specific hours of the day so I control distractions
I access social media for the most part through a third party platform and removed it from my phone so it takes a lot of conscious intention to access it
I choose movies, tv shows, and books wisely and really consider the long term effect of my being
I never ever watch the news and I swipe right as soon as I can when it pops up on my search browser or phone (I also disabled news and alerts to avoid sudden intrusions that can interrupt my flow
So choose wisely where, when and for how long you will engage with nutriments in your life, be mindful, be intentional, and learn to create healthy boundaries that support these personal values.
Feeling Inspired
I hope these tips have inspired you to take action to support your mental and emotional well-being. If you’d like to learn more or receive support please contact me today for a free consultation.
