January 2020
Mental Health Challenge
When you are faced with one crisis after another, devastating losses, and feel stuck in a situation that you have no control over, it can be hard to feel any sense of hope. You may feel a lack of motivation or energy in trying to change your situation. Even though you know that you are miserable with the way things are, it feels far more scarier to try and change things. What if it gets worse? So we don't change and things won't get worse but also they likely won't get much better, and you end up stuck in a cycle. Feeling miserable about your current situation but also too scared to change anything, leading to even more misery. It's true, there are some circumstances that can't be changed and focusing only on those aspects can leave you feeling horribly stuck.
Fostering hope is about looking for those areas that you can control, and that you can improve. Being hopeful doesn't mean that you are always thinking positively and ignoring the negative but it does require an individual to become aware of the positives. Hope will help keep you committed to your goals during difficult times, rather then giving up when faced with adversity. There have been a number of studies that have demonstrated that individuals who are more hopeful tend to feel more satisfied with their lives overall, and feel more capable of addressing stressful situations and view them as challenging rather then threatening. Just like any other area of our lives, in order to develop hope, we need to practice. How does one practice being hopeful? Well here are a few suggestions:
1. Celebrate your successes (no matter how big or small): acknowledge your achievements and the challenges you have made it through.
2. Practice gratefulness in your day to day.
3. Be realistic about what you can do and set take small steps in working towards your goals. "Rome wasn't built in a day"
4. Perform an act of kindness. Take some time to provide support to a fellow human. Small acts of kindness help you to feel more connected to others as well as a sense of contribution and purpose.
5. Practice Mindfulness: Developing a consistent mindfulness practice can help in preventing fixation on negative thoughts and encourages your to focuses your attention on the present moment. This is incredibly helpful in reducing stress and developing a sense of peacefulness.
Mental Health Tip
Often people set the goal of not doing something. For example people will say that they will not smoke or will eat out less or eat less junk food. This can be a difficult time of goal to keep because it does not give you something concreate to do instead of what you are trying not to do. For example what will you do during the time when you used to smoke or what will you do with friends if you are no longer eat out together.
One of the ways to be more successful with accomplishing a goal is to make it clear what it will look like when you have accomplished the goal. Therefore if my goal is to eat out less perhaps when I accomplish this goal I will have learned to cook five new recipes or maybe I have saved up enough money to go on a trip or perhaps I will have a new activity that I do with my friends when we get together. Either way we always want to be replacing a behaviour with something that we want to be doing. Rather then trying to eliminate a behaviour and put nothing else in it's place.
So when you are thinking about goals do not only consider what you want to stop doing also think about what you want to start doing. Then break down what you want to be doing into small steps and reward yourself for accomplishing the small steps towards your larger goal.