What Resources Do You Recommend to Clients to Help Maintain Mental Wellness?
Imagine mental wellness as a garden that requires daily nurturing to thrive. In the world of mental health, guidance from a Licensed Psychotherapist and a Licensed Clinical Therapist can make all the difference. This article explores ten expert insights on maintaining mental wellness outside of therapy sessions, opening with the importance of adopting a growth mindset and concluding with the benefits of using a guided journal.
- Adopt a Growth Mindset
- Encourage Social Connections
- Practice Self-Compassion Activities
- Get Early-Morning Sunlight
- Develop Body-Awareness Practice
- Maintain Continuous Awareness
- Schedule Daily Activities
- Seek Genuine Human Connection
- Ensure Adequate Sleep
- Use a Guided Journal
Adopt a Growth Mindset
Keep a growth mindset while understanding a variety of ways towards better self-care awareness. Use journaling prompts, adopt better sleep hygiene, have a regular digital detox, practice a more mindful routine, distance yourself from unhealthy relationships, spend time in nature, practice altruism, identify your boundaries, stop taking things so personally, and develop a regular exercise routine, to name a few. Having a growth mindset enhances your personal development, gives you clarity on energy givers versus takers, and can cultivate efforts.
Encourage Social Connections
Any resource that helps with connection—that could be ClassPass that gets you involved in classes, Bumble BFF to meet new friends. We are in a loneliness epidemic, and it is really hurting people's mental health. So I would suggest anything that would encourage you to socialize and connect in a way that you feel comfortable with.
Practice Self-Compassion Activities
As a therapist who often works with parents on their mental wellness in order to support their families more effectively, the main resource I like to recommend is self-compassion activities. This can be through apps such as Calm or Headspace, where the focus is on mindfulness but self-compassion is incorporated, or it can be through Dr. Kristin Neff's website where she offers free self-compassion audio recordings. This is one recommendation that I find invaluable, and my clients do too!
Get Early-Morning Sunlight
I regularly recommend that clients get early-morning sunlight directly on their skin and even in their eyes as a quick and easy way to boost mood and improve sleep. Numerous studies have proven that getting direct early-morning sunlight will kickstart your circadian rhythm (sleep cycle) and boost serotonin (mood) for the day. Viewing early-morning sun, even through cloud cover, will create a spike in cortisol, which positively influences your immune system, metabolism, and ability to focus during the day.
The way this works is that the SCN (or suprachiasmatic nucleus), the area of the brain in charge of the sleep-wake cycle, triggers the release of cortisol once your eyes sense sunlight. Getting sunlight in the morning helps regulate the circadian rhythm since it's triggering your brain and body to know it's time to start the day. When it gets dark at night, the SCN triggers the release of melatonin, which helps you feel sleepy. If you've been exposed to artificial light consistently throughout the day without natural light to trigger your SCN, your brain won't know what time you're meant to be awake or asleep.
Tips for making sure you get daylight in your eyes and on your skin in the morning:
- Go outside within the first hour of waking up since your body is most sensitive to light at this time. Try to get at least 5-10 minutes on a sunny day and 15-20 minutes on a cloudy one.
- Open your curtains and blinds when you wake up. Allow as much natural light into your home as possible. Even getting light on your skin and in your eyes through a window makes a difference!
- Do outdoor activities in the morning. Go for a morning walk, do stretches on the patio, or drink your coffee and eat breakfast outside.
- If you live in a region that's especially overcast or you have limited access to natural light, consider investing in a light therapy lamp, which is a device that mimics natural sunlight.
Develop Body-Awareness Practice
One resource I highly recommend as a psychotherapist for maintaining mental wellness outside of sessions is developing a body-awareness practice. Stress can really take a toll on us every day, and tuning into your body can be a game-changer. For instance, you might notice your shoulders tensing up when work gets overwhelming, or your stomach feeling uneasy with family demands.
Simple techniques like mindful movement, body scans, or gentle stretching help clients tune into these physical signals and recognize as well as manage stress, such as by setting boundaries before it builds up. Additionally, incorporating these practices can enhance overall well-being by fostering a deeper connection between mind and body. By regularly checking in with their bodies, clients can stay more balanced, responsive, and resilient to everyday stressors.
Maintain Continuous Awareness
I always recommend clients continuously bring awareness to what is discussed in therapy. When we look at things with awareness, we have more power to shift them, if we want to. Even the mere act of observing one's thoughts, sensations, feelings, and behaviors in and of itself can be a new way of engaging with the world and will lead to a change, even if one does not change anything else but their way of observing themselves.
Schedule Daily Activities
My all-time favorite resource for helping clients maintain mental wellness between sessions is an activity-scheduling exercise. It involves planning one daily activity that is either social, physical, or pleasant, then rating its satisfaction level on a scale of 0-10. This exercise is valuable because it encourages daily self-care in a world where we can get easily consumed by our responsibilities. It helps clients identify which activities are most fulfilling, and it increases follow-through by planning these activities in advance and reducing decision fatigue. This is an evidence-based technique that has been shown to reduce anxiety and depression, and clients have experienced great success with it!
Seek Genuine Human Connection
What most people need to achieve wellness outside of sessions is genuine human connection. Connection can look like: reaching out to a close friend to catch up; striking up a conversation with a neighbor whom you bump into outside; sharing an experiential activity (like a pottery class) with strangers; attending a local book club; or gathering with a group of like-minded people to support a cause close to your heart. We need each other to survive and thrive in this world. Even though reaching out for connection sometimes feels daunting, it often renews our sense of hope, joy, or peace to know that we aren't in this world alone.
Ensure Adequate Sleep
Having been in the mental health field for over a decade, one of the lowest-hanging fruits I've seen for overall mental and physical wellness is making sure to get adequate sleep. Sleep is the way your body and brain recover, heal, and cement learning. Not getting enough sleep makes you more vulnerable to illness, as well as engaging in behaviors that can be helpful in the short term but cause problems in the long term, such as overly using substances/alcohol to deal with stress.
Sleep is not always easy for many. In fact, I have personally struggled for years until I started to change up my sleep habits, which is often referred to as "sleep hygiene." By making small but meaningful changes to both your bedtime routine (or creating one if you don't currently have one) as well as your sleeping environment, people often experience huge payoffs in relation to their sleep quality and duration. For example, light in the morning, especially natural light, is great to help calibrate your circadian rhythm (your wake/sleep cycle). However, light at night, especially in your bedroom, can be disruptive to your sleep and make it harder to fall asleep.
Adding/changing simple things can make a big difference in your mood, so don't be afraid to start experimenting until you figure out what helps or doesn't!
Use a Guided Journal
One resource I often recommend to my clients for maintaining mental wellness outside of sessions is journaling, specifically using a guided journal. Guided journals offer structured prompts that encourage self-reflection, emotional processing, and goal-setting. I find that this can be especially helpful for clients who may feel overwhelmed by the blank page or unsure of how to start exploring their thoughts and feelings.
Journaling serves as a therapeutic outlet between sessions, helping clients to track patterns in their emotions, identify triggers, and reflect on their progress. It also promotes mindfulness and allows individuals to externalize their internal experiences in a safe, private way.
By using a guided journal, clients can deepen their self-awareness and take an active role in their healing process, reinforcing the work we do together in therapy. It's a simple yet powerful tool that helps maintain mental wellness and encourages growth beyond our sessions.
