Mental Health

What makes the difference between someone able to accomplish the long-term goals they set for themselves and someone who can’t? Does it boil down to something predetermined like intelligence, luck, physical capabilities, or is it something else? It turns out that your ability to persist through challenges and stay focused on achieving your goals is something that you have more hand in creating for yourself, and it is known as mental toughness. What is Mental Toughness? Having mental toughness is important because it is what allows you to persevere through adversity to reach your goals. Mental toughness is defined as the capacity of an individual to deal with stressors, pressures, and challenges and perform at the best of their ability, regardless of difficult circumstances. Possessing mental toughness comes with a strong ability to effectively manage your thoughts and emotions to act in alignment towards achieving your goals. 3 Aspects of Mental Toughness in Recovery Cultivating mental toughness will help you through any challenge you encounter in life, but it can be an especially helpful trait to have if you are in recovery. Aspects of mental toughness that help someone achieve a goal like sobriety are seen below:

Learned helplessness usually has a role to play in most individuals’ dependency. Either learned helplessness was a causative force in the inception of their dependency, or they developed learned helplessness in the process of failing to quit and perpetuating it. Whichever way learned helplessness affects your dependency, the good news is that it can be unlearned given the right tools.

Supporting a loved one through anxiety and panic attacks is both a noble and complicated undertaking. These attacks can feel very intense, and it can be difficult to know how to help. However, support is essential through these challenging events. Even while anxiety and panic can feel like isolating experiences, overcoming these disorders and emerging safely can be a communal effort. Proper, educated support systems can help further reinforce the benefits of effective assistance.

Does the phrase “stuffing your emotions” resonate with how you handle your feelings and emotions? In case you aren’t familiar with this phrase, stuffing your emotions refers to burying hurt feelings down only for them to resurface later on as unresolved pain that still needs to be felt and heard. When you stuff your emotions, you will have to deal with many unintended consequences down the line. If you learn how to avoid stuffing your feelings, it will help you build strong relationships, enjoy better mental health, let you healthily deal with your emotions, and you will feel better without repressed feelings weighing you down. Why We Stuff Our Emotions Stuffing our emotions isn’t a healthy way to deal with our emotions, but it is a pattern that many of us fall into regardless. There can be many reasons a person can stuff their emotions, and usually, it is a combination of several factors.

Mental illness and addiction have a close association, especially bipolar disorder. Those who have bipolar disorder cycle between manic and depressive episodes. Substance use is particularly risky for those diagnosed with bipolar disorder since drug use can trigger a manic or depressive episode. With the symptoms of this disorder exacerbated by drug or alcohol abuse and vice versa, then substance abuse and bipolar disorder together make for a truly dangerous combination and fuel a vicious cycle.

If you struggle with depression and are looking for ways to feel better that you can try on your own without medication or simply don’t respond well to medication, then exploring holistic lifestyle changes may be the right choice. In mental illness, one-size-fits-all treatment is a complicated thing since causative factors are unique to the individual. Luckily, lifestyle changes can easily be adjusted based on a person’s individual needs and can positively support people who can’t or don’t want to use medication. Since using a holistic approach to bettering your mental health looks at the symptoms and explores the root cause of the illness, you can effectively treat depression and make lasting positive changes for your mental health without any adverse effects. Treating depression through a holistic approach without medication will look different for everyone. Much of the process looks like trying different things out and seeing how your body and mind respond, and deciding what works best for you. If you think you could benefit from treating your depression holistically, see below for some ideas of lifestyle changes to make a part of your routine.

Recovery from addiction and mental illness is already a complicated venture, and one’s mindset can play a crucial role in the success of one’s recovery program. It is essential to keep an open, optimistic mind about the future and avoid succumbing to a victimized mentality while moving through the recovery process. Not only can a victim mentality paralyze progress in recovery, but it is also an incredibly stressful state of mind that can introduce unwanted additional hurdles through the recovery process. Avoiding or overcoming this kind of mindset is crucial for continued progress and maintaining many of the life-changing decisions made in the name of recovery.

Since April is Stress Awareness Month, it’s the perfect time to declutter anything causing extra stress in your life. One of the things you may find causing you unnecessary stress is an excess of decisions to make, resulting from the hefty mental and emotional strain of being weighed down by too many choices and decisions to make. This severe overwhelm, or what is known as decision fatigue, not only causes stress but can lead to someone shutting down and incapable of making decisions altogether.

When you have been facing mental health challenges or going through addiction treatment and most days find yourself feeling good, bad, and all things in between, one of the worst questions you repeatedly hear yourself getting asked is, “How are you feeling?” There’s something that feels overwhelming being asked this question since you don’t exactly know how you feel, especially when how you feel mentally or physically seems like it changes quickly from one second to the next. Loved ones ask this question with love and good intentions, and not wanting to answer it can make you feel guilty and upset.

Judging when someone else has an anger problem is usually pretty obvious, but knowing when you are the one who has anger issues is another story. Especially if you are someone who struggles with flash anger who feels fine and peaceful most of the time but will fly off the handle in a second. You may think that because you are calm 99 percent of the time, you don’t have any anger issues but do those fleeting moments of rage or “flash anger” amount to something that requires some personal work? It turns out, yes, they do.

Learning something new may be difficult, but the task of unlearning deeply held false beliefs proves even more challenging for most people. Whether you realize it or not, we all hold on to beliefs about ourselves and life that we have accepted as truths from our families, society, TV, education, or experiences. Most of what we learn as we grow and mature molds and shapes us in beautiful ways, making us more intelligent and more aware of ourselves, but in the mix of all of the good we absorb are false beliefs that can be holding us back and poorly affecting our mental health. Looking critically at your actions and why you say or do things will help you identify the underlying beliefs you hold about yourself. When we carry negative beliefs about ourselves that weigh us down internally, this will manifest downstream as negative self-talk and a poor state of mental health. Retraining how we think about ourselves by unlearning these false beliefs will help bring about positive self-regard and positive changes to our mental health. Below are some common false beliefs that deep down people believe to be true, perpetuating poor mental health.

If you have experienced trauma in your life, you may find yourself having a range of strange reactions to certain events. When you have experienced trauma, it is important to remember your brain has been sensitized to certain stimuli and that you should be gentle with yourself as you unpack, process, and alchemize your trauma. The path of healing the wounds of trauma imprinted on your subconscious is not a linear journey and takes a variable amount of time for everyone. As you go about your life, you may find yourself easily triggered at times. Sometimes it is hard to recognize that feeling or acting a certain way is caused by feelings from a past trauma surfacing. By learning the signs of feeling triggered by a precipitating event, you can be on your way to pacifying yourself and de-escalating your response in sensitive situations. Not to mention, when you have a good understanding of the signs and symptoms of trauma-related triggers, you can react with compassion and empathy to create a safe space when you are experiencing anxiety from those stirred-up emotions. See below for common signs that you or someone else may be reacting to a trauma-related trigger.