Experience & Compassion
- Common goals of treatment
- More Peace of mind
- Adjust your perspective
- Avoid being hijacked by negative feelings
- Handle stress better
- Calm your body
- Quiet your mind
- Improve your sleep
- Accept change
- Worry less
- Respond instead of reacting
- Stop obsessing
- Be more mentally flexible
- Be less negative
- Honor your core values
- Improve brain health
Peace of Mind
How elusive it is for many of us, especially when we need it the most. It’s been my experience that anyone can experience a state of deep relaxation at will. Even a brief experience of profound relaxation can be transformative.
Peace of Mind may seem unattainable, and you may have already tried a number of approaches for attaining it. Competent instruction and regularly putting aside time to take care of your own needs are essential. Of course there may be barriers, but you deserve to live a good life. Those barriers can be identified and minimized with proper support and guidance.
Sometimes it’s hard to choose which thought to follow.
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Change how you’re Thinking
How we feel is often influenced by what we think.
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Have you been asked to try to be more open in your thinking? Does your mind seem overactive or gloomy in outlook? Maybe you would like to worry less. One’s experience can be much more stressful if we interpret them in maladaptive ways. Cognitive therapy can help develop a revised perspective through “reframing” and cognitive restructuring.
Change how you’re Feeling
It’s not always easy, but you don’t have to allow your emotions hijack your mind.
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Troublesome emotions are often the result of our perspective, biases, and habitual negative thoughts. Some people have excessively strong emotions while others seem rather devoid of a rich emotional life. Trauma and a life of having others invalidate our feelings can leave lasting scars. Therapy can help process traumatic experiences, navigate around negative thinking, and question unkind thoughts about ourselves.
Remain Calm
Being calm is not the absence of emotion, it is the balance of emotions.
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Strong emotions can overwhelm rational thought, disrupt effective communication, and cause one to be misunderstood by others. Negative self-statements (internal dialogue) may only worsen the situation by contributing to biased perception. Relaxation, meditation, and mindfulness can lead to the development of the ability to quell disruptive emotional reactions, develop an internal sense of calm, lower bodily arousal (fight or flight), and set the offer a choice in how to respond instead of responding negatively and automatically.
Change your mindset
We can be the authors of our own story, but we may need to change our thought patterns as part of the preparation.
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We are not always of one mind so to speak. Various internal and external events can drastically alter the matrix of thoughts, feelings, and habitual responses from which we engage the world and other people. This is especially true for those of us dealing with anxiety, depression, trauma, or chronic illness.
Sleep Better
Few things are more important to good brain health and mental health that adequate sleep.
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Individualized forms of cognitive therapy can help reduce symptoms of insomnia. This approach includes sleep restriction, sleep hygiene, reconditioning, relaxation, meditation, and reviewing attitudes and beliefs about sleep.
Respond to life differently
All too often our attempts to avoid discomfort lead to living in a smaller world with less joy.
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Bad habits and unhealthy lifestyles can be changed. Change starts with awareness and acceptance and is reinforced by a commitment to take control. Strong emotions can lead us to act in ways that we would not otherwise endorse. Learning emotional self-regulation can free us to be the people we want to be.
Relate Differently
We can learn to accept differences.
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Become a better listener and improve your ability to understand another’s point of view can learn to more harmonious relationships. Especially important is the ability to effectively communicate feelings. This sometimes requires that we become better at recognizing and naming our feelings, especially negative ones.
Protect yourself from stress
Pause, attend, identify, prepare, act.
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Stress can not be avoided. Its negative effects on us can be minimized though. Relaxation therapy, meditation, and biofeedback can change our response to stress. Learning to accept change and modify our attitude toward challenges helps too.
Pursue your life’s goals
By aligning our actions with our values we can more effectively achieve our goals.
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As humans, we have an amazing ability to create a goal and formulate a plan for obtaining those desired results. Each step, vision, plan, and action can break down. Having good intentions is not enough. Aligning our goals with our highest values and staying attentive to reaching them may require a little outside support.
Identify what really matters to you
What‘s most important to you?
We all have adopted certain values, sometimes inadvertently. It becomes easier to reach our goals when we align our behavior with our most cherished values. When is the last time you gave thought to what your values are?
Be more resilient
Too often we get ourselves trapped in ways of approaching challenges and our options become limited and less effective.
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Accept the things you can not control. No matter how clear or vision or well formulated our plan, challenges are likely to present themselves. We can learn to be better able to roll with the punches and stay on track. Awareness is important to achieving any of the goals mentioned on this page. Critical as well is acceptance of the current situation and commitment to change. Motivation is the desire to change, commitment is the ability to stay the course. It requires resilience. Setback are part of the process. Avoiding an attitude of defeat is an important step. Remember “Pick yourself up, dust yourself off, and start all over again.” There is considerable wisdome encoded in that old tune.
Increased Self-control
Impulses can be strong, but they don’t have to be our master.
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Most of the problems listed here do not respond well if we apply the same kind of effort that we would if trying to overcome a physical obstacle. Instead a different kind of self-control like that used by an accomplished musician is required. Relaxation training, meditation and biofeedback are all useful in how to develop this second type of control.
Manage Fatigue
Unless you’ve experienced it firsthand, you can’t understand the pain and frustration of a state of chronic fatigue. Like an old cell phone, you charge slowly and discharge quickly.
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Fatigue is often more that just feeling run down or not getting enough rest. It can be a medical symptom that severely limits our ability to function. Common causes can be as a side effect of chemotherapy or other medications, post-viral syndromes (especially after COVID), and disorders of the cardiovascular, endocrine, or other bodily systems. When all of the possible medical causes have been addressed, it can still linger and requires careful self-management. Too often we don’t know where our physical limits are until we cross them. If we are recovering from a condition we can all to often fall prey to impatience in getting back to good health. The body has its own timetable.
Protect your Brain Health
How little attention we pay to the 3 pound supercomputer within our heads.
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How little attention we give to the health of our brain, even when we are adfdressing mental health. It is an absolutely amazing and complex organ that need careful care and feeding. Physical exercise is at the top of the list, but adequate sleep is right near the top. Reducing or eliminating the use of intoxicants is very important as well, and can be a major challenge for those who have slid into a dependence on chemical substances. Adequate diet, finding a community where we feel accepted and valued, mental stimulation, and a sense of purpose and fulfillment are all part of maintaining that from which we seem to experience and interact with the world.
Feeling better is often proportional to the time dedicated to the process.
Some people just want to relieve there current symptoms, others may choose to prevent them by changing their lifestyle, attitudes, or thinking.
Sample intervention
Listen to Effortless Breathing, a preparation for mindfulness practice created for my patients and students.
Listen
Where do you want to go from here?
