Mindfulness and Mental Health

Mindfulness can be Simpler than It’s Made out to Be

A brief, internet search about mindfulness might bring you to a range of techniques and practices for embodying a mindful self. This is awesome. Many of these are extremely helpful practice in developing abilities that range from increasing focus to reducing stress. However, many of these (concentration, breathing, etc.) can feel very aimless without the right teacher. At least, for me this was true. Of course, this is fully an internal struggle of my own. Almost all resources I encountered make it very clear that the entire experience should be free of pressure to perform.

Still, though, it is honestly difficult to accomplish that. And because it is difficult, it is at least worth looking at what the goals of all of these practices are.

What you Stand to Gain

At its heart, mindfulness is your ability to draw your attention and focus to the present moment and everything that it affords you. If you are distracted with deadlines at work, financial strife, or conflict with a loved one, you are having a natural reaction to the stressors of life. Additionally, you might not be fully present in the moment.

Now, another natural reaction might be to read the previous paragraph and think that I am trying to convince you not to worry about fairly consequential things in your life. However, I can assure you that this is not the case. Of course you have matters to attend to that simply cannot be ignored. At the same time, there are undoubtedly moments that exist in between your opportunities to work toward solutions. In these moments, the question is how to tend to what is going on right then and there.

Maybe the situation in front of you is a really lovely one that warrants a little appreciation and gratitude. Those seem to be the moments that our loved ones insist we make an effort to live in. On the other hand, maybe the situation is a minor concern that still needs tending to. In either case, there is something of value happening in the current moment that makes your attention valuable there as well.

So ultimately, you stand to gain an increase in value on each moment of your time and attention.

How to Practice Mindfulness

I should take this moment to fully acknowledge the benefits of any other mindful practices you might find. They truly are fantastic. Again, though, this blog is meant to provide more easily accessible ways to get the ball rolling on mindful practices.

One thing to try is to notice when you are feeling preoccupied. This might sound easy. With some practice, it can be. However, noticing what you tend not to notice is a skill. One way to build this skill is to take note of when you miss some details in whatever you might be engaging with. For example, maybe you are watching a movie and can’t remember what happened in the last few minutes. Maybe you are reading and go over the same paragraph several times in a row without retaining anything. These are experiences that everybody has at some point, but noticing it is the first step.

Next, simply tell yourself that you notice when you notice. Even try saying it out loud. Obviously this might not hold all of the answers to mindful practices, but again, it is a start. Once you make a habit of noticing when you can’t seem to keep your attention in the present, the next step is to identify what feelings and emotions are tied to your distraction.

For example, you’ve just realized that your attention has been somewhere else for several minutes, and you’ve told yourself that’s what has happened. Great! Now ask yourself this:

“While my attention was elsewhere, what was I feeling? Was I sad, anxious, angry, agitated, upset, etc.?”

Of course, you can feel many emotions at the same time. Even so, identifying even one goes a long way. With a few repetitions, you might see some patterns. Maybe you are identifying the same emotion again and again. Maybe it’s a different one each time.

In either case, you have now begun the process of getting in touch with your moment-to-moment feelings. Whether you choose to begin unpacking all of them on your own or with the help of another person, you might have a little bit better of a grasp on what you are trying to address.

If you feel like you need some extra help, there is always someone to talk with.

What Does it Mean to 'Work Through' Your Baggage?

Concerns From the Past

All right, so by virtue of the fact that you are reading this post, you are some number of years old. These years have afforded you experiences. And the nature of experiences is that they can be either good or bad. Both have affected you in some way. Sometimes you draw upon moments of success and triumph to inspire yourself today. Sometimes you utilize the lessons of hardship and failure to make better judgments moving forward.

Other times, though, it is difficult to find any meaning in your past other than just pain. Sometimes when you draw upon certain memories, all you can do is hope that they recede back into the depths of your mind to keep from putting you through it all again. These memories are your traumas, your wounds, and any other unresolved pain.

How the Past Affects the Present

It is easy to find comfort in the idea that making it through a difficult time is all you might need to come out better on the other side. And sometimes that is absolutely the case. When it isn’t the case, though, the past has many ways of working its way into disrupting your life today.

As mentioned previously, finding meaning in past experiences opens the door to drawing upon those memories in positive ways. However, when it is difficult or impossible to find meaning in them, their context in our lives deteriorates, but the memories remain. And this remains to be true even if we do our best to push such memories away. Maybe, you could even say that this makes it worse. Now, we are dealing with an inherently painful memories that stirs up certain negative emotions compounded with a sense of anxiety about even bringing it up in the first place.

This is the part where you have likely heard somebody else express the unwarranted advice that you just need to work through it.

How to Actually Work Through It

It is worth taking a moment to note that as I am talking about past events and their effect on the present, specifically do not mean very recent events. If you have just gone through something, there is naturally a period of recovery (and that period can vary depending on how severe it was). What I am talking about are the situations when you have had adequate time to heal but it simply has not happened. This takes a different mindset and approach, and it is

Being perfectly honest, there are many different ways to do it. However, there are certain goals and markers along the way that should help. First, if recalling a certain memory stirs up a significant amount of pain (similar to the level as when it happened), that is a clear indication that this is a point of focus. Ultimately, one of the most important ways of dealing with this is to be able to provide yourself some context.

While you are living through something painful or difficult, you have no way of knowing how things will turn out. Even right after you make it through a trying time or traumatic event, it can be difficult to foresee how things will settle down. The more time that builds between that event and where you are now, the more opportunity you have for context. Sometimes it is even necessary to let that time build before you can revisit your pain in a constructive way.

Once you have reached that threshold of time, though, the tempting nature of trying to forget begins to become more and more of an obstacle. Many times, it takes support from somebody else to muster the courage to revisit the event again, but being able to acknowledge what happened in as unfiltered terms as possible will go a long way in beginning your journey to healing. As you do this, your beliefs and feelings that you hold in regard to your memories begin to come to the forefront of your mind. Once you have the opportunity to face these beliefs, you will find much of the source of your current pain.

And this brings us to one of the keys to healing. The beliefs that you hold in regard to your painful memories influence the meaning that you derive from your experiences. This meaning drives the narrative that you tell about your own life. All of this starts with your understanding of your pain in the greater context of your experiences overall. But gaining any understanding means that it is necessary to take a courageous look at your pain to begin with.

Mental Health Concerns and the Role of Labels

Is There a Name for What is Going on With Me?

If you are going through a significant period of struggle, and you don’t have quite the words to describe it, you have likely wondered some version of this question in the recent past. And it makes perfect sense. Imagine a time before people understood where the chicken pox came from. Imagine even further if you were the first person in your entire community to develop a case. The number of conclusions that you might draw about such a thing could be endless. It would certainly feel scary and isolating, and you might even start to wonder how people saw you differently.

Maybe a day or two into your ailment, a stranger comes through town and sees you in your fear and agony. Maybe this stranger then shrugs and tells you that it’s “just the chicken pox,” before leaving town again.

There are a few elements to this example that make it both comforting and unsettling. For one, the stranger gives you a name for it. While the name might make you think that your exposure to poultry had something to do with it, at least it lets you know that other people have gone through the same thing.

Next, the stranger shrugs it off, which could mean you don’t have anything to worry about. It also makes sense, though, that without more explanation your swirling thoughts would still run away from you.

In the Realm of Mental Health

At this point, so many people have had so many different mental health concerns arise, that there are volumes of different versions of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Health Disorders (DSM). The DSM puts into black and white letters the criteria for every one of those mental health concerns, which allows mental health workers a framework for helping you through them. And of course with the advent of the internet, almost anybody can find some copy of the DSM online somewhere. This is a wonderful development in the pursuit of relieving the sense of otherness and isolation that accompany a lack of awareness of certain ailments.

On the other hand, though, it has also awarded an opportunity for other anomalies to arise. For example, many of the disorders in the DSM have comorbidity with others. In other words, the presence of one increases the risk for another. For example, many of them share comorbidity with both anxiety and depression.

The reason that this is concerning is that much of the information that is readily available only provides part of the picture. To illustrate this, lets go back to the chicken pox story.

The stranger has provided a name for the ailment and displayed a general lack of concern. However, he has not explained his lack of concern or given any information at all about where it comes from, how communicable it is, or what the timeline for recovery is. Leaving these questions unanswered naturally stirs up a level of anxiety about what the next few days, weeks, or years has in store. And this example is about a condition that does not necessarily increase the risk of anxiety.

Now imagine you are increasingly burdened with feelings that you can’t quite put into words (maybe this is something you are dealing with now). A brief internet search might very well point you in the direction of narrowing down your possibilities to one of a few different ailments. However, if the road to healing and recovery is not laid out as well, it only makes sense that other worries and anxieties might start creeping up.

What it All Means

None of this is to say that you shouldn’t go looking for answers when you can. It is always, at the very least, a place to start. Maybe you are even wired to where having a name for your condition relieves enough of the stress that you are comfortable again. That is fantastic.

If, on the other hand, you find incomplete answers still unsatisfying, there is additional help out there. The biggest point in this post is this: You do not have to go through this by yourself.

If you feel like you are struggling and can’t quite navigate it on your own, you absolutely have every opportunity to find a professional who will work with you based on your needs and your values. It seems that one of the major obstacles to getting help is a belief that you will have to adopt a different set of core values altogether. And if you do feel that way, it is perfectly okay for you to look for other options. There are many to be found.

How to Know When it's Time to get Marriage Counseling

Lingering Stigma Around Therapy

There isn’t an area of mental health where no work needs to be done to reduce social stigma. While it can sometimes feel to a counselor that progress has been made over the last few decades (and it has), it is always worth checking that creeping sense of complacence in the matter.

Marriage counseling seems to be one of the most pressing areas where this is true. Maybe you’ve noticed that the divorce rate has actually dropped in recent years, which might look encouraging at first. However, closer inspection shows us that the marriage rate is also falling in tandem. No matter what the cause, it is at least clear that one of the most central institutions to our society is in decline.

On a much more anecdotal note, I work in a building with a handful of general practice attorneys. More and more, it seems that the cases coming in are all divorce filings. Perhaps some of these marriages truly were destined for failure regardless of any intervention. If not, though, would it not at least have been worth reaching out for help if it were available? If so, it might also be true that the perceived embarrassment surrounding the idea of getting marriage counseling deterred some of those couples from reaching out.

So, When Do I know that I should Reach Out?

Let me respond to this question with another set of questions. When is the right time to get a physical? When is the right time to go to the gym, or to get a physical trainer? When is the right time to take up music lessons or to take a class that interests you?

Presumably, you would take music lessons before you book your first show, you would get a physical before you fell ill, and you would go to the gym before your muscles atrophy. It seems, though, that marriage counseling is often the final tool to prove a willingness of effort before calling it quits.

This is not to say that more severe cases are absolutely hopeless, but early intervention clearly produces the highest chance of success. So instead of thinking of marriage counseling as a badge of shame that suggests your marriage is failing, we can use it as a way to strengthen a marriage that simply has areas to improve upon. At the end of the day, this is the purpose of marriage work. To restrengthen a marriage to its peak.

After all, life already has so many obstacles and unknowns. You don’t have to let marriage be the one that you struggle through without a helping hand from the outside.

Why the Unknown is Scary Even when it Must be Better

Learning to Succeed

From the moment you were born, you began your slow and steady path of incremental progress. Though you don’t remember it, you had to learn to control your flailing limbs. You had to learn to distinguish between different sounds. You had to learn what the presence of your mother and father meant. Success in each of these pursuits armed you with the ability to navigate more and more complex situations. And you also gained the comfort needed to try bigger ventures. Eventually, you learned how to crawl and then walk. As your orbit around your parents grew, you tackled newer and bigger feats. Going down a slide, swinging on the swings, getting on a bike. The list is endless, but each item on the list began with an unsure footstep in that direction.

Of course at that age, the concept of questioning any of it is not as overwhelming as it becomes later on, but why do progress and success begin to scare us as we get older?

Before we get into that, lets look at a commonly held assumption. The assumption is that people naturally fear failure. While this is definitely true, a far more dire truth exists in tandem. And that is that people tend to fear success even more.

Implications of Rapid Success

Lets look back at the example of riding a bike. Perhaps it starts with a strider or tricycle. Then maybe a bike with training wheels. Eventually, you are riding on your own with no assistance at all. Freedom.

And with that freedom comes more adventurous exploration. Of course, then you start hearing conditions accompany that freedom. “Be home before dark,” for example is a phrase that sounds foreign to nobody. And what does that demand imply? For one, it suggests that being home after dark comes with consequences. Maybe one of those consequences is losing bike privileges.

However, a more weighty implication is that you now have the agency and responsibility to monitor your time and to then make it home before dark without having to be reminded. Furthermore if you do manage your time well and abide by your parents’ rules, nothing happens. Everything goes on the way it should because that is what’s expected of you. If you don’t, something you don’t like will happen.

This means that the more success you have, the higher the expectations become. As a consequence, doing well is not rewarded the way it might have been earlier in life. Likewise, performing poorly comes with negative consequences.

If this is true, the question becomes why you should bother progressing further if rewards decrease and punishments increase.

How to Overcome the Fear of Success

As we previously established, a situation where rewards are far less likely than punishments is one that naturally inspires avoidance. If, however, such a situation arises as a result of progress and success, how can we ultimately call that success?

The answer to that is the key to overcoming any lingering urge to avoid success. While it is different from person to person, much of the how in finding that answer comes from how you personally derive meaning in your life. Getting to the root of that allows you to build the sense of reward from within instead of looking for it from somewhere else. Mastering that allows you to bask in the life that you achieve through realizing your goals rather than dreading the change that it begets.