Self-care is where you place yourself as a priority and you take care of your mental well-being. It can be likened to traveling on a plane next to a child. When on a plane, you are instructed to put the mask on yourself before placing a mask on the child next to you because if you don’t prioritize yourself, you won’t be in a position to help anyone else.
Without taking care of yourself, you won’t be in a mental or emotional place to care for anyone else, and a prolonged lack of self-care can cause problems with your overall mental health.
So what does self-care look like?
Water Gap Wellness Center offers PHP mental health care for those in need.
Mindfulness Practices to Improve Mental Wellness
Mindfulness practices come in many forms. The goal of mindfulness is to be just that, mindful. This type of cognizance can be simple yet powerful, help you cultivate inner peace, and keep your mental health rooted in self-control, balance, relaxation, and harmony.
Mindfulness is a tool to improve emotional regulation and awareness.
For example, if you are having a conversation with someone at work and they make a comment about coworkers not pulling their weight, mindfulness can help you take a step back from the situation and examine it through a neutral lens.
This examination might reveal that you are initially offended, but that offense is derived from believing that you are a mind reader and assuming that the person with whom you were speaking was passive-aggressively talking about you.
This will help you acknowledge your emotions and simply let them be rather than try to change or control them.
Meditation
Meditation is a form of mindfulness practice, and it’s one of the most effective ways to figure out what you need to do to improve your mental well-being.
When you take a moment to sit, pause, and contemplate, your ability to turn your attention inward can reveal what emotions you are currently harboring, where you might be hanging on to physical tension, and why.
This insight can give you an opportunity to prioritize the things that come to mind first, figuring out what it is in the midst of your day that you want to focus on, that will bring you joy, or that needs your attention the most.
Positive Affirmations for Better Mental Wellness
Positive affirmations, tangentially, are an area of mindfulness practice that can be integrated into your meditation sessions or used before you go to bed or even throughout the day.
Throughout the day, you can practice positive affirmations about yourself like:
- I am strong
- I am creative
- I can bake a great cheesecake
- I am healthy
- I am loving
- I made someone smile today
You can write these down somewhere that will always be accessible and visible to you so that throughout the day if you are particularly stressed, depressed, or anxious, you can remind yourself about your positive attributes.
Self-love affirmations can serve as a healing tool to transform negative self-images into positive ones. Positive affirmations like these can help you increase your sense of well-being, reduce stress, and improve personal fulfillment.
Getting Help with Mental Wellness
While using these self-help strategies can go a long way toward improving mental well-being, if you still need help managing your mental wellness, Water Gap Wellness Center is here.
Our top-of-the-line treatment center provides comprehensive care for mental health conditions and dual-diagnosis situations. Clients can receive a broad continuum of care through the three levels of treatment we offer:
- Partial hospitalization program
- Intensive outpatient programs
- Traditional outpatient programs
Each of these levels of care can help you transition from one step down to the next or back up again, depending on your needs.
When you receive treatment at our facility, we will help you improve mental wellness by expounding upon many of the self-help practices that are effective when used at home, like mindfulness practices, positive affirmations, and physical forms of self-care like yoga.
However, our forms of self-care are coupled with education and psychotherapy to boost mental wellness even more.
Consider this:
A client is always very anxious when her mother-in-law comes to visit. Even though her mother-in-law is a perfectly good house guest and they get along well, as soon as her mother-in-law begins to talk about all the television programs she watches, the client experiences the start of a panic attack.
While self-care strategies like meditation or mindfulness could help the client calm herself during these moments, professional treatment with an on-site therapist at Water Gap Wellness Center might help that client explore the fact that in the past, her mother-in-law regularly spoke about a television show that contained several triggers for the client so now, simply bringing up television shows puts the client on edge because she is terrified of being triggered again.
In the example above, self-care strategies will work very effectively in managing symptoms at the moment, but the combined therapies received during professional treatment will help clients better understand triggers, factors that contribute to certain emotional states, and what to do with them moving forward.
Call our team today to learn more about how we can help you with self-care.
