Mental Health Treatment

Having grown up in a ski resort town, I was one of those people who wanted to become an admired athlete. The rigors of being a hopeful Olympic athlete training to make the Olympic team encompasses much more than the obvious, like possessing physical ability. It goes beyond physical strength. It goes beyond diet. It goes all the way to sacrifice and mental toughness.

The first key is getting mentally ready. People discover that changing their habits is difficult. Thus, the mental aspect of being ready to stick with an intense training program is the first thing to overcome. Getting into excellent shape, eating well-balanced meals and taking excellent care of your body is a daily practice of knowing you can do it. It all starts with believing you can.

Often we don’t feel like doing a workout. When that happens, we have to push ourselves to get into it. When exercise feels like a drain, it’s ok to listen to your body, but you will have to dig deep to understand what the body is going through and move beyond that.

The second key is making the mental decision to act. The only way to get something done in the universe is to act. Action is what makes things happen. You can tell your friends, “I’m going to get in good enough shape to make the Olympics.” However, unless you actually work out, it won’t happen. You have to take the time to learn to do what is needed and then apply those lessons – otherwise it won’t happen. Thinking of taking action is a good idea, but it takes the first step after the idea to create the action. Put that action into play and see it in your mind’s eye. Continue Reading

One thing that we all know is that we live in an ever-changing world that is filled with stress. There is no way that we can escape it no matter what we do or where we go, there are pressures in life that we all must learn to deal with. These things can raise your blood pressure, increase your heart rate and cause you to lose your cool. Stress will affect you in one way or another, but it doesn’t have to conquer you and take a toll on your health.

Recent studies that have been conducted by scientists have shown that stress is the root cause of most of the deadly diseases that are killing men and women. The good news is that even though stress is unavoidable, there are steps that you can take to put it at a level that will not affect your health in a negative way. There are some unusual ways that you can use to control stress so you can carry on with your everyday life.

One of the main causes of stress is lack of sleep. When you do not get a good night’s sleep, you wake up cranky and grumpy and that is because while you are sleeping, your body is repairing itself. If you cheat yourself on sleep there is a good chance that your bodily organs will not function properly and your head will become clouded and you will lose your focus and you will easily get stressed. You can easily avoid this by getting to bed early. It is a proven fact that the best times for your body to repair damaged tissues and cells is between the hours of 10pm and 6am. Make a habit of being in bed by 10pm so your body will get enough sleep and rest. Continue Reading

The term “eating disorders,” like so many diagnostic labels, describes a spectrum of experiences and dynamics; while two people might both overeat and purge, the psychological reasons why they do so can be very different. I’d like to discuss one of my clients who suffered from bulimia, along with the emotional factors involved, because her story sheds light on a much larger issue: how we may cope with unbearable emotions and feelings by trying to get rid of them.

When I began working with this client (I’ll call her Sharon), I had little experience with eating disorders. I understood that there might be a connection between childhood sexual abuse and bulimia; I was aware that low self-esteem and perfectionism likely played a role. The first time we met, Sharon told me she’d been sexually molested by her step-father during her early teens; while she didn’t strike me as having particularly low self-esteem, she did seem quite perfectionistic and self-critical. In our early sessions, however, what struck me most was how little she could tolerate her emotions and feelings.

A pattern began to emerge: whenever an experience threatened to stir up emotion (it could be an intensely pleasurable feeling just as well as an anxious or painful one) the powerful urge to overeat would arise. Eventually she would give in, binge eat and force herself to vomit afterward; an enormous sense of relief always followed. We came to understand that what she wanted was to feel empty, void of emotion. Her bulimia, in a very literal sense, was a process of emotional evacuation. By throwing up, Sharon felt she’d gotten rid of the unbearable emotions and feelings along with the food she’d eaten. Continue Reading