You look after your mental health.
You practice healthy thinking.
You try to be positive and grateful and happy.
Mostly this works.
But sometimes you have to really try.
And even then it doesn’t feel as good as it should.
What’s going wrong?
You might remember this from previous posts but first I’d try to diagnose if you’re trying to be too happy/positive/grateful for the situation.
Sometimes life sucks. And sometimes the most psychologically healthy thing you can do is turn to someone and have a good complain. Not in a victim-ish way, but in a stating the facts way, like this: “My Dad’s in hospital. Mum is melting down at every turn. My dog has eczema and my boss has threatened if I don’t do overtime I’ll lose my job. I’m about to lose my sh*t.”
Social support (turning to friends or people who care about you) is one of the best ways to boost your resilience, mood and coping.
Next I’d look at whether your positive thinking is too far from what your brain believes is possible. If I’m in chronic pain and I’m doing an affirmation about being pain free, my brain is going to think I’m an idiot and not listen to a word I say on the matter.
If I were to tone that back to ‘moments of being pain free’ it will probably listen. Or if I were to say I was working towards being pain free it would definitely be on my side and probably help by coming with new ways I could work towards being pain free.
Lastly, I would get someone else to look at my physical health.
If you’re trying and trying, doing all the right things and still feeling rubbish there’s a good chance that your body is out of balance.
Thankfully now we have easy access to doctors who have done extra training in Integrative Medicine. They don’t look at things the same way as regular GP’s and they are finding more and more links between nutritional deficiencies and mental health. For example, an out of balance zinc to copper ratio can cause anxiety.
So things that we thought we just had to live with can possibly be made better with supplements. Cool huh!
So next time your positive thinking isn’t working try these 3 diagnostic steps.
Related Tag: Life Coach Mermaid
