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5 Alternative Health & Wellness Practices That Can Boost Your Mental Health

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Benefits of Yoga for Mental Fitness

by Nicole McCray

When you think about boosting your mental health, one of the first things that come to mind is probably traditional talk therapy. And while there’s no question that talk therapy can be extremely helpful in many cases, it’s not a one size fits all solution that works for everyone.

Sometimes, you just need some strategies to help you stay grounded and manage daily stress. And sometimes, you need help getting through trauma or recovering from past events. There’s no denying the everyone is dealing with more stress now than ever before and taking care of your mental health is more important than ever.

Taking care of your mental health is every bit as important as taking care of your physical health, but sometimes it’s hard to know where to start. These alternative health and wellness practices might be just the answer you’re looking for.

Whether you incorporate one or all of them into your wellness routine, they’re all beneficial on their own – or they can be used in conjunction with traditional talk therapy for boosting mental health.

1. Kinesiology

Kinesiology is an alternative therapy that boosts mental health by helping the patient diffuse negative energy and implement positive strategies to overcome stress, anxiety, and depression. It utilizes muscle testing in combination with many of the basic principles of traditional Chinese medicine to assess body function and energy.

The goal is to identify emotional, chemical, energetic, and structural imbalances in the body. Muscle testing techniques are used to create a natural biofeedback system. Information is relayed via the nerve pathways throughout the body and the brain meridian systems.

A leading NYC-based kinesiologist explains that “Muscle testing can be used to identify underlying blockages that are causing mental and physical health issues. When these blockages are addressed, the body can begin to heal itself.”

Kinesiology has been used to help patients work through past and present emotional issues and take positive steps to address the triggers of their anxiety. It can help the patient move away from negative thinking patterns and develop and implement effective stress-management techniques.

2. Mindfulness

When it comes to wellness practices that can boost your mental health, mindfulness is one of the best places to start.

Evidence shows that it can reduce depression, anxiety, and overall stress. But what is mindfulness exactly? It’s actually not as complicated as you might think.

Mindfulness is a simple lifestyle change that focuses on living in the present moment with an attitude of openness and acceptance. It requires monitoring your own emotions, self-talk, and negative perceptions, as well as stress and anxiety. The key is to deal with these emotions positively before they take root.

To try mindfulness for yourself, the next time you feel anxiety, stress, or negative thoughts and emotions beginning to spiral out of control, slow down and take some deep breaths. Observe your thoughts and feelings, then center yourself and explore positive solutions before you move on. It’s kind of like stopping a runaway train before it gets out of control.

Other ways to practice mindfulness include meditation, prayer, deep breathing exercises, and guided imagery.

3. Yoga

Yoga is another mindfulness practice that can be incorporated into daily life to reduce anxiety and stress. It has been shown to improve mental focus, support healthy sleep patterns, and promote an overall sense of peace. It is often used for daily stress management, but it also makes a wonderful accompaniment to talk therapy and many of the other strategies we’re discussing here.

Yoga can benefit your mental health by calming the central nervous system, which relieves anxiety and promotes a state of relaxation. Many people who practice yoga regularly find that it builds self-trust and self-confidence as it strengthens the connection between the body and mind.

4. Nutrition Therapy

Did you know that there are at least 40 different chemicals in the body that play a role in mental health?
Psychiatrists are beginning to take notice of the importance of nutrition for their patients. They are using bloodwork to identify which of these chemicals are out of balance and prescribing supplements to overcome deficiencies.

It may sound like a fad, but there’s actually a lot of evidence to back up nutrition therapy. The use of supplements and dietary strategies has been shown to help patients who suffer from major depression, obsessive-compulsive disorder, and severe mental disorders like schizophrenia and bipolar disorder.

Of course, holistic and alternative practitioners have been talking about the importance of nutrition for centuries. You don’t have to be under the care of a psychiatrist to utilize the curative powers of nutrition therapy. Many alternative practitioners will be happy to help you develop a diet and supplement plan to support your mental health.

5. Creative Therapies

Creative therapies are an excellent outlet for patients looking to boost their mental health naturally. Art, music, and dance therapy provide a relaxing and invigorating way to relieve stress and shift mental focus away from stress triggers.

Evidence shows that creative therapies have curative properties for both physiological and psychological ailments. They have been used to help patients overcome trauma and promote healing, particularly when used in conjunction with conventional treatments.

Wrapping Up
Of course, you should consult with your health care professional before making any major changes in your health regimen, especially if you think you may be dealing with a mental health issue. If you’re looking for a way conventional treatment or simply support your mental health daily, these alternative therapies and practices can bring some extra joy and balance to your life.

5 Mindfulness Exercises That Can Help Relieve stress

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In this hectic world of ours it’s easy for thoughts and emotions to be scattered, and we often spend too much time thinking negative or random thoughts, which can be draining. It can also make you more likely to experience stress and anxiety.  Practicing mindfulness exercises, on the other hand, can help you direct your attention away from this kind of thinking and engage with the world around you.

What is mindfulness?

The basic idea of mindfulness is that you bring (on purpose) your awareness to the present moment: your thoughts and your body – without interpretation or judgment.  Thinking about the past, blaming and judging yourself or worrying about the future can generate stress.  But by staying calm and focused on the ‘here and now’, you can bring your nervous system back into balance.

Try these mindfulness exercises, provided by Lloyd Wells – a long-time practicer of the methods, and an aspiring psychotherapy commentator for UK-based CBT, Counselling and Life-Coaching specialist Klear Minds – to get you on your way to relieving stress and learning to live in the present.

  1. Breathe

The act of breathing sounds so basic and automatic it hardly sounds like a mindful exercise for stress relief.  But when feeling stressed or anxious, we tend to take lots of shallow chest breaths, which actually signal your mind and body to feel more anxious.  Slow down and take a deep focused breath.  Let it out slowly.  The simple act of taking a conscious deep belly breath and letting it out slowly has a profound effect on mind and body.  It sends a message to the nervous system to calm down.  It is a wonderful mindfulness based stress reduction exercise that can be done anywhere at any time for immediate stress relief.

  1. Meditate

Mindfulness meditation involves increased awareness of the present moment. With practice, it can be utilized anywhere, and can bring lasting stress relief benefits. This simple meditation technique can be learned quickly and easily.  Sit quietly and focus on your natural breathing or on a word or “mantra” that you repeat silently.  Allow thoughts to come and go without judgment and return to your focus on breath or mantra.  By concentrating on a certain word, your mind is able to shut out any overbearing thoughts that cause you to think too much about certain things.  Focus on your breathing throughout, and you will find your mind is able to quiet and enter a more peaceful place.

  1. Mindful Movements

In addition to all the benefits of mindful meditation, mindful movements, like those found in yoga or tai chi, add a physical element that provides a boost of energy and positive chemicals in the brain and can be a helpful way to reduce stress.  Follow along with a guided video or attend a class in your area.  Instead of treating your practice like a session at the gym, treat it like a meditation where you bring your full awareness to both your physical and emotional sensations as you move through the poses.

  1. Body Scan Exercise

Body scan exercise encourages self-awareness of sensations in your body you might otherwise ignore. When you notice excessive tension in your body, you can consciously relax the muscles in that area. You may not even realize how tense you are until you intentionally bring awareness to your whole body.  Here’s how it works: Lie down, or sit comfortably.  Take a few deep breaths, close your eyes, and start to ‘scan’ your body.  Bring your awareness to your toes.  If you notice any tension, let it go.  Then, continue the exercise by bringing your awareness gradually to every part of your body until you reach the very top of your head.  By practicing this exercise every day, you can help to reduce tension and stress in the body.

  1. Mindful Awareness

This exercise is designed to cultivate a heightened awareness and appreciation of simple daily tasks and the results they achieve. Think of something that happens often; something you take for granted, like the moment you open your computer to start work.  Take a moment to appreciate the hands that enable this process and the brain that facilitates your understanding of how to use the computer.  Or, perhaps each time you smell food, you take a moment to stop and appreciate how lucky you are to have good food to eat and share with your family and friends.  Instead of going through your daily motions on autopilot, take occasional moments to stop and cultivate purposeful awareness of what you are doing and the blessings it brings your life.

In Summary

Mindfulness exercises can help you ease daily stress by bringing you back to the present moment.  When you are mindful and present, it is not possible to fret about the past or the future, and you are more able to deal constructively with whatever is troubling you.  The above exercises may seem simple, but do not let that fool you.  Sometimes simple things are the most powerful and beneficial, especially when done with intention and focus.

 

Mindfulness or Rage Room, Which is Better for Anger Management?

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by Lloyd Wells

Apparently, smashing up your office printer as a way to release stress and tension is now a thing. Since we all suffer from excessive anger, brought on by the chaos of our lives – traffic hold-ups, office tensions, relationship problems and so on – we should go right ahead and take a baseball bat to office equipment because it’ll help us feel better.

Bear with me.

Anger’s a perfectly reasonable emotion, the gurus tell us, so rather than keeping it bottled up, we should smash the living daylights out of old household items like printers, televisions, toasters, fridges and even washing machines, in order to restore our inner calm.

Let’s put this into perspective.

I suppose in a world that permits tennis players to grunt and scream to their heart’s content, where spectators can shout ‘get in the hole!’ at golf tournaments without being thrown out of the club, where parents allow their children to run amok in shops and restaurants but won’t allow their school teachers to tell them off, and where people are seriously considering the rules of sports games to that no-one loses, I suppose encouraging wanton destruction of innocent office machinery in the name of anger management is just the next logical step.

Whatever happened to taking a few deep breaths to calm down? To teach methods and techniques to keep anger in check? Too much to ask??

Now, I’m not an unreasonable guy, I’ve sometimes been known to curse and swear at my printer when she jams or malfunctions and I’m running late for a meeting. But I’d like to think that I can control myself sufficiently so as not to inflict terminal equipment damage.

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However, there seem to be plenty of people who would disagree with me. Perhaps they’ve watched the slow-motion scene of the 1999 cult classic movie Office Space – where three office workers brutally destroy their malfunctioning printer with baseball bats – too many times?

A recent Wall Street Journal article on this printer bashing trend stated that they’d done extensive research to reveal that an average of 10 good whacks is all it takes to demolish a printer.

And in an article I read just the other day, readers are informed that because of rising stress levels at work, many companies are now investigating new and less harmful ways to help employees manage their anger. This kind of ‘let it all out’ anger management facilitation is gaining in popularity and there are now places knows as ‘Rage Rooms’ where people can pay for a smashing session! One rage room provider goes through more than 15 printers a week, saving their biggest and juiciest machines for corporate smash parties! Apparently, printers inspire more hate and loathing than any other machine.

So, is this expressive and explosive kind of anger management a good idea? Does smashing an inanimate object make people better at handling stress in a healthy way? Is it working? Sigmund Freud certainly thought so. He and his contemporaries believed that punching objects was a good way for patients to rid themselves of anger, and that they could then deal with the underlying issues causing the feelings in the first place.

Today, our knowledge of anger management and how to deal with it in the workplace has become somewhat more sophisticated – dare I say enlightened?

Concepts like mindfulness and meditation help people experience emotions including anger, sadness or jealousy and deal with them in a detached and calm way. The more detached we become from harmful emotions like anger, the more we’re able to reduce its impact on our lives, and on the lives of our loved ones. That’s a bit more like it!

And just to prove my case, scientific evidence suggests that venting anger makes things worse, not better. People who regularly express anger, even in controlled situations like a Rage Room, are more likely to suffer from heart disease. Letting out our anger actually increases our aggression towards others. Even when people feel better as a result of smashing something, they’re still more likely to be aggressive towards others. I rest my case.

Just one final thought on the issue. If your company’s printers are forever jamming and malfunctioning, making you as mad as a rattlesnake, don’t look for a hammer to smash them, rather get on the phone and outsource your print management.

Problem solved, by Lloyd Wells – a freelance writer in the tech world, working with the PBS Group  to avoid the Rage Room and remain mindful.

Why Mindfulness at Work Really Does Work

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Thanks to Lloyd Wells, a freelance writer and Mindful technique practitioner – working with Planday, a staff management software solution aiming to relieve stress from the workplace wherever possible.

Largely a concept of Eastern origin, here in the Western world, we are waking up to the benefits of mindfulness. It’s a hot topic. Not just on a personal level, but in the working environment too. While many still scoff at the idea, success stories akin to those of the Canadian Police Force (starting their day with a meditation session) are hard to ignore.

Over in the UK, Police in Manchester have followed suit. In the face of scepticism, the Greater Manchester Police Force is offering mindfulness classes to staff. It’s a bid to stem the growing level of anxiety and depression amongst their officers.

Police officers are being asked to cope with increasingly violent and stressful situations. It’s no surprise with the recent spate of Manchester’s gangland-style shootings, to hear that stress and sickness rates across the Greater Manchester Police Force have soared. While the world may be a far cry from offering mindfulness techniques to the gangs on the street (though not a bad idea if it could somehow be socially engineered), mindfulness it seems at the moment may be the constabulary’s best answer.

What is mindfulness?

Essentially mindfulness is practising the capacity to be fully conscious and aware. Mindfulness is often practised by paying full attention to your breath (mindfulness of breathing meditation). The concept is to try and observe and be aware without criticism. Mindfulness (or meditation) is not a religion and you don’t have to sit cross-legged on the floor to practise. It doesn’t take a lot of time and it’s not complicated.

How do you practise mindfulness?

You simply sit (on the floor or in a chair) and pay attention to your breathing. When thoughts arise and you find yourself drifting into a mental dialogue, bring your attention back to the breath. That’s it. Easy. Mindfulness practise can be used doing any task. When washing-up, for example, bring your focus to the feel of the water, the crockery, the smell and the sounds. It’s all about bringing awareness to the task in hand.

What’s the difference between mediation and mindfulness?

Not a lot essentially. Meditation is a practice, which uses the art of mindfulness of breathing. So meditation is actually a form of mindfulness.

Can we believe the hype?

Mindfulness is not just a Zumba-style craze. It’s an ancient tradition. It’s been part of Buddhist psychology and practice for 2,500 years. Don’t knock it until you’ve tried it, but to really feel the benefits it does take committed practice.

Who’s doing it?

More and more big corporates are bringing mindfulness to the business table. Innovative companies need focused innovative staff. In the last decade business has woken up to the importance of staff well-being. There’s been a sea change in the workplace, with employee satisfaction moving up the boardroom agenda. When answering the question, ‘what makes a business successful?’ employee well-being is gaining ground, with a much more sizeable chunk on the pie chart.

Many high-stress companies are catching on. They’re making mindfulness a part of their corporate mission. Well-being is definitely the new HR buzz word, and mindfulness it seems can take your business to the next level. Apple, Google and Nike get it. Some corporates are ahead of the crowd. In some innovative companies, mindfulness at work is in full sway and its proving successful.

Where’s the evidence?

Neuroscientists have found that meditators shift their brain activity to different areas of the brain (from the stress-prone right frontal cortex to the calmer left frontal cortex). Research shows that mindfulness works. It increases happiness and reduces stress.

Dr. Sara Lazar, who works at the Harvard Medical School, is a leading expert in the field of neuroscience and meditation. In her research, MRI neuroimaging techniques show an increase in gray matter of the brain in four different areas after periods of meditation. Her research concluded that these changes were in places associated with increased focus, empathy and compassion.

How does it help?

Over time mindfulness has shown to bring about long term changes in mood and happiness. It increases our childlike sense of curiosity, seeing things and people as they are without judging them. Mindfulness improves our ability to focus without the mind wandering. It enables greater clarity at work and in our personal lives. Mindfulness isn’t a trick to deaden your mind or turn you into a work zombie, it’s a means of waking you up and growing your potential.

Employee focused culture isn’t a new phenomenon in the business world. There’s a greater understanding of the importance of quality in employee productivity. How to get employees more focused is the new buzz about town, and mindfulness it seems for now is providing the answer.

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6 Reasons Why Mindfulness and Meditation are Good for You

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Mindfulness and Meditation

Written by Mike James, a Mindful content specialist working with Wickwoods Country Club Hotel & Spa.

If all the influential business thinkers and lifestyle gurus are doing it, then surely we should be taking more notice? Big business is taking it seriously so why shouldn’t we? It’s getting harder and harder to ignore the fact that mindfulness and meditation practices can have a positive impact on our health. Big business has grasped the fact that extended working hours are leaving employees frazzled. It makes financial sense for them to improve employee focus, reduce stress and increase productivity. Schools are also following suit with positive results being found in students’ focus and behaviour.

The public are now warming to the idea that meditation and mindfulness have tangible benefits. Get used to it folks, meditation and mindfulness have arrived in mainstream society and they’re here to stay – they are no longer confined to spiritual practices and hippy conventions. Even the NHS are steering their unwieldy ship crammed full of conventional approaches a little left field on this one.

So, if you’ve been pondering the idea of giving it a go, you shouldn’t ignore this calling. Here are six good reasons why.

  1. Take care of your emotional well-being

We’re pretty good at noticing and dealing with physical complaints, but our capacity to identify changes in our emotional well-being isn’t so easy. Before we know it we’re having negative thoughts, worrying or buying into patterns of behaviour that sabotage our well-being. The good news is there is plenty of evidence to show that regular meditation and mindfulness practice can help. Engaging in a process of emotional awareness lets us know how we are feeling before we’ve taken the wrong path.

  1. Sleep – getting the right amount of zzzzzzs makes all the difference

We all know that sleep disturbance in any form can leave you feeling lousy. There’s nothing worse than turning up to work feeling like you need to crawl under your desk for a nap. Well the good news is mindfulness meditation evokes a relaxation response and has a positive impact on sleep.

Mindfulness and Meditation

  1. Feel more positive

It’s becoming increasingly acknowledged that those who practise mindfulness and meditation have a more positive outlook on life. In fact research shows that mindfulness alone can have a significant impact on depression, anxiety and other mental health conditions. Thoughts become things. You may have heard of ‘The Secret’ and the law of attraction. The practice of meditation and mindfulness itself doesn’t mean thinking good thoughts, it’s all about connecting with the present moment and understanding the transience of our feelings. It’s this ability to connect with ourselves that brings us to a place of acceptance and a greater sense of intention and direction.

  1. Improve your physical awareness

Practicing mindfulness and meditation improves our ability to identify emotions and become more aware of tension in the body. Take heed and you can avoid stress settling into those shoulders when you are hunched over the computer keyboard for hours on end. Take it as a cue to get up and walk around for five minutes.

  1. The health benefits

Meditation is known to have a positive impact on stress and is most known for its benefits in helping depression and anxiety. Clinical research has also demonstrated that meditation practice reduces blood pressure. And there’s more – mindfulness training has been shown to have a positive impact on inflammation in the body, as well as correlating with faster physical recovery from stressful situations. Jon Kabat-Zinn, Ph.D has written extensively about the mindfulness solution to chronic pain. The health benefits keep on coming.

  1. Improve your relationships

According to Melanie Greenberg Ph.D writing in Psychology Today, mindfulness training makes us “more compassionate and better able to stop destructive impulsive behaviour. It can help us resolve conflict”. The Buddhist practice of Meta Bhavana, a meditation cultivating loving kindness towards others, is a method of developing compassion. The good news is you don’t have to be a Buddhist to give it a try. If you fancy cultivating some compassion you might like to give one of these guided meditations a go.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S6E9Pu9kqJ8

https://youtu.be/S6E9Pu9kqJ8

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https://youtu.be/sz7cpV7ERsM

Mindfulness and Meditation